Prehistoric Pilgrimage

Prehistoric Pilgrimage

A journey down the Louisiana Ancient Mounds Trail

Story by Kristy Christiansen • Photos by Paul Christiansen

et in the car, kids. We’re traveling through prehistoric Louisiana!” I shouted while rounding up our three boys, our dachshund-mix Zion, and my husband Paul. With the latest discovery that LSU’s campus mounds are eleven thousand years old, making them the oldest known man-made structures in the Americas, I’ve started wondering about the other eight hundred mounds scattered across Louisiana. Thankfully, the Louisiana Division of Archaeology has put together the Ancient Mounds Driving Trail, linking together thirty-nine mounds in northeast Louisiana. Built by various prehistoric cultures, the dome-shaped, conical, and platform mounds speak to the appeal this land has held for thousands of years and offer clues about the early people who lived here.

Heading out of New Orleans on a stormy Saturday morning, we set our GPS to Natchez, just across the river from the largest grouping of mounds circling Ferriday, Jonesville, and Sicily Island. We took the direct route north from Baton Rouge, past the hills of St. Francisville into “The Bluff City.”

Emerald Mound and Natchez

Nodding to the fact that Mississippi is the only state that boasts more mounds than Louisiana, we decided to take a detour from our itinerary and stop by Emerald Mound on Natchez’s outskirts. At thirty-fivefeet high and encompassing eight acres, the platform mound is the second largest Mississippian period ceremonial mound in the United States, built and used between 1200 and 1730 C.E. (current era).

Paul Christiansen

To put that in perspective, there are four periods tracking pre-historic archaeology in our region. Paleoindian covers 11500 B.C.E. (before current era) to 8000 B.C.E. LSU’s mounds fall within this time frame, around 9100 B.C.E. The Archaic period then runs from 8000 B.C.E. to 800 B.C.E. Stonehenge was built around 3000 B.C.E., six thousand years after LSU’s mounds. The Woodland period picks up in 800 B.C.E. and brings us to 1200 C.E., and the Mississippian period (1200 C.E. to 1700 C.E.) bridges the gap between the Woodland and Historic periods.

We traveled a short jaunt on the historic Natchez Trace Parkway to get to Emerald Mound. The rain had lifted by the time we scaled the soggy trail up the mound’s back corner. High above the treetops, we explored the wide, flat plateau of the primary mound, envisioning the ancestors of the Natchez Indians holding ceremonies on the rounded secondary mound rising thirty feet out of this one. Archaeologists believe the mound builders were farmers who lived in a nearby village. By the late 1600s, they had moved twelve miles southwest to the Grand Village of the Natchez, a pre-historic village and earthworks site on the outskirts of the city of Natchez, which was our next stop.

Established in 1716, the historic town is Mississippi’s oldest. Grabbing coffees and enormous chocolate chip cookies from Natchez Coffee Company on Franklin Street, we took in the expansive views of the Mississippi River at Natchez Buff Park before driving Silver Street for a glimpse at Natchez Under-theHill—which was once one of the rowdiest ports on the Mississippi.

Louisiana Ancient Mounds Trail

An impressive bridge spanning the river between Natchez and Vidalia set us down in the middle of small-town Louisiana. Beyond Vidalia is Ferriday, birthplace of recently-passed rock-and-roll superstar Jerry Lee Lewis. Heading west on Highway 84, we stopped by the five dome-shaped DePrato Mounds, which date to 600 C.E. Three of them contain human remains, one was mostly removed for highway construction, and the fifth is topped with a modern-day house. Just five minutes down the road, beside Frogmore Plantation stands the fourteen-foot-tall, tree-covered Frogmore Mound, a platform mound built in two stages. Charcoal found underneath this mound dates it to 10201260 C.E.

In Jonesville, we searched for the remnants of the Troyville Earthworks, once a series of nine mounds and a perimeter embankment dating back to 700 C.E. Mound 5 measured eighty-two feet high, the tallest in Louisiana. The mounds trail guide deems the entire complex as once “one of the most impressive mound groups in North America,” until it was destroyed in 1931 to use as fill for a bridge approach. Sadly, what’s left is scattered around the various streets in town.

Paul Christiansen

Nearly nine miles north on LA 124 are McGuffee Mounds. Although a good distance from the road, the six (possible seven) mounds are still clearly visible and highlighted by the trail guide as “one of the most spectacular sites on the Mounds Trail.” They date from 100 B.C.E. to 700 C.E. and include “the longest intact earthen embankment of any site on the Trail.” The largest mound, at thirteen feet tall, is adorned with a house and tree.

