Archaeological Field School 2014

During the summer, 2014, the department’s  Archaeological Field School continued to gather basic data from mound sites in the southern part of the Mississippi Delta as part of MDAH’s Mississippi Mounds Trail Project. Former graduate student (now working on her Ph.D. at U. Alabama) Jessica Kowalski and graduate student Ronnie Wise served as project staff. Field school students were Amy Ball,Taylor Brower, Mitchell Furr, Cecilia Henderson, Beth Hunt, Zach Myers, and Miranda Parker. Kelli Ferris, Sarah Beth Grant and Aaron Shook volunteered to gain more field experience. This summer we stayed at a duck camp in Onward, near where Teddy Roosevelt famously spared a bear during a hunting expedition to the Mississippi Delta.

We worked on three new sites and returned to three others to gather additional information.  Our most extensive excavations were conducted at Aden, an early Coles Creek period (ca. AD 700-900) in southern Issaquena County. Aden originally consisted of three mounds, two of which remain. We put test units in each. On Mound A, the larger of the two, we excavated  two 1-x-2 m units aligned on the south flank. Excavation exposed a thick midden interpreted as a refuse accumulation resulting from mound summit ceremony. A large ceramic assemblage was recovered including varieties of Coles Creek Incised, Chevalier Stamped, and French Fork Incised. In addition to ceramics at least one arrow point and several fragments of quartz crystal were collected. Abundant well preserved animal remains were collected as well representing deer, bear, squirrel, rabbit, turkey and other birds, catfish, buffalo fish, and freshwater drum. Mound B at Aden has suffered from dirt removal in the past, recognizable by the present irregular outline of the mound. A test unit at the base of the west side of the mound showed that the mound originally extended several meters to the west but it had been trimmed away to ground level.  A second unit on the eastern edge of the present summit disclosed that this side of the mound had also been damaged by excavation in the past.  What appeared to be a prehistoric feature in this unit turned out to be a large collapsed animal den (fox?), much to our dismay. Ceramics from Aden will feed into Ceci Henderson’s thesis research on the Coles Creek period in the Lower Yazoo Basin.