The Fremont village Paragonah
Six centuries of occupation, and a century of excavation after it
The Paragonah Mounds, and what is left of them.
Between about A.D. 700 and 1300 a Fremont village stood on this valley floor, and in the late 1800s more than four hundred mounds still covered close to a square mile of it. Farming took most of them and three waves of archaeology took a good deal of the rest. Twelve acres holding twenty eight mounds survive as a permanent preserve, and they are not a place to go and look round.
Start here
Six hundred years of people, on this valley floor.
Between roughly A.D. 700 and 1300, a Fremont village stood on the ground at Paragonah, and it is counted among the largest known anywhere in Utah. In the late 1800s, before farming and a century of excavation, historical records describe more than four hundred mounds covering close to a square mile.
Those mounds are not burial mounds. They are the accumulated remains of structures: pit houses and surface buildings built, occupied, collapsed and rebuilt on the same spots over generations, until the ground itself rose. A mound is a stack of housing, which is a rather different and more domestic thing than the word suggests.
Six centuries is a long occupation by any measure. It means dozens of generations of people farmed this valley floor, drew the same water out of the same creek, and left enough behind to still be visible eight hundred years after they stopped.
The site
400+
mounds recorded in the late 1800s
1915
the year Neil Judd began excavating, to 1917
1954
the year UCLA field schools began
12 acres
protected as a permanent preserve today
A century of digging
Four hundred mounds to twenty eight.
Neil Judd, an archaeologist with the United States National Museum at the Smithsonian, excavated portions of the site between 1915 and 1917. By his time roughly fifty mounds were still intact, which means the great majority of the four hundred had already gone to farming in the decades after settlement. In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration ran limited excavations here. From 1954 UCLA ran a series of field schools that excavated close to thirty mounds.
That is three separate waves of professional archaeology on one village site, spanning forty years, on top of the agricultural levelling that came before any of it. Each wave was conducted to the standards of its own period, and the earliest of them predates most of the recording methods that a modern excavation would take for granted.
What is left with protection is twelve acres holding twenty eight mounds, described as the largest remaining intact portion of the site. Everything else is under fields, under buildings, or in a museum drawer somewhere.
Fifty mounds still intact by 1915, out of more than four hundred recorded thirty years earlier.
What saved the rest
A land sale in 2013, and a conservation buyer.
The twelve acre core is now owned and managed as a permanent preserve by The Archaeological Conservancy, a national organisation that buys archaeological sites outright in order to protect them. It came into their hands through a transaction in 2012 and 2013 in which the Utah Transit Authority paid Southern Utah University $108,000 for the land.
The money did work at both ends. Funds were allocated to fencing the site, a long term management plan, educational programming and a stewardship fund. Proceeds from the sale went to support a Native American anthropology scholarship and Southern Utah University's archaeology repository, which is a considerably better outcome than most such transactions produce.
The practical result is that the largest intact remnant of one of Utah's great Fremont villages is fenced, managed, funded and permanently out of the reach of the next plough or the next subdivision. That is a quiet piece of work and it is the reason there is anything left to write about.
How to treat it
This is not somewhere to go and look round.
It matters to say this plainly rather than at the bottom in small print. The Paragonah Mounds are a managed archaeological preserve on privately held conservation land, not a park. There is no trail, no car park, no interpretation on the ground and no visitor provision, and none of that is an oversight. A site survives by not being walked on.
It is also an ancestral site. The Fremont were people with descendants, and the correct posture toward a village where families lived for six hundred years is the one you would want extended to a graveyard belonging to your own. Do not dig, do not collect anything, do not walk on a mound, and do not treat it as a photograph.
If the archaeology genuinely interests you, and it should, the routes in are the ones the preservation work itself created: The Archaeological Conservancy about the site, and Southern Utah University, which holds an archaeology repository funded in part by the same transaction. Both are more rewarding than a look over a fence, and neither costs the site anything.
