Maryland has no mounds. What it has instead is worse, and the story ends where I didn’t expect it to.
If you go looking for mounds in Maryland, you will not find them.
This is not because nothing happened here. The Potomac tidewater has been occupied for thousands of years, and by the
time Europeans arrived, it supported one of the Atlantic coast’s more organized chiefdoms. But the Algonquian peoples of
the Chesapeake did not build pyramids of earth. They built something else.
They built ossuaries.
What an ossuary is
The word gets translated as “mass grave,” which is accurate and completely misleading.
A mass grave, in the way most people hear it, implies catastrophe, plague, massacre, something that overwhelmed the
ordinary machinery of burial. An ossuary is the opposite. It is the ordinary machinery, functioning exactly as designed.
The practice worked in two stages. When someone died, they were first interred somewhere else: a scaffold, a temporary
grave, a charnel structure. They stayed there, sometimes for years, while the soft tissue decomposed.
Then, periodically, the community held a second burial. The dead were gathered, carried together to a prepared pit, and
reinterred as a group. Not side by side in rows. Together.
Think about what that means as a statement about personhood. In the burial traditions most Americans know, the grave
preserves the individual: one name, one plot, one marker, permanently distinguished from every other. The ossuary does
the reverse. It takes people who were separate in life and in first burial, and after a period of waiting, returns them to a
single body of ancestors.
You are an individual for a while. Then you become part of the community’s dead, which is a different and larger thing.
Whatever else you believe about the people who built these, that is not a primitive idea. It is a fully worked-out position on
what happens to a self.
The site
Accokeek Creek sits in Prince George’s County, Maryland, on the east bank of the Potomac, roughly twenty-five miles
downriver from Washington, D.C.
People lived there for a very long time. The National Park Service describes intermittent occupation reaching back around
six thousand years, based on projectile point analysis; other summaries put continuous occupation from roughly 2000 BC
forward. Either way, the depth is measured in millennia, not centuries.
By the Late Woodland period, a substantial town existed. Excavation revealed consecutive palisade lines, meaning the
defensive wall was rebuilt repeatedly across generations, along with post molds, hearths, refuse pits, and dog burials,
across an area of roughly 650 by 350 feet.
The pottery made here has its own name. Moyaone ware, dating roughly 1300 to 1650, is tempered with fine sand
containing mica, which gives the finished surface a faint glitter. It’s found across the western shore coastal plain of
Maryland, which tells you this place was exporting, or at least that its style was.
And the name itself: Moyaone. It translates as “home place.”
What Alice Ferguson found
In the 1920s, Henry and Alice Ferguson bought land in the area as a rural retreat from their life in Washington. Sources vary
on the exact year: 1922, 1923, and 1928 all appear in print, which is a small thing but worth noticing, because inexact
record-keeping becomes the theme of this entire story.
Alice Ferguson was not a trained archaeologist. She was what the field politely calls an avocational, a serious amateur.
From 1935 to 1939, she excavated the site extensively.
She found the palisades, the hearths, the post molds. She also found the ossuaries. Four of them at Accokeek Creek, one
more at nearby Mockley Point.
The four ossuaries at Accokeek Creek held at least 1,438 people.
Ferguson concluded she had found Moyaone, the principal town of the Piscataway chiefdom, the settlement John Smith
mapped when he sailed up the Potomac in 1608.
The dispute nobody mentions
That identification is not settled.
Some archaeologists question whether the Accokeek Creek site is actually the Moyaone of Smith’s map. The chronology is
difficult, the mapping is imprecise by modern standards, and the Potomac had multiple substantial towns.
What is not in dispute is that Accokeek Creek was a major center, one of the most significant archaeological sites in the
eastern Middle Atlantic, and the source of the diagnostic artifact sequence that regional archaeologists still use to date
other sites.
I’m flagging the dispute because you’ll see the Moyaone identification stated flatly in many places, including some official
ones. The honest version is: this was a great town on the Potomac, and it may or may not be the specific one in the 1608
record.
The ossuary nobody can find
Here is the part that should stop you.
Separate from the four at Accokeek Creek, there is a site cataloged as 18PR42, the Ferguson Ossuary, also called Powell’s
Site #38. It is a contact-period ossuary containing the remains of at least 207 people, most likely Piscataway. It sits within
or very near the principal Piscataway town of roughly 1630 to 1680, historically recorded as the Piscataway Fort, or
Kittamaquund.
The precise location is not known.
Maryland’s own site file says so directly: the location was lost due to inadequate record-keeping relating to the site in the
late 1930s and 1940s. The best current assessment is that the ossuary lies somewhere near a post-war housing
development.
Two hundred and seven people were buried by their community in the most deliberate ceremony that community
performed, and we cannot say which street they are under.
That is not a conspiracy. Nobody hid it. It is something worse and more ordinary: people dug, wrote down too little, and the
paperwork rotted faster than the bones.
Where they went
Most of the human remains from these excavations were transferred to the National Museum of Natural History at the
Smithsonian, across five separate accessions over the following decades.
The minimum number of individuals from the Accokeek site ossuaries in the museum’s holdings is 1,123.
