The Indian Temple Mound
Near Destin, Florida
A short drive west of Destin, in downtown Fort Walton Beach beside Highway Ninety Eight, stands an earthwork far older than any fishing village. It is the Indian Temple Mound, a great flat topped platform of packed earth built by Native people between roughly the years eight hundred and fourteen hundred of the common era. The builders belonged to what archaeologists call the Pensacola Culture, a local expression of the wider Mississippian world that raised earthen mounds across the American Southeast.
Even after centuries of erosion, the mound still rises about twelve feet high and spreads more than two hundred feet across at its base. Building it took an estimated two hundred thousand basket loads of earth, carried by hand. On its summit once stood a temple and the residence of the chief, and successive leaders were buried within it as new layers were added over generations.
It was a center of ceremony, politics, and religion for a farming society that thrived on this coast long before European contact. In the year nineteen sixty four it was named a National Historic Landmark. Beside it, the Indian Temple Mound Museum, opened in nineteen sixty two as the first city owned museum in Florida, holds thousands of artifacts and one of the finest collections of prehistoric pottery in the Southeast.
