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A FIRST LOOK AT PARCHMAN PLACE
A Mississippian
Ceremonial Center
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Crew members complete work on a trench dug to explore a cluster of house remains located in a cultivated portion of the site. The main mound is covered by the trees in the background.
An investigation of Parchman Place Mounds reveals the expected and the unexpected.
By Michael Finger
Farmers in northern Mississippi tend to keep their eyes on the ground. After all, close attention to the cotton, soybeans, corn, and milo that stretch to the horizon can mean the difference between a good crop and a disaster. Besides, the only things that rise more than a few feet into the air in the Mississippi Delta, which is as flat as a frying pan (and just as hot in the summertime), are the occasional flocks of birds, the regular drone of cropdusters spraying herbicides, and the clouds of mosquitoes that swarm out of the muddy creeks snaking through the fields.
So folks in Coahoma County probably stared in disbelief one summer evening last July when what appeared to be a yellow go-kart dangling from a kite slowly soared across their fields. As it flew closer, they could see that this odd-looking device was a parasail, a propeller-driven ultralight aircraft suspended beneath a rainbow-tinted parachute. Tommy Ike Hailey, an archaeologist at Louisiana’s Northwestern State University, was flying the contraption. Strapped into the seat behind him, taking thermal and near-infrared images of the ground below, was Bryan Haley, an archaeologist with the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Mississippi (better known in these parts as Ole Miss). They were part of the first professional investigation of the Parchman Place Mounds, a 59-acre Mississippian site purchased this winter by The Archaeological Conservancy.
Jay Johnson removes some loose dirt from the floor of the trench. The lighter streak of earth running down the center of the floor is the remains of a prehistoric wall trench.
Drawing the Past from the Present Named after a former landowner, Parchman Place consists of three mounds, one of which is a massive, oval-shaped central platform that rises almost 30 feet above ground level and is flanked by a pair of smaller mounds.
“Parchman is probably one of the most significant Mississippian sites around here because of its size and relatively intact mounds as well as the now-known good preservation of buried structural remains,” said John Connaway, an archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The site “makes up one of the largest of the unexplored prehistoric ceremonial centers in Mississippi,” added Jay Johnson, the director of the Center for Archaeological Research at Ole Miss and the leader of the investigation.
In the late 19th century, the top of the central mound was used as a family graveyard, and it has remained relatively undisturbed. The other mounds, however, have been disturbed for decades, so their original shape is hard to determine. As recently as the early 1960s, visitors to the site observed more than 20 smaller house sites nearby, but these have since disappeared, replaced by an unbroken field of cotton. The only traces of Indian habitation are the broken bits of pottery and brick-colored dried mud, called daub, that plows regularly turned up.
“Twenty years ago, the traditional technique would be to plot the site, do a controlled surface collection, then dig some test pits,” said Johnson. “Then, if the pits showed anything, you would come in with a backhoe and scrape off the first several inches, since that’s been disturbed by plowing, and you’re not going to find anything useful there anyway.”
A gradiometer survey of the site, done in February of last year, provided the first broad-scale map of Parchman Place. The gradiometer measures subtle differences in the earth’s magnetic field that can result from a house foundation or other construction. In July, Johnson, Connaway, and a team of Ole Miss students spent four weeks at the site.
It was a formidable project, as temperatures soared into the high 90s well before noon each day. The crew, loaded down with water bottles, thermos jugs, tubes of sun block, and floppy hats, arrived just after dawn, when a layer of fog would sometimes blanket the field; they worked until 2 p.m., when the heat became unbearable. They would then drive back to their headquarters—a Hampton Inn in Clarksdale, about 20 minutes away (“the nearest town large enough to have a Pizza Hut,” noted Johnson), to clean up and relax for a few hours. Then they washed and sorted the pottery sherds and other artifacts they unearthed and wrote field reports.
A thick canopy of oaks and maples on the central mound offered relief from the sun, but it also harbored ticks and chiggers, and mosquitoes from the creek that ran behind the mound were a constant irritation and even
The white blurs in this remote-sensing image are underground anomalies that suggest the remains of a house. A photo of a trench is superimposed over the remote-sensing image. The trench, which was dug several months after the remote-sensing survey, revealed charred beams and the hearth of a structure. The charred beams were preserved under daub from the collapsed walls. The daub is identified above as wall fall.
a danger, given the threat of the West Nile virus. The occasional afternoon thunderstorms brought more humidity and flooded the pits the crews dug.
Johnson explained that the field school had two goals: “We’re certainly trying to learn what went on here, which we believe to be a large, long-occupation Indian site,” he said. But the main goal was to give the students a chance to work with a full range of remote-sensing gear that included a thermal sensor, a ground-penetrating radar system, a gradiometer, and conductivity and resistance meters. The students employed these sophisticated tools to detect a number of possible house sites in the cotton field, extending some 200 yards south of the mounds.
