Meeting Link: Click Here!

Meeting Time: November 14 @ 7pm (Central)

The Red River Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society will be having a virtual meeting this month. They are welcoming Dr. Julie Morrow (ARAS-ASU) to give a talk about the Greenbrier site. This presentation describes ongoing research of the privately owned late Mississippian town at the Greenbrier site. During the 2000 field season the Society and Survey excavated part of a burned square domestic structure (House 1) measuring about 3 m east-west x 3 m north-south. Identification and analyses of more than 9,000 ceramic sherds, predominantly from House 1 supports the idea that the pottery at Greenbrier is related to Late Mississippi period sites in the eastern Lowlands, closer to the Mississippi River. Preliminary insights from artifact analyses suggest that the residents of Greenbrier made pottery from local clay sources. A large-scale gradiometer survey of approximately 30 percent of the surface artifact distribution indicates a double walled enclosure or palisade that was expanded at least once. Images from the gradiometer survey show over 90 prehistoric structures, a central plaza, and two separate fortification alignments. Domestic structures range between

About Dr. Morrow

4 x 4 and 8 x 8 meters on a side and are sometimes rebuilt near to the same location. Spatial patterning of gradiometer anomalies indicates expansion of the enclosure and rebuilding episodes of square structures inside and outside of the enclosures. Recent work includes excavation of Unit 23 in the center of the house to find the center posts.

Dr. Juliet E. Morrow (Ph.D. Washington University in 1996) worked for the US Army COE, Louis Berger and Associates, and The University of Iowa before arriving at the Survey in 1997 when she became the Station Archeologist for the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s ASU-Jonesboro Research Station. She specializes in the archaeology of the Peopling of the Americas, the Clovis culture, and descendant cultures. At Arkansas State University-Jonesboro she teaches anthropology and archeology courses and manages over 4,000 cubic feet of collections, archives, and equipment. She, her assistant Sarah Stuckey, and her students discover and investigate sites of all time periods and cultures, map cemeteries, and conduct excavations to preserve artifacts, feature contents, and data. For 26 years she has worked to assist the city of Jonesboro in their parks and cemeteries, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, the Quapaw Nation, NRCS, Ducks Unlimited and many other private and govt agencies to preserve archaeological information. The stations’ current field projects include site recording along a proposed roadway near Pocahontas, AR and excavations to recover features and artifacts to reconstruct a burned late Mississippi period house at Greenbrier.

Hello, friends. We have had a major development with the plans for the upcoming Arkansas Archeological Society Training Program. Due to a recent land sale, we no longer have permission to be at the Lockesburg Mounds site, which was to be the site of our field portion.

With the support of community members and the Society, we have worked out an alternative focus for our fieldwork. We will, instead, be excavating at the Holman Springs site. This is a major Caddo saltworks on the Rolling Fork River. The Training Program was at this site in 1985 and 1986, and this is our chance to clear up a few things from those projects and finish a project that the Survey and Society have had on their ledgers for almost forty years.

The laboratory portion will remain focused on finishing the analysis of collections from the 1980s digs at Holman Springs and the 1960s from the Bayou Sel site, another saltworks over in Clark County. Camping will remain at DeQueen Lake and the lab will be at UA-Cossatot.

The Central Arkansas Chapter of the Society invited Dr. Drexler to give their next talk on Thursday, May 12. It will be online, and the link should be available from their Facebook page. If you are planning on attending the Training Program or want to learn more about the Holman Springs site, please make space in your calendar to listen in.

This is a heck of a pivot to make at the last minute, but we can do it, together!

It’s March, and we here in the world of Arkansas archeology are deep into Archeology Month. It’s *also* Women’s History Month in the United States, and we’ve got a nice little confluence of these things for you today.

We know that one of the first archeologists to work and publish in southwest Arkansas archeology was Clarence B. Moore, who ascended the Red River in 1911 and published his results, in stunning detail, the following year (Moore 1912). Usually, histories of archeology here jump straight from Moore to the work of M.R. Harrington, who published his work almost a decade later (Harrington 1920).

In our ongoing research on Haley Place (3MI1), in Miller County, we happened upon a short article that was published between Moore and Harrington that we do not talk about much. In 1913, Harper’s Monthly Magazine published “The People of the Flints,” which stemmed from Moore’s fieldwork. It introduced Haley Place and the Foster and Gahagan sites to Harper’s readers, and being a nationally-circulated magazine, it is likely that this article reached more people than did from Moore’s books.

The author of “The People of the Flints” was H. Newell Wardle, from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Like many of the period, H. Newell Wardle used a first initial and then a middle name to mask their gender, as the “H” stood for “Harriet.” This was common practice in a time when most scientific fields were dominated by men, and women were not taken seriously as scholars.

So, H. Newell Wardle published one of the first pieces of archeological scholarship on the Caddo region. That’s neat. Also neat is that she was a product of another woman’s contribution to the history of science. Clara Jessup Moore, mother to Clarence B. Moore oversaw the Jessup Fund, a scholarship for young male scholars to work at the Academy and gain museum experience. Clara Moore augmented the fund in 1892 so that it would also fund female scholars. Harriet Newell Wardle was one of the Jessup Scholars. Her education founded her career, which included positions with several prominent Philadelphia museums.

There are certainly parts of the article that the following century’s worth of archeological research doesn’t support. That’s fine. The point is, we should recognize Wardle’s contributions to Arkansas archeology and also remember Clara Moore’s efforts.

References

Harrington, M.R.
1920 Certain Caddo Sites in Arkansas. Museum of the American Indian, New York.

Moore, Clarence B.
1912 Some Aboriginal Sites on Red River. P.C. Stockhauesen, Philadelphia.