The light now fading, we continued north to Delhi and Poverty Point Reservoir State Park, where we would stay the next two nights in a cabin on stilts perched over the 2700-acre, man-made reservoir. With two bedrooms, a full kitchen, and a wraparound porch complete with rocking chairs, the spacious cabin easily housed the five of us and provided a beautiful setting for our home away from home. The lake is a popular destination for locals and visitors alike and features a marina store for easy access to all your bait and tackle needs. On the reservoir’s north end, the State Park system runs the Black Bear championship golf course, part of Louisiana’s Audubon Golf Trail.

Paul Christiansen

At only fifteen miles from Poverty Point World Heritage Site, it’s the prime location for both convenience and comfort.

Although it was dark when we arrived, our neighbors were still out on the deck fishing for bass and crappie. The family travels here from Baton Rouge twice a year to spend a long weekend together relaxing and replenishing their freezer full of fish. They gave our sons fishing tips, then showed us the nearly hundred crappie they had caught over the last several days.

Poverty Point World Heritage Site

Sunday dawned with a light rain and a fog-shrouded lake. Drinking our morning coffee on the back deck, we watched a flock of American Coots, small black birds with white beaks, lazily swim around our cabin while a focused white egret hunted on the shore’s edge. Waiting for the weather to clear up and giving our oldest time to fish, we walked the State Park’s trail to the Marsden Mounds. Five tree-covered mounds hid beneath a jungle of trees with an open field filling the space between them. The mounds led back up to Bayou Maçon, a popular waterway for early inhabitants.

Tracking Bayou Maçon north, we finally reached our main destination for the trip—Poverty Point National Historic Landmark and UNESCO World Heritage Site near Epps, Louisiana. In the Visitor’s Center, we watched the short film explaining how hunters and gatherers built Poverty Point around 1500 B.C.E. The complex includes six semi-circular ridges, a plaza, and six mounds, the largest being seventy-two feet tall and seven hundred feet long at its base. For more than two thousand years, it stood out as the largest earthen monument site in the Western hemisphere. Not only was all of this built by hand, one bucket of dirt at a time, but some archaeologists believe the giant Mound A was constructed in ninety days—an unthinkable feat for a pre-agricultural society.

Paul Christiansen

Park Manager Mark Brink explained, though, that this theory was subject to questioning. There is so much we don’t know about the people who lived at Poverty Point. “This is three thousand years before any historic record,” he pointed out. Extensive research, though, has revealed some clues to these ancient societies. “We know they used the mounds as a temple or a place of worship. They had a sophisticated religion. They held social gatherings in the plaza, and we think they lived on the ridges. They could have held as few as a hundred people to as many as a thousand.”

Brink showed us a sampling of the millions of artifacts found at the site. The museum displays projectile points, knives, plummets (fishing net weights), and small cooking balls known as PPOs, or Poverty Point Objects. Materials used to make these objects often came from far away, demonstrating an extensive trade network.

This community mysteriously abandoned Poverty Point around 1100 B.C.E. “A cold and wet spell may have shifted things so they couldn’t live here year-round, and they all slowly moved away to other places,” Brink said.

Brink encouraged us to get the full effect of the area by walking the 2.6-mile trail, which winds its way from Bayou Macon, across the ridges, and high up the stairs to the peak of Mound A. It might have been the same path people thirty-five hundred years ago followed to bring fish home from the bayou before traveling to Mound A for a special religious ritual. The final stretch of the trail brought us through a wooded area lined with Pawpaw trees, which produce the largest edible fruit native to North America.

Tensas National Wildlife Refuge and Balmoral Mounds

After another peaceful night gently swaying in our cabin over Poverty Point Reservoir, we loaded everything back into the car and headed home via the Tensas National Wildlife Refuge. A short boardwalk trail behind the Visitor’s Center led us through a small cypress swamp, and another trail brought us to the quiet water’s edge of Rainey Lake. Deer greeted us on the nearly deserted backroads, and a flock of turkeys scurried across the lane in front of our car.

Paul Christiansen

From there, we continued south past Balmoral Mounds, an impressive three mound complex straddling the road. An enormous flock of starlings scattered in formation as we left behind the cotton fields of north Louisiana, and a black bear even appeared to wish us farewell on our journey home. In such a beautiful pastoral setting with an abundance of natural resources, it’s not hard to imagine why pre-historic people would have chosen this land as their home.

Plan your own prehistoric pilgrimage through Louisiana by downloading the Indian Mounds of Northeast Louisiana Guide at crt.state.la.us/dataprojects/archaeology/ moundsguide/using_guide.html.

Learn about the Poverty Point World Heritage Site at povertypoint.us and book a cabin at lastateparks.com/parks-preserves/ poverty-point-reservoir-state-park.