The Toltec Mounds just outside Little Rock date back more than a thousand years - and the 100-acre state park is the largest archaeological site in the lower Mississippi valley.
We're not headed to the front gate of the amusement park on the parking lot tram, we're headed back in time, when the ancestors of the American Indians, the Plum Bayou People, lived and worshiped just outside Little Rock.
"The Plum Bayou Indians, they lived here from 650 A.D. to 1050 A.D. and they came here and the built 18 mounds total," says Park Interpreter Amy Griffin, who is our guide and driver on the tram-tour, keeping the one-hour experience fun and informative.
Griffin stops to explain an earthen wall. "The leaders and important people would have lived on this side of the wall. And the average Joe I guess you could say, would live on the other side of the wall, out and about in the countryside."
Many of the site's mounds were leveled by farming, some intentionally destroyed as late as the 1960s. The two largest mounds remaining measure just under 50 feet tall.
Griffin explains, "Those are mounds that we believe the Native Americans would have some kind of structure on top of them to either live on or have some type of ceremonies in."
One location has been identified as a burial mound, and is left undisturbed out of respect. But archeologists have explored the site as far back as 1878. And artifacts from the Plum Bayou culture are on display at the park.
Most remarkable, though, may be the layout of the site.
Just like Stonehenge and other ancient discoveries, the mounds here serve as a type of calendar or clock.
Griffin points to the field of mounds. "If you stand on mound H and the sun sets over mound B, it's the summer solstice or what we call the longest day of the year. And if the sun sets behind mound A it's the far spring equinox. And if it sets over mound S way back there, it's the winter solstice or what we call the shortest day of the year."
All important information for the planting and harvesting of crops in a pre-historic society.
Griffin continues, "And they were engineering these mounds in certain places to last thousands of years and they didn't have one piece of paper telling them how to do it."
The people living at Toltec had access to the water. And artifacts indicate they may have traded with tribes living as far away as the Great Lakes.
They are long gone now, but the Plum Bayou People are still under study by archeologists here.
And their giant earthen clock is still working.
Source: Todays THV