Culture
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ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS OF LOUISIANA
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REVOLUTIONARY WAR
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THE
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Unearthing Prehistory, One Shard at a Time FRANK MCMAINS IS DIGGING INTO LOUISIANA’S PAST By Tom Guarisco
On several artifact-finding expeditions carried out over the course of just a few months this year, Frank McMains has amassed a collection of about four hundred carved pottery shards and more than three dozen points and blades. All images courtesy of McMains.
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t’s a warm spring day, and Frank McMains is stepping carefully through a muddy field in rural northeast Louisiana. He’s driven a little over two hhours north from his Baton Rouge home to get here. The Native Americans who once populated this area left no written or recorded history, but they did leave clues. And McMains aims to find them. The ancient past may be murky, but this stretch of Tensas Parish is familiar to the photographer and writer. He’s been coming here since he was a boy, staying at his family’s home on nearby Lake Bruin—an oxbow lake scoured and then abandoned by the ever-shifting Mississippi River. On this day, though, fields of young corn, cotton, and soybeans stretch out in all directions around McMains. The ground seems flat, but a closer look reveals subtle ridges and dips that undulate through the land like gentle waves. It’s this topography that has captured McMains’ attention, and it’s the reason he’s here hunting for
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artifacts left by the villagers who lived where he is standing twelve hundred to two thousand years ago. He steps carefully between the rows, head down, eyes scanning the ground to and fro for man-made shapes. Focused in this way, he sometimes loses track of time, and the search can go on for hours. “There,” McMains says, pointing to the ground. Laying snugly on the damp soil is an angular clay shard no bigger than a quarter, its dirt-filled carved lines clearly contrasting its light clay surface. It has been tilled by the farmer’s plow, and rinsed by the spring rains. Carved clay shards such as this one are remnants of clay containers once used to carry or store food and water, or to cook with. Each shard seems unremarkable, random pieces of a jigsaw puzzle never to be completed. Examining artifacts from ancient village sites like this one in relation to ancient earthen mounds, it’s possible to learn more about how people once lived. With the benefit of fresh elevation data and satellite imagery, an
extraordinary story emerges about the sprawling cultures that thrived here for thousands of years, and the vital skills and knowledge they gained. “What’s most compelling is when you're out on the village sites, and you see all that material, you just realize how many people were here and for how long,” he said. At one point, thousands of people are believed to have lived in the area around Poverty Point, McMains said. “When you’re standing in an empty agricultural field in the least populous parish in the state,” McMains said, “the contrast is inescapable.” Any study of ancient culture in Louisiana begins with earthen mounds. If you grew up in Louisiana you probably learned about—and may have even made a field trip to—Poverty Point, that ancient complex of earthen mounds and ridges in North Louisiana. At 3,500 years old, the Poverty Point complex was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014 for its
