"We explain to the kids why, from the beginning of time in our homeland, we had the mounds. You can feel it in the classroom. There's a sense of dignity and a sense of loss."

Glenda Galvan

IN CONTEXT

Common Ground

FEATURE ARTICLES

Native Voices

Nanih Waiya: Mother Mound of the Choctaw

From Ancient Site to Tourist Attraction and Beyond

Speeding Ahead of the Plow

In Search of a Mound  

Peril or Potential

by Joe Saunders

Down the back trails in the piney hills south of Bayou D'Arbonne in Louisiana we rumbled along in search of the mound. My companion, Frank Thomas, knew the route, since it was his property. But he wasn't the only one familiar with the back roads that led to the mound, which explained why I was along for the ride. Looters had been here too. They, too, knew about the site, and had already put in some hard hours of digging.

The evidence they left prompted the Thomases to call me at Northeast Louisiana University. What could be done to stabilize the damage and preserve the mound?

It rose up out of the swampy underbrush, perched on an alluvial terrace above the bayou. Conical in shape, the mound was about 50 meters wide at the base and six meters high. The work of the relic-hunters was plainly visible: a trench 3 meters wide and 25 meters long.

Around the turn of the century, the land had been farmed by the Hedgepeth family. Though it had been plowed for decades, few artifacts turned up: several projectile points, a grinding stone, no pottery. Mr. Hedgepeth knew that there was something extraordinary about the mound, because he forbade family members from disturbing it. The site had remained intact until the looters arrived.

I examined the exposed trench walls for artifacts, but found none. Instead, my attention was drawn to the horizontal bands of weathered mound fill exposed in the walls of the trench. A beautiful sequence of soil horizons was clearly visible. In Louisiana, it takes tens to hundreds of years for surface sediments to become organically enriched (A horizon) and thousands of years for the clay near the surface (E horizon) to be stripped and redeposited, forming a clay-enriched zone (Bt horizon) above the unweathered sediments (C horizon). The soils at Hedgepeth suggested that the mound had stood for thousands of years, and I began to wonder if perhaps this was a natural feature. Topographically it appeared to be manmade, but the lack of artifacts and the degree of weathering reminded me of a story I had heard recently.

A few years ago, an archeologist discovered a mound in Louisiana's uplands that made a stir in the local news. The mound was associated with artifacts that dated to the Poverty Point period (ca. 1700-1200 B.C.). But a geologist who examined the site came to the conclusion that it was not a mound at all. Instead, he claimed, it was a natural feature on which Poverty Point people had camped. Was the Hedgepeth site also a natural feature? That would explain the absence of pottery. Was I about to make the same mistake?

I contacted soil scientist Thurman Allen of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Allen had worked at Poverty Point and also conducted a number of soil surveys in the area of the Hedgepeth mound. At first sight, he concluded that what we were looking at was indeed a mound. But after he examined soil horizons in the trench walls, he too began to wonder.

There appeared to be no conclusive answer to the question until a few days later, when I visited the site again with Mr. Thomas. Looking hard at the trench wall one more time, I noticed what appeared to be a large piece of quartz. As I cleaned the area around the object for a photograph, it gradually became clear that it was a ground stone adze. There was no evidence of an intrusive pit in the trench profile, so the artifact had not been placed in a pit that had been excavated into an existing mound or hill. The adze had to have been transported to that spot during mound construction. Only one agency was capable of transporting an object of that size to the top of the mound: human labor. The Hedgepeth mound was, indeed, a prehistoric mound site.

Because of the extensive weathering in the mound fill and the absence of pottery at the site, Allen and I were convinced that the site was at least preceramic (pre-500 B.C.). Later, a test pit dug in the bottom of the looters' trench would yield charcoal from a submound hearth which dated to ca. 3000 B.C.

Thurman Allen and I have since been using soil development as a means for identifying mounds that we suspect to date from the Archaic period. We plan to re-evaluate this site that apparently had fooled the archeologist a few years back. What we had learned from the Hedgepeth site makes me wonder. Perhaps the archeologist had found an early mound, and it was the geologist who had been tricked by the soil.