17,000 Years of Continuous Human Habitation

17,000 Years of Continuous Human Habitation. Ocmulgee National Monument. , 17,000 Years of Continuous Human Habitation , Descendants of Ocmulgee's early inhabitants, the Muscogee (Creek) people, continue to hold these lands sacred in keeping with their traditions. , Archeological investigations conducted on this site during the 1930s uncovered evidence of the extensive human habitation of these lands dating as early as pre-9600 B.C.E. with the Ice Age nomadic hunters. Artifacts and features from every southeastern time period have been discovered on Ocmulgee Fields. , The continuing mission of the Ocmulgee National Monument, as established by Franklin D. Roosevelt on December 12, 1936, directs the National Park Service to preserve and protect the lands commonly known as the "Old Ocmulgee Fields" for present and future generations. , You are now standing in the lands once occupied by an advanced and skilled farming community of people known as the Mississippians. More than 500 years before Columbus sailed to the New World, the Mississippians at Ocmulgee built a thriving town of thatched huts and constructed a series of earth mounds for religious and political ceremonies. , They lived by farming the river bottomlands with corn, squash, beans, pumpkin, and tobacco crops. They fished and gathered shellfish, plentiful in the nearby Ocmulgee River. The Mississippians at Ocmulgee numbered more than 2,000 at a single time during their peak occupation in this area referred to as the Macon Plateau.