Emerald Mound Site, Native American ceremonial mound in Adams County, United States

Emerald Mound is an elongated, pentagonal earthen platform built around a natural hill, measuring 770 by 435 feet at its base and rising 35 feet. Its flat summit holds two smaller mounds, the larger at the western end at 190 by 160 feet and 30 feet high. Two pale earthen ramps curve up onto the grassy mound and meet near the center.

Emerald Mound began as a natural hill that Plaquemine workers built up with earth along its sides between 1250 and 1600, creating an elongated pentagonal plateau. It is the type site for the Emerald Phase (1500–1680) of the Natchez Bluffs chronology. By the late 1730s the Natchez had abandoned it, and the hereditary chief moved to the Grand Village of the Natchez, 12 miles southwest.

The name comes from the 19th-century Emerald Plantation that surrounded the mound, not from the Natchez. The summit held the ceremonial center itself, an unusual placement among mound centers, while the two secondary mounds were platforms for a temple and the residence of a priest or ruler.

The mound is reached from a parking area off the Natchez Trace Parkway near Stanton. A trail leads from the lot toward the platform, but the stairways built in the 1950s to the summit and the larger secondary mound have since been removed, so the top is not climbed by steps. The grass surface can be uneven and soft after rain.

The summit of Emerald Mound lies about 65 feet above the surrounding plain, and the ceremonial center stood on top of the platform itself, a placement rarely seen at other mound centers. The larger of the two summit mounds, at the western end, measures 190 by 160 feet at its base and rises 30 feet.