In this fascinating volume, Kit Wesler tells the story of seven decades of excavations at the Wickliffe Mounds, a major Mississippian town near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in Kentucky. For its first 50 years of excavation this rich site was subjected to the indignities of looters and the love of professional archaeologists. When I first visited as a boy in the 1950s, it was a failing tourist attraction, billed as the “Ancient Buried City,” that displayed an excavated cemetery in situ, complete with skeletons and grave goods.
But fortune smiled on the Wickliffe Mounds when, in 1983, it was turned over to Murray State University for an academic center dedicated to research, student training, public education, and preservation of the site and its collections. Fortunately, the Wickliffe collections include all the early excavation records as well as more than 85,000 artifacts. Wickliffe Mounds was transformed from an impending disaster into a model university archaeological preserve, serving science and the public.
The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains contributions from a wide range of archaeological specialists and includes site maps, databases, excavation records, artifacts, and photographs.
Excavations at Wickliffe Mounds is both a fountain of data and a fascinating story of preservation.