Compare that to the fourteen hundred and thirty-eight recorded at the site. The gap isn’t necessarily sinister: analysts
calculate minimum-number-of-individuals counts differently, remains were transferred piecemeal, and some material
stayed elsewhere. But the arithmetic doesn’t close cleanly, and a 2025 report prepared for the Ferguson Foundation
working through the NMNH accessions runs to enough pages to show why: the catalog numbers, the accession dates, the
proveniences marked “x.”
This is what institutional custody of the dead actually looks like. Not a vault with a secret in it. A spreadsheet with gaps.
Why they left, and who came after
The Piscataway did not disappear from Moyaone gradually or mysteriously.
At the north end of the area, near Piscataway Creek, there was a rectangular fort occupied by the Susquehannock in 1674
and 1675. The Susquehannock were a powerful Iroquoian-speaking nation being pushed south under pressure from their
own.
In 1680, the Piscataway vacated Moyaone and relocated to Zekiah Manor, seeking safety from Susquehannock attacks.
So the town emptied, not from collapse, not from plague, not from anything mysterious, but from a documented sequence
of one displaced nation displacing another, which is what the seventeenth century did up and down this coast.
Then, seventy-four years later, in 1754, George Washington moved into Mount Vernon, directly across the river.
Hold those two dates next to each other, because almost nobody does. The Piscataway were forced out of their home
place in 1680. Washington arrived in 1754. The famous view from Mount Vernon the unspoiled Maryland shore, the one
preserved in a thousand photographs is a view of somebody’s abandoned capital, and it had been abandoned for three
quarters of a century before the house that frames it was ever occupied.
Saved as scenery
By the mid-twentieth century, that shoreline was under development pressure. Suburban Washington was expanding, and
the land opposite Mount Vernon was slated for development.
The campaign to stop it succeeded. Piscataway Park was established, and the Accokeek Creek Site was designated a
National Historic Landmark in 1964 and listed on the National Register in 1966.
The organizing argument was the viewshed. The land needed to be preserved so that visitors standing at George
Washington’s home would look across the Potomac and see what he saw.
I want to be fair about this, because the easy version of the story is wrong in one important way. Alice Ferguson, who dug
the ossuaries, was central to the preservation effort. She bought land, encouraged friends to settle nearby as a protective
buffer, and after she died in 1951, the foundation bearing her name continued the work. Piscataway Park today is a
patchwork of seven entities, several of them assembled from parcels she or the Moyaone Corporation acquired between
the 1940s and 1970s.
She excavated the dead, and she saved the ground. Both. That’s not a contradiction anyone in 1935 would have felt, and
pretending otherwise flattens a real person into a cartoon.
But the framing still stands, and it’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about. The ancestral capital of a living nation survived into
the twenty-first century because a dead president’s sightline was worth protecting. The mounds in Ohio got a golf course.
Moyaone got a better fate for a reason that had nothing to do with the people in the ground.
November 11, 1979
His name was Philip Sheridan Proctor. He was known as Turkey Tayac.
He was a Piscataway leader, and he spent his life on the specific and exhausting work of insisting his people still existed. In
the twentieth-century Mid-Atlantic, that was not a rhetorical position; Native identity in Maryland and Virginia had been
systematically erased on paper, reclassified, written out of records. Proving continuous existence was the whole fight.
He was central to the Indigenous activism and cultural revitalization movement on the East Coast. He pushed to have
Moyaone designated a historic landmark. He supported the creation of Piscataway Park.
He died in 1978. And on November 11, 1979, by an act of Congress, he was buried at the ossuary site at Accokeek Creek.
Sit with the shape of that. The United States government, which spent three centuries removing Native people from that
ground and then removed their ancestors’ remains to
a museum, passed a specific act so that one man could be returned
to the same pit as his ancestors.
It is a small correction against an enormous ledger. It is also, as far as I can tell, exactly what he wanted, and he got it.
They are still here
The State of Maryland formally recognized the Piscataway in 2012. Their descendants live near the site today. The
Accokeek Foundation stewards two hundred acres of the park, with programming that includes Piscataway culture rather
than only colonial-era agriculture.
This matters more than any other line in this piece.
The Mound Builder Myth worked by insisting that the people who built these places were a vanished race, extinct, leaving
the ground unclaimed. Every version of that argument, in every century, has the same payload: there is nobody left to
object.
At Accokeek Creek, that argument is not just wrong; you can refute it by driving there. People whose ancestors are in that
ground have names and addresses and a state recognition certificate, and they have been saying so the entire time.
Maryland has no mounds. It has fourteen hundred people in four pits, two hundred more under a subdivision nobody can
identify, eleven hundred catalog numbers in a Smithsonian accession file, a national park established to protect a dead
man’s view, and one grave dug by act of Congress in 1979.
Every conquered society gets its architecture reassigned. It happened here.
Ask yourself where else it’s happened.
A country is buried underneath this one. And you’re standing on it right now.
LOOK FOR YOURSELF
- National Park Service on the Accokeek Creek site and its significance:
- Piscataway Park, official NPS page:
- Maryland Historical Trust’s own site file on the lost Ferguson Ossuary, the state document stating the location is unknown:
- The 2025 report on Piscataway Creek remains in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History:
- Colonial Encounters project summary of the Ferguson excavations and the ossuary counts:
- Indigenous Maryland on Piscataway Park, Moyaone, and Turkey Tayac:
- University of Maryland Special Collections on the place name and the park’s layered history:
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