Lake Mills, Wisconsin

Lake Mills, Wisconsin is a pleasant Jefferson County city on the shore of Rock Lake, but just a mile to the east stands one of the most significant archaeological sites in the upper Midwest. Aztalan State Park preserves a Middle Mississippian village and ceremonial complex that flourished around one thousand to twelve hundred A-D. The people who built it constructed massive flat-topped pyramid mounds, a ceremonial fire temple, and a fortified log-and-clay palisade wall that enclosed the entire village.

At its height Aztalan housed perhaps five hundred people with cultural and trade ties stretching all the way to Cahokia, the great city near present-day Saint Louis. The site was discovered by European settlers in the eighteen thirties, its name coined by surveyor Nathaniel Hyer, who speculated the mounds were built by the mythical Aztecs. The name stuck even after that theory was set aside.

Systematic excavations began in nineteen nineteen. Today the mounds are protected and partially reconstructed inside a state park just outside town.