Aztalan State Park
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Aztalan, on the Crawfish River near Lake Mills, is the site of a village that people of the Mississippian culture built about a thousand years ago. A stockade of upright logs ran around most of it, and inside, three flat-topped platform mounds and a natural knoll marked the corners of a large plaza. Parts of the stockade and two of the mounds have been rebuilt, and the rest is open, mown field. With the pandemic still keeping me from traveling abroad, state parks were where I went in 2021. I walked this one on the afternoon of April 25: along the stockade, up onto a platform mound for the view back across the plaza, and down to the river. I came back on a sunnier afternoon that October. The man who first wrote about the site named it for Aztlan, the legendary homeland of the Aztecs, because he thought they had built it. They had not. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1964.
Photos from Aztalan State Park
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The view from the top of a platform mound, back across the plaza.
The Crawfish River, which runs along the east side of the old village.
The plaque from 1964, when Aztalan became a National Historic Landmark.