Indian Mound Park (Dauphin Island, Alabama)

The mounds were visited throughout this period by Native Americans of the Pensacola culture, who harvested oysters and fished in Little Dauphin Island Sound, an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico.

[2] Archaeologist Gregory Waselkov of the University of South Alabama believes that the visitors to the island came from Bottle Creek, the largest Mississippian settlement in the area.

Waselkov theorizes that Bottle Creek, located on the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, served as the major village while Dauphin Island acted as a migration destination during the winter months.

[3] Relatively immune from the unpredictable weather conditions that affect farming, the fish and oysters from the sound were a reliable supply of food that could be immediately consumed or dried for use during later months.

[3] Some have suggested that such waste disposal (dumping) with apparent lack of care is inherent in human behavior, not just a trait of Western civilizations.

The Creeks and Seminoles continued to fish and harvest oysters in the area until the 1830s when they were forcibly displaced to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma.

As the location of the fire moved each year, a complex pattern of overlapping layers emerged in the form of shell mounds.

[2] Indian Mound Park exhibits a variety of subtropical plants exceeding that of the other Gulf Coast barrier islands.

Likely brought to the area by Native American groups for medicine or culinary purposes, the species include representatives of families from as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains and as far south as the state of Yucatán in Mexico.