Criel Mound
West Virginia
The Criel Mound in South Charleston is the second largest Adena burial mound in West Virginia, originally thirty-three feet high and one hundred seventy-three feet across at its base. Archaeologists estimate it was built somewhere between two hundred fifty and one hundred fifty years before the common era, part of a culture that constructed elaborate earthworks across the Ohio Valley for more than a thousand years.
When Smithsonian archaeologist P. W. Norris excavated the mound in eighteen eighty-three and eighty-four, he found multiple layers of human remains arranged in a striking spoke pattern, feet pointing toward a large central figure, evidence of highly ritualized burial practice. Historians have not confirmed whether any of the individuals buried there died in battle. Today the mound is the centerpiece of Staunton Park and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a two-thousand-year-old landmark in the middle of a modern neighborhood.
