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N E W P O I N T- 2
In Pursuit of the First Moundbuilders a cq u i s i t i o n
The Conservancy preserves Louisiana’s Caney Mounds site.
ow old are the first Indian mounds constructed in America? For years, most archaeologists agreed that the Late Archaic period Poverty Point culture in Louisiana (c. 1800–500 B.C.) constructed the earliest major earthworks in North America. Archaeologists thought that the older cultures lacked the social complexity, technology, and sedentary lifestyle required to construct monumental earthworks. However, recent research on sites in Louisiana such as Banana Bayou, Hedgepeth Mounds, Frenchman’s Bend, and Watson Brake by archaeologists like Joe Saunders and others changed the old notions by the mid-1990s. Numerous radiocarbon dates from these sites, combined with diagnostic artifacts and soil dating processes like pedogenesis, showed that mound construction began at least 2,000 years earlier than was previously thought, thus placing the earliest mounds into the pre-ceramic Middle Archaic Period. (c. 3500–3000 B.C.) Archaeologists have now begun to re-examine a number of sites around the Southeast to determine if mound construction at those sites also began in the Middle Archaic period. Their work has led to some remarkable new discoveries. Among the most significant of these discoveries is Saunders’ recent work at the Caney Mounds in Louisiana. The Caney Mounds site is a 78acre, six-mound complex located in eastern Louisiana that was first recorded by James Ford of Harvard University in 1933. Ford was followed 48
ALAN GRUBER
H
Radiocarbon dating indicates that the Caney Mounds are more than 5,000 years old. They are among the earliest major earthworks in North America.
by a variety of professional and avocational archaeologists who performed a number of surface collections over several decades indicating that every major period of human occupation in Louisiana, from PaleoIndian through historic period, were represented at the site. In 1970, noted Louisiana archaeologists Clarence Webb and Jon Gibson mapped Caney and excavated portions of the site. Along with producing the first map of the site, they uncovered significant occupations from the Poverty Point and Marksville (a local derivative of Hopewellian Culture, c. 200 B.C.– A.D. 400) phases. Based on their findings, Gibson and Webb reasonably concluded that the mounds at Caney must be
Poverty Point period in origin. In fact, the site was the largest Poverty Point culture site and the largest mound complex in the region. For these reasons alone, Caney was considered highly significant. As early as the 1970s, Webb and Gibson called for the site’s preservation and urged the landowner to refrain from farming the site. The owners agreed, and the site remained intact until 1998, when new owners permitted an irrigation pivot to be erected on the site and cultivation to creep onto the lower portions of the mounds. In 2000, after completing his groundbreaking work at Watson Brake, Saunders turned his attention to other mound groups in Louisiana that he thought could contain Midspring • 2005
