The Burial Pit Beneath Alabama’s Moundville Just Got Even Stranger

For fifty years you could look through museum glass at the dead of Moundville, laid out exactly where the diggers found them. Today that case is empty, and the strangest part is this: most of the people buried in this ancient Alabama city may never have lived there at all. Moundville was one of the largest cities north of Mexico, a Mississippian capital of nearly thirty earthen mounds above the Black Warrior River. Then, around the year 1300, the living moved out and the dead kept arriving. This is the story of how a thriving town became a necropolis, a city of the dead, what the carved hands and skulls and the famous Rattlesnake Disk might mean, and why the one test that could finally prove what happened here may now be gone for good, as more than ten thousand ancestors return to the ground. --------------