10/16/2026
This week began with . We end it with a feature in our Mosaic magazine on the future of the Florence Mound, one of Alabama’s most sacred indigenous sites.
The story features a roundtable conversation between some of the folks who know the Mound best — and are working to ensure its vital presence long-term. The story also highlights a public symposia that Alabama Humanities supported with a grant. That gathering convened knowledge keepers, mound caretakers, scholars, archaeologists, and landscape designers in conversations about the Mound’s past, present, and future.
The piece also considers the Mound in the context of America’s 250th. As one of our scholars shared: “We see the Mound as expanding the narrative of America’s founding. It not only brings deeper histories into view but also asks us to reconsider how we care for the places we use to mark history. Work at the Mound encourages us to see these sites not as inert relics, but as active and ongoing, places that shape how the past is understood and put to work in the present.”
Finally, we are grateful to Anita Flanagan, of Tuscumbia, for her poignant essay that opens this feature. Flanagan is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She writes, in part:
“The mound rises from the earth toward the sky:
Its base is rooted in the earth.
Its summit reaches toward the Upper World.
Ceremonial fires connect the community to spiritual forces.
The mound serves as a sacred center connecting earth, sky, water, ancestors, and community.
From a Cherokee homeland perspective, the Florence Mound is more than an archaeological monument. It is part of a living indigenous landscape shaped by thousands of years of human experience, ceremony, and connection to place. It reminds us that the Tennessee Valley was — and remains — a homeland where culture, history, spirituality, and geography are inseparable.”
Read it all here: alabamahumanities.org/america-at-250
Photos: Abraham Rowe.
