Too-Cowee (sometimes Cowee) (also Stecoah), was an important historic Cherokee town located near the Little Tennessee River north of present-day Franklin, North Carolina. It also had a prehistoric platform mound and earlier village built by ancestral peoples. As their expression of public architecture, the Cherokee built a townhouse on top of the mound. It was the place for their community gatherings in their highly decentralized society. The name translates to "pig fat" in English. British traders and colonists referred to Cowee as one of the Cherokee Middle Towns along this river; they defined geographic groupings based in relation to their coastal settlements, such as Charlestown, South Carolina.

The "Cowee Mound and Village Site", now within present-day Macon County, North Carolina, has been listed since 1973 on the National Register of Historic Places as an archeological site. Since 2006 it has been owned by the federally recognized Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, based in North Carolina, which shares some conservation easements with the state.

Cowee was developed in the floodplain of the river, as were most prehistoric and historic indigenous towns. It has been described as one of the best-preserved South Appalachian Mississippian culture sites in western North Carolina and has an earthwork platform mound. The people of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture flourished in this area from about 1000 CE to the 14th or 15th century. It developed later in this region than in the main cultural centers in the Midwest.

In this period, the larger villages in South Appalachia each built a single platform mound. These villages each served as the political center for several nearby smaller communities. In the largest centers, by contrast, such as Cahokia and Etowah Indian Mounds, the Mississippian culture people gathered in larger centers and built multiple mounds. These dense settlements expressed the more stratified levels of social and political hierarchy.

The Too-Cowee mound and village site became an important center for the Cherokee, who occupied a large territory in southeastern Tennessee, western North and South Carolina, and northeastern Georgia. They are believed to have migrated from the Great Lakes area, where other Iroquoian-speaking peoples are based, and to have been in this homeland in the Southeast for more than 1,000 years.

When the Cherokee occupied this area, they built a large townhouse or council house on top of the mound, which was their form of public architecture. It held the sacred flame of the people. When needed, the townhouse would be dismantled and burned, then replaced, and the mound repaired. It gradually became larger in circumference. Large enough to hold hundreds of people, the townhouse was a place for the community to gather.

In the westernmost eleven counties of North Carolina, the Cherokee developed towns known by colonists in the eighteenth century as the Middle, Valley, and Out Towns, along the river valleys and floodplains between mountain ridges in this region. The major rivers were the French Broad, Pigeon, Tuckaseegee, Little Tennessee, and Hiwassee. In the late eighteenth century, the Cherokee expanded deeper to the south and west into Georgia and Alabama.

The Cowee Mound and Village Site has been defined as the mound and about 53 acres (21 ha) of rolling fields and hills, believed to contain evidence of the Cherokee village and earlier habitations. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 as an archaeological site. In 2001 it was listed as a contributing site to the "Cowee-West's Mill Historic District."