Disturbing an archaeological site is a serious matter and a legal one. Collecting artefacts, digging or damaging an archaeological site carries real legal consequences in Utah and on federal land, and the reputational consequences for the wider community of people who care about this material are worse. If you find something, leave it exactly where it is, note where you were, and tell the land manager or the state historic preservation office. Context is the whole value and picking something up destroys it permanently.
Keep reading
More of Paragonah on The Local.
Things to do
The top 6, ranked
Six picks, and one of them is eleven hundred years older than the town.
Read the guideThe water
Red Creek Reservoir
Sixty acres of trout water at the top of nineteen miles of gravel.
Read the guideThe founding
First called Red Creek
Four miles up the valley in 1851, for a second creek.
Read the guideThe calendar
The Pioneer Day Pie Auction
Six events a year, no venue, and no budget but the last one's takings.
Read the guideMoving here
Five minutes off the interstate
The land is here and the services are four miles away.
Read the guideThe companion
Paragonah, from a local
The mounds, the creek, the founding and the calendar.
Read the pageQuick answers
The mounds, answered.
The remains of a Fremont culture village occupied between roughly A.D. 700 and 1300 on the valley floor at Paragonah, counted among the largest known in Utah. The mounds are not burials: they are the accumulated remains of pit houses and surface structures built, occupied, collapsed and rebuilt on the same spots over generations until the ground itself rose. In the late 1800s more than four hundred of them covered close to a square mile.
Three separate waves across forty years. Neil Judd, an archaeologist with the United States National Museum at the Smithsonian, excavated portions between 1915 and 1917, when roughly fifty mounds were still intact. The Works Progress Administration ran limited excavations in the 1930s. From 1954 UCLA ran a series of field schools that excavated close to thirty mounds. Agricultural levelling had already taken most of the site before any of it.
Twelve acres containing twenty eight mounds, described as the largest remaining intact portion, now owned and managed as a permanent preserve by The Archaeological Conservancy. Set that against more than four hundred mounds recorded in the late 1800s and the arithmetic is stark. Everything else is under fields, under buildings, or in a museum collection somewhere.
The Archaeological Conservancy, a national organisation that buys archaeological sites outright to protect them. The land came into their hands through a transaction in 2012 and 2013 in which the Utah Transit Authority paid Southern Utah University $108,000 for it. Funds went to fencing, a long term management plan, educational programming and a stewardship fund for the site.
It is a managed archaeological preserve on privately held conservation land rather than a park, with no trail, no car park and no interpretation on the ground. The right approach is to contact The Archaeological Conservancy about access rather than to go looking for it. This is an ancestral site with living descendant communities and it survives precisely by not being walked on.
The people who lived across much of what is now Utah and neighbouring states from roughly A.D. 700 to 1300, farming maize alongside hunting and gathering, building pit houses and surface structures, and leaving a distinctive material culture. The Paragonah village is one of the largest Fremont sites known in the state, and six centuries of occupation there means dozens of generations of families on the same valley floor.
Leave it exactly where it is, note where you were, and tell the land manager or the state historic preservation office. Context is the entire archaeological value of an object, and picking something up destroys that permanently even with the best intentions. Collecting, digging or damaging an archaeological site also carries real legal consequences in Utah and on federal land.
Southern Utah University holds an archaeology repository, funded in part by the same land transaction that protected the site, and it is the natural academic route in. The Archaeological Conservancy is the body to approach about the preserve itself. Both are considerably more rewarding than a look over a fence, and neither costs the site anything, which is the point.
No, and they are different things in different places. Parowan Gap, about twenty five minutes away through Parowan, is a rock art site in the Red Hills with an associated dinosaur tracksite, and it belongs to the Parowan companion on this site. The Paragonah Mounds are a habitation site: the physical remains of a village where people lived for six hundred years, on the valley floor rather than in the hills.
Six hundred years of people chose this valley floor first.
Two settlements more than a thousand years apart came to the same ground for the same creek, which is the most direct argument there is that geography rather than accident put a town here. If that has you looking at the valley, the founding page picks the story up in 1851.