Moundville Native American Festival
Eight hundred years ago, Moundville, Alabama, was the home of a city of 10,000 people.
Once a year, a thousand of their descendants and random tourists
descend on the mounds for a day of fun and edification. Mark and
I were thrilled to discover that the Native American Festival was being
held the day before our cruise ship departed, and was nearly on our
way. The stars were aligned to bring us to another Native
American mound.
While our visit to Moundville wasn't the same soul-bending experience as our trip to Serpent Mound,
we still ended up rivetted. The mounds themselves were amazing
--- a dozen "small" ones and one sixty feet tall, the last of which we
were allowed to climb. But what really captured my attention was
the educational booths set up for the festival. I learned so much
about Native American crafts that I'll have to turn it into a lunchtime
series --- fire making, river cane baskets, pit-fired pottery!
Then there was the semi-authentic Native American food, an actual
archaeological dig, and an astonishing number of vendors whose crafts
should have been in a museum. Despite hundreds of screaming kids,
we stayed until the Alabama heat sent us scurrying for cover. If
you're ever close to Alabama in October, I highly recommend that you
drop by the festival!
This post is part of our Moundville and Cruise to Mexico honeymoon
series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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