For the kid, such ideas struck a sweet spot. Young minds expand quickly, and he had long ago dispatched the amusements of Bob the Builder for wonder about Wild West cowboys, and then Native Americans.
Spinning on Mound B above a vast meadow and its silent sentinels, more than a dozen other high-grassed mounds, the kid sighed. He was only now seeing that the Mississippians and their city really were long gone. How did he feel?
"Sad, because I wanted it to still be here," he said. "I wanted to go inside the houses."
Happily, spirits swing swiftly for a 5-year-old. The kid hopped down Mound B's steep steps to a flat field of the Black Warrior Valley, and followed a trail into the woods.
"I bet this is what it was like in the old days," he said, "except no trail."
A lot more has changed, of course, since the Mississippians abandoned the Moundville site, largely by 1450. In 1540, the Spaniard Hernando De Soto, first of the Europeans to arrive in the area, led an exploration party nearby. Slavery and the Civil War came later, and, later still, civil rights.
Before it all, the Mississippian residents had cleared much of the land. First formed around the year 1000, the settlement became home to an estimated 1,000 people living in a fenced compound between the river and a ravine on Carthage Creek. More than 10,000 others lived nearby in the valley. The fertile land offered a long growing season for maize. The river provided an avenue for trade of copper and other luxury items north and south.
The kid pressed on to trail's end: a high bank above the slate-smooth waters of the Black Warrior. His early adventures had been simpler forays into the wild, to ponder tall trees near the Pacific, or the autumn view from a New Hampshire notch. With each year, of course, a child encounters more.
This wander around Moundville was a chance to consider, beneath the cloak of a somber winter day, cultural change. It can seem to a young mind, after all, that things have always been as they are. Time tolls, though, even for those at the peak of their power.
