The Paragonah Mounds, and what is left of them

The remains of a Fremont culture village that stood near Paragonah between roughly A.D. 700 and 1300, and one of the largest known anywhere in Utah. The mounds are not burials. They are the built-up remains of pit houses and surface buildings raised, lived in, 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 over about forty years. Neil Judd of the Smithsonian dug portions between 1915 and 1917, when fewer than 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 opened close to thirty mounds. Farm leveling had already taken most of the site before any of it.

Twelve acres holding twenty-eight mounds, the largest intact piece left, now owned and managed as a permanent preserve by The Archaeological Conservancy. Set that against the more than four hundred mounds recorded in the late 1800s and the loss is stark. Everything else is under fields, under buildings, or in a museum collection somewhere.

The Archaeological Conservancy, a national organization that buys archaeological sites outright to protect them. The land came to them through a deal completed in 2013, in which the Utah Transit Authority paid Southern Utah University $108,000 for it, with added money for fencing, a long-term management plan, education and a stewardship fund.

Not the way you would visit a park. It is a managed archaeological preserve on private conservation land, with no trail, no parking lot and no signs on the ground. The right move is to contact The Archaeological Conservancy about access rather than 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 neighboring states from roughly A.D. 700 to 1300, farming corn alongside hunting and gathering, building pit houses and surface structures, and leaving behind a distinctive material culture. The Paragonah village is one of the largest Fremont sites known in the state, and six centuries there means dozens of generations of families on the same ground.

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 archaeological value of an object, and picking it 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 deal that protected the site, and it is the natural academic way in. The Archaeological Conservancy is the body to approach about the preserve itself. Both are far more rewarding than a look over a fence, and neither costs the site anything, which is the point.

No. 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 a dinosaur tracksite nearby, and it belongs with our Parowan pages. The Paragonah Mounds are a habitation site, the physical remains of a village where people lived for six hundred years, near town rather than in a pass in the Red Hills.