Mapping the large mound proved troublesome. First, the gradiometer detected barbed wire, tin cans, and even pieces of a tractor left over from a turn-of-the-century farmhouse that once stood near the southern slope of the mound. “There’s lots of junk, and that makes our data noisy,” said Haley, explaining that the device is extremely sensitive to buried metal, and the interference tended to obscure the more subtle variations in the soil.
Second, the headstoneless graves on top of the mound—believed to be yellow-fever victims from the epidemics that decimated this area in the late 1800s—posed another problem. Mississippi law requires a permit when dealing with a human burial; sometimes, Johnson explained, a coroner has to come out and examine the remains. “So we ’ll have to determine where the graves are, and work around them,” he said. In short: “We’re not going to be digging on top of the mound this season.”
Out in the Fields After clearing a 40-square-yard area in the rows of cotton, the crew began a detailed survey using the remote-sensing equipment. Some gadgets, it turned out, worked better than others. The area’s clay-rich soils reduced the effectiveness of the ground-penetrating radar, for example.
Once the survey was completed, ground-truthing— the excavation of the site based on the remote-sensing data—began. The students dug three one-yard-square pits and, at a depth of about eight inches, they discovered the remains of a prehistoric structure. They dug up the intervening areas between the three pits, forming a long trench that revealed a large concentration of daub, along with the remains of postholes and a wall trench.
Excavations at other sites reveal that Mississippian Indians built their houses by placing upright timbers into holes dug into the ground. Then they weaved a lattice of cane to form the walls, and smeared mud mixed with grass over the cane until it dried. Sometimes, instead of digging separate holes for each post, they would dig a trench, set the posts in place, and pack dirt around them. The roof was thatched with grass and the floor was bare earth.
“These houses were fire traps,” said Johnson. “When they caught fire, the heat fired the clay just the way you would make a brick, and that’s what we’re finding here.”
After digging further, the crew discovered a layer of burnt timbers and a large, reddish mass of fired clay where the walls of a house had collapsed. The daub still revealed clear imprints from the cane that once surfaced a wall. At
“Low and slow—those are the requirements of any aerial surveys of archaeological sites,” said archaeologist Jay Johnson, the director of the excavation at the Parchman Place Mounds. Airplanes are, of course, an option, but they pose special problems: Most universities don’t have the funds to purchase their own planes, rentals can be prohibitively expensive, airplanes require trained and licensed pilots (another expense), and they need airports—something that’s not always available at remote sites.
An alternative that proved effective at Parchman was a powered parachute, sometimes called a parasail. Suspended from a 550-square-foot nylon parachute and driven—actually, pushed—by a 65-horsepower engine, the two-seat ultralight aircraft is capable of flying as slowly as 12 miles per hour.
“That speed is great for aerial images, and at Parchman, we were flying at about 700 feet, which was also optimum for the thermal imaging and near-infrared cameras we were using,” said Tommy Ike Hailey, an archaeologist at Louisiana’s Northwestern State University who, in recent years, has been experimenting with alternative methods of recording aerial images. “The real beauty of a powered parachute, or PPC, is that it can be flown at any altitude, barring obstructions or airspace restrictions, from three feet to 10,000 feet.” The aircraft normally cruises at about 30 miles per hour, but with a tailwind can hit 50.
In addition to the remote-sensing equipment, this particular PPC was equipped with a global positioning system to help him locate the precise area to be surveyed. Normally, a PPC can take off from a grassy field, but at Parchman all the fields were planted in cotton, so the vehicle took off and landed at the Coahoma County Airport, about five miles away. “Had we been flying over a previously unsurveyed area,” Hailey said, “the GPS would also have been used to document the location of newly discovered sites from the air.” — Michael Finger
The parasail can carry a crew of two, allowing one person to concentrate on recording data while the other pilots the craft.
Bryan Haley conducts a remote-sensing survey of a portion of the village area, hoping to refine the images of the buried house remnants.
the southern end of the pit they also discovered traces of an oval hearth.
“The real pleasant surprise was the intact house floors,” said Connaway, who carefully scribed around the edges of the hearth with a trowel. “Hopefully, they will turn up some unexpected finds in the future, such as plant remains, corn, and so forth, or artifacts sandwiched between the floors and the fallen house walls.”
After photographing the floor of the pit and mapping the location of the postholes, clumps of daub, and hearth, one of the students used a trowel to slice off a chunk of burnt timber that was then wrapped in aluminum foil.
“We’re taking out chunks of charcoal for carbon dating, but they will also be used for wood identification,” said Johnson. “Also, if somebody is working on the dendrochronology—dating by tree rings—of this area, they can use it.”
A few yards away, another pit turned up something of a mystery. The team’s remote-sensing devices detected a small area that might be an ancient trash pit. “Those are a good source for botanical remains, animal remains, and bones,” said Johnson. “Useful things for telling us about the site.”
