Itzate – Kenimer Mound
The Kenimer Mound, near where I live now, is the oldest example of Itza style architecture in the United States. The Itzas and their close kin, the Kek-chi Mayas, traditionally sculpted large pentagonal earthen pyramids from hills to use as platforms for their Sun God temples. The State of Georgia, plus the highlands of Chiapas and Belize, are the only regions in the world containing numerous five-sided earthen pyramids.
The Kenimer Mound probably dates from around 600 AD. In 1999, after signing an affidavit for the property owner, promising not to do any excavations in the mound site, a team of archaeologists from the University of Georgia went ahead and excavated test pits anyway. They found a preponderance of Napier type potsherds. Napier style pottery appeared in North Georgia around 600 AD.
The other Itza sites
Tamachichi’s ancestral band of Itza Mayas from southern Florida, who settled on the Ocmulgee River around 1200 AD, joined other Itzas, who had established a village two miles south of the Ocmulgee Acropolis around 990 AD. A few years later, they established a large town on the Etowah River, which became Etowah Mounds . . . a village on the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River, which became Itzate and the Nacoochee Mound . . . a village on the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River in Northeast Georgia (which became the Dillard Mound). Itza Commoner refugees poured into the Southeastern United States during that period with their shell-tempered redware pottery, thus triggering the sudden appearance of “the Mississippian Culture.” The region between the higher Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia and the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee became known as Itzapa . . . Place of the Itza or Itzate Itza People)
