Moundville Archaeological Park adds all-levels yoga on the museum lawn

Moundville Archaeological Park will trade its usual museum-lawn feel for a moving, stretching crowd when Grounded at Moundville arrives on May 28. The all-levels outdoor session will mix gentle flow with Pilates, making the park itself part of the practice instead of just the backdrop.

The class will be free with park admission, and Moundville residents will still need to pay admission because it is a special event. That detail matters at a site that already draws visitors as a destination, not just a neighborhood green space, especially with the program set on the lawn at an archaeological park south of Tuscaloosa in Hale County, Alabama.

Dominique Bodoh will lead the session. Bodoh is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of Alabama and a member of the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin. In her University of Alabama anthropology bio, she identifies herself as a bioarchaeology Ph.D. student and points to the relationship between tribes and institutions of learning as an important part of North American archaeology, a background that gives this yoga offering a sharper cultural frame than a typical fitness class.

That context fits Moundville itself. The University of Alabama describes the park as one of the nation’s premier Native American heritage sites and says it was once a powerful prehistoric community that, at its peak, was America’s largest city north of Mexico. Reference sources place the site’s occupation roughly between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1450, and the park sits on the Black Warrior River about 14 miles south of Tuscaloosa. It is also known for 29 or more platform mounds and for the scale of the settlement that once occupied the area.

The yoga program also fits a broader pattern at the park, where outdoor educational events have already activated the landscape this spring and beyond. An invasive-plants hike ran on May 16, 2026, and an ephemeral walk was held on March 29, 2025, showing that Moundville has been leaning into programs that bring people outside and into direct contact with the grounds. Grounded at Moundville follows that same path, but with mats, breath, and movement on the museum lawn.