However, after excavating to a depth of nearly six feet, the crew found no traces of trash; instead, they discovered a darkened streak of soil that could represent a wall trench. “That’s kind of what it looks like,” said Johnson,
“and it may intersect with this one,” pointing to the wall trench in the unit nearby. “Then again, it might also be a tree root that’s just rotted out.”
Another group of students dug a test pit into the sloping side of the mound. After digging less than four inches, they turned up several large pottery sherds, white ash, more chunks of daub, and bones from deer, raccoons, and turtles. A resistivity meter showed evidence of a house up the slope of the mound that was the source of this prehistoric trash. The crew dug a one-by-two-yard trench that revealed one edge of the house floor, a large amount of daub, and some carbonized roof thatching that will be radiocarbon dated.
The Delta Initiative
The Mississippi Delta, stretching from southern Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico, is one of the most archaeologically rich regions of the United States. There are literally dozens of major mound sites like Parchman Place scattered along the bayous and oxbows of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Because of the large concentration of sites in the region, most of them, like Parchman Place, remain relatively unexplored by professional researchers. All too often, the archaeologists who study the region’s past spend much of their time working ahead of bulldozers and earthbuggies to salvage what clues they can before the magnificent mound sites are leveled for agriculture. Each year, dozens of sites are lost in this way.
Though the region is rich in archaeology, the delta continues to be one of the most economically depressed areas of the country. In an effort to help solve the economic problems of the region while preserving its rich archaeological heritage, Congress passed the Delta Initiative in 1994. This effort was led by former Louisiana Senator Bennett Johnston and former National Park Service Director Roger Kennedy. The initiative’s goal is to provide federal funding to identify, study, and preserve the delta’s ancient cultural treasures. These measures will ultimately lead to the creation of a series of state and national park units to protect and interpret the best of the delta’s sites, thus facilitating the development of cultural tourism.
However, eight years later the Delta Initiative remains unfunded. In 2003, preservationists in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas plan a major effort to secure funding to acquire important sites and develop new parks and trails throughout the region. National groups like The Archaeological Conservancy will join this effort to promote archaeology and create new jobs.
What you can do to help: Contact your congressional representatives and tell them to fund the Delta Initiative. —Alan Gruber
The crew begins the task of connecting three test units to form a trench. Early morning fog blankets the cotton growing in the background.
Johnson took a pottery sherd of dark-gray clay peppered with white fragments. “See the broken pieces of shell in there?” he asked. According to Johnson, the presence of mussel shell indicates the pottery was made during the later stages of the village’s existence, when the Mississippians started mixing shell with clay to strengthen the pottery and absorb the heat.
The Mystery ofthe Mississippians Indian mounds have been found all over the Southeast. Since 1997, archaeological crews from Ole Miss have been excavating the Hollywood Mound, 28 miles north of Parchman Place, and The Archaeological Conservancy recently purchased an eight-acre site nearby, known as the Wilsford site. Even so, relatively little is known about the Mississippians who occupied this area from approximately A.D. 1000 until at least the mid-1500s, when Spanish explorers moved throughout the region. When Europeans returned to north Mississippi, more than 150 years later, the large mound centers had been abandoned. The exact timing and the cause of the collapse have yet to be determined.
“That whole question has been the purpose of a lot of archaeology,” said Johnson, “but we’ve really only explored a handful of sites, maybe 10 or 15, in any kind of detail.”
Some of the discoveries at Parchman confirm the model that has been formulated through the study of other sites. That model consists of a village containing a collection of simple dwellings, a large open plaza, and a grouping of high, rectangular mounds that held the chief’s or priest’s house, or a ceremonial structure. Sometimes these houses were separate structures, built on adjoining mounds. In other places, the chief and priest were believed to be the same person.
“But one of the surprises here is that this mound doesn’t look the way we thought it was going to look before we cleared it,” said Johnson. “We thought it would be rectangular, but it’s oval. We also thought it might have one ramp off the front, but instead it has one off the side and maybe another rampart off the other side.
“We also felt coming in that this area would be a plaza, clear of houses, because that is the regular model,” he continued. “But instead we’ve got houses that come right up to the edge of the mound.” This suggests to Johnson that the houses predate the construction of the mound by some time. It’s possible that this was a village site, occupied by a small group of families that eventually numbered into the hundreds, long before it was turned into a ceremonial site by the construction of the mounds.
“Then some of the houses are abandoned, and the site becomes a center for ritual activity,” Johnson said. “What I think we’re going to find here, once we get a [radiocarbon] date on the mound, is that it’s relatively late and built in a relatively short period of time.”
The radiocarbon date notwithstanding, Johnson’s theorywon’t be put to the test until much more work is done at the Parchman Place Mounds. “All these things we hope to answer in the next three or four seasons,” said Johnson. “Archaeology is an adventure. You don’t know what you’re going to get, exactly, until you dig, and then sometimes you have to redesign what you think is going on.”
MICHAEL FINGER is senior editor of Memphis magazine and The Memphis Flyer.
