When the archaeologist Cyrus Thomas surveyed the Kanawha Valley in the 1880s on behalf of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology, he counted fifty mounds along the river terraces near present-day Charleston. They ranged from three feet to thirty-five feet in height, and they sat among eight to ten circular earthwork enclosures, each enclosing one to thirty acres of ground. Stone mounds dotted the bluffs above the floodplain. The Criel Mound sat equidistant between two of those great circles - each 556 feet in diameter - in what was clearly a deliberate spatial arrangement. Thomas called the whole complex the Kanawha Valley Mounds, and described it as the second-largest known concentration of Adena earthworks in North America. Most of those mounds and circles were destroyed during the city's growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - leveled for streets, plowed under for cropland, demolished for factories. The Criel Mound survived. The Wilson Mound, in a private cemetery in South Charleston, also still stands.

In the 1830s, the residents of South Charleston used the mound as the centerpiece of a horse-racing track. The course ran in a wide loop around the base. In 1840, they leveled the top of the mound to install a wooden judges' stand, removing what was probably the original conical peak. The loss is unrecoverable: any artifacts or burials in the upper portion went into the displaced soil. By the time the federal Bureau of Ethnology arrived in 1883 to excavate, the mound's full original height could only be estimated from comparable structures elsewhere in the valley. Colonel P.W. Norris supervised the work; Professor Cyrus Thomas of the Smithsonian directed the excavation. They tunneled into the mound from the side and from above. What they found at the base would be remembered for decades.

Thirteen skeletons lay inside the Criel Mound - two near the top, eleven at the base. The base burials were the centerpiece of the find. A single very large skeleton occupied the center, surrounded by ten others arranged in a spoke-like pattern, their feet pointing inward toward the central figure. The bodies had been wrapped in elm bark and laid on a floor of white ash and bark, possibly within a wooden vault whose decayed timbers left only postholes in the earth. A.R. Sines, who assisted Norris in the excavation, recorded the central skeleton as measuring six feet, eight and three-quarter inches from head to heel. The Smithsonian nomination form would later add a careful note: the extreme height might have been exaggerated by the pressure of earth on the burial. The central figure was accompanied by a fish-dart, a lance-head, and a sheet of hammered native copper near the head. The other burials held arrowheads, lance heads, shell, and pottery fragments. The Adena people had buried someone important here - and ten others, perhaps companions, perhaps attendants, in formal arrangement around them.

The Criel Mound is now the centerpiece of Staunton Park, a small municipal park maintained by the city of South Charleston. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On any given weekend, it serves as the gathering place for local arts and crafts fairs, revivals, memorial services, sunrise services, and town carnivals. Most visitors do not know they are walking the grounds of an indigenous burial complex that predates the Roman Empire's expansion into northern Europe. The Adena culture itself faded by about AD 200, replaced or merged with the Hopewell tradition that followed across the Eastern Woodlands. The descendants of the people who built Criel Mound are presumed to be among the historic tribes of the Ohio Valley - Shawnee, Mingo, Cherokee, and others - though direct cultural continuity over two millennia is difficult to trace. A recreation of the original Shawnee Reservation Mound exists at Institute, West Virginia, a few miles downriver. The original mounds, with the exception of Criel and Wilson, are gone. The earth held them as long as it could.