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main phases of habitation during the Mississippian period.12 After the Early Mississippian cultures
abandoned building in the main plateau area, development at the Lamar site began. Habitation at the
Lamar site persisted until Hernando de Soto's expedition of 1540 made contact with the what they
described as the Ichisi culture there. The resulting spread of foreign diseases, and occasional skirmishes
with Europeans, ultimately led to the death of approximately seventy to eighty percent of the total
population in the region.13 In an attempt to survive after such a decimating death toll, the remaining
peoples banded together in the genesis of what is today the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.14

Once the land was vacant of its Native inhabitants, due to the wholesale Indian removal policies
of the American government in the early 1800s, a series of several disastrous events plagued the
Ocmulgee site. In the 1840s and 1870s two separate railway paths were carved through the plateau, the
first one cutting into the Lesser Temple Mound, and the second removing large sections of the Funeral
Mound.15 The next event that maimed the Ocmulgee National Monument came in the form of the
archaeological excavations carried out under the direction of Dr. Arthur Kelly starting in 1933.16 Dr.
Kelly's archaeological research was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and staffed with around
800 workers from the WPA, the Civil Works Administration, and the Federal Emergency Relief
Administration between the project's beginning and 1936, when the site became a national
monument.17 The Kelly excavation yielded an estimated 2.5 million artifacts, many of which are still
left uncatalogued either on-site or at the Southeast Archaeological Center (SEAC) in Tallahassee,
Florida.18 Though there were many significant archaeological finds associated with this massive
archaeological exploration, there was never any thought given to seeking permission from any Native

12 Bigman, “An Early Mississippian Settlement,” 51-65.
13 David, Interview.
14 “The History of the Muscogee Nation,” accessed February 18, 2016, http://www.muscogeenation-

nsn.gov/Pages/History/history.html.
15 Matthew Jennings, Images of America: Ocmulgee National Monument (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing,

2015), 8-12.
16 National Park Service, “Stories,” accessed February 18, 2016,

https://www.nps.gov/ocmu/learn/historyculture/stories.html.
17 Ibid.
18 David, Interview.