Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park

Arkansas State Park And National Historic Landmark. One Of The Largest And Most Complex Prehistoric Mound Sites In The Lower Mississippi River Valley, Built And Used By The Plum Bayou Culture Between Roughly AD 650 And 1050. The Name Is A Nineteenth Century Mistake And Has Nothing To Do With The Toltecs. · Scott, Arkansas

Between about AD 650 and 1050 the people archaeologists call the Plum Bayou culture built eighteen earthen mounds here on the bank of an old Arkansas River oxbow, laid them out to solar alignments, and ringed the whole thing with an earthen embankment and ditch more than a mile long. Two of the mounds still stand over thirty and thirty-eight feet. It was a ceremonial centre rather than a town - very few people actually lived inside it - and it was abandoned four hundred years before Europeans reached the valley. The name is wrong and everyone knows it: a nineteenth-century landowner assumed the Toltecs of Mexico had built it, the name stuck to the site and then to the park, and the state has kept it because changing it would lose the site's identity. The mounds are a National Historic Landmark, the most significant prehistoric site in Arkansas, and thirty minutes from Little Rock, and on most days you will have them to yourself.

490 Toltec Mounds Road, Scott, Arkansas, 72142, United States

Open daytime hours most days of the year, with reduced hours and days in winter and closure on major holidays; the park has at times closed one or two weekdays out of season. There is a small admission charge for the visitor centre and the trails. Guided tours run on a schedule and are the only way to walk certain parts of the site. The grounds can close in wet conditions because the trails cross low ground. Confirm the day's hours and tour times before driving.

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