Wardle, H. Newell
1913 The People of the Flints. Harper’s Monthly Magazine. January, pp. 291-301.

Daniel T. Witter was one of Arkansas’s early legislators, serving in Little Rock during the Territorial period (pre-1836). He had a house in Washington as early as the 1820s, and remained there until 1859. The house remained until around the time of World War II before being torn down (photo shows it in 1938). Though a different house was built there in the 1980s, we want to know if some portions of the earlier structure remain to be seen on the property.

This past week, the SAU Station staff completed a small geophysical survey on the site which, combined with historic maps and photographs. We found a small geophysical anomaly that does not match up with the footprint of the 1980s house, but seems to match up with what we know of the Witter House. We want to find out whether this is the remaining portion of a very early part of Washington’s history.

So, we will be out at Historic Washington State Park on March 25-27 to do a small dig to see if we can wind anything that remains of the house. Any member of the Arkansas Archeological Society is welcome to come out and dig with us. If you are not a member, come out and watch, ask questions, and learn about Arkansas archeology. We will be having a training program this summer to teach people how to dig, so you can join and take park in future digs!

Please contact Dr. Drexler (cdrexler@uark.edu) if you want to come and join in or have questions about the project.

Or, rather, the Ouachita River lowers enough to expose part of the S.S. Homer…

The leak in the Thatcher Lock and Dam, in Union County, has dropped the Ouachita (pronounced almost like “Washita” to those abroad) a lot, meaning a lot of things that are usually masked by higher water are now visible. One of these things is a part of the S.S. Homer, a Civil War-era steamboat that supported both the Confederate and United States Navy before sinking in the river at Camden in 1864.

The Homer

The Homer, like so many naval vessels used during the war, was not built as a warship. It came out of the shipyards in Parkersburg, (West) Virginia, in 1859 and carried freight and people on the Mississippi, Red, and Ouachita rivers until the start of the war. Friend-of-the-station Mark Christ’s (2021) article about the ship on the Encyclopedia of Arkansas online tells us that the Homer “was placed under contract to the Confederate government, transporting men and supplies.” I threw this quote in because there’s a difference between a ship being under contract to the Confederate government and being a Confederate naval vessel. There has been some discussion on the Facebook posts about the appearance of the wreck today including comments about it being a Confederate naval vessel, which it may not have been.

The U.S. Army (elements from the 1st Iowa and 3rd Missouri cavalry regiments) captured the vessel on or around April 15 at a place 30 miles below Camden, and were grateful for the 4,000-5,000 bushels of corn that it contained. The ship was apparently sunk in the river around when the Army abandoned Camden on the night of April 26 (Christ 2021).

What Can You See Today?

If you go to Sandy Beach park on the east side of Camden, you can see a large pile of bricks that is believed to be part of the remains of the ship. This would be the “flame bed” a platform of bricks that would be placed under the boilers to keep the heat and sparks from the wooden hull of the ship (Stewart-Abernathy 2008). I think it’s cool, but be aware that it literally just looks like a big pile of bricks…

Also, get on the Ouachita County Historical Society’s Facebook page and check out Dustin Hall’s excellent drone shots of the wreck!

Archeology on the Homer

My office, the Arkansas Archeological Survey, keeps tabs on archeological sites of all kinds from around the state, and keeps up with work other archeologists have done on those sites. In 1992, Charles Pearson, an archeologist with Coastal Environments, an archeological firm from Louisiana, dove on the site, following on from some earlier work in the 1980s. The site was mapped and some field notes were taken. The archeologists determined that a significant portion of the hull is there and still buried, and that it was an important part of American history that should be preserved. In recognition of that, the wreck site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

Enjoying the Homer in 2021

Though it’s strange to see the river low enough to make the Homer’s flame bed visible, it is not a bad thing to want to go out and look at the remains while you cans see them. Camden has a lot of great Civil War-related things around town, and this just adds to the landscape. So, by all means, go out and take a look. Take pictures! Use them to tell the history of the boat, the times, and your experience connecting with the past. That’s all great!

But bear a few things in mind. First, under a 2013 law passed by the state of Arkansas, all islands, submerged lands, and the property on them, including this wreck, are owned by the Arkansas Commissioner of State Lands. You cannot legally collect any item from the wreck site. I want you to know this so that you’re not placed in legal jeopardy by your historical interest. Seriously, don’t go collecting!

Second, I’ve seen some comments on Facebook suggesting that going out and collecting some of the bricks would be a way of preserving the past before the river comes back up and we lose sight of it again. I very much understand that motivation, but I want you to consider some things (besides the illegality of doing so… see above). Any archeologist will readily whip out the old maxim that “context matters,” meaning it’s not just the thing that you find, but its location, its connection to other things in the same site, etc., that are really, really important. You take a brick out of the flame bed, then you have a brick, which is cool, but you have less of the Homer’s flame bed in the wreck site, itself. That’s no small thing, as a systematic study of the entire wreck is better when it’s as intact as possible, and we ultimately get more knowledge and understanding of a site (ANY site) when it has been better preserved. So, please, if you go take a look, don’t take it home with you.

– Carl G. Drexler, station archeologist

Edits: The original post claimed that the river was down due to drought conditions here in southwest Arkansas. Thank you to Sherrel Johnson, of El Dorado, for correcting the source of the low water levels.

References

Christ, Mark (2021). Homer. Encyclopedia of Arkansas Online (https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/homer-steamboat-7755/), accessed 12/13/2021

Stewart-Abernathy, Leslie (2008). Ghost Boats at West Memphis. Arkansas Historical Quarterly 67(4):398-413.

Our staff members were out collecting gradiometer data at the Haley site (3MI1) earlier this week. The gradiometer is a very useful instrument that can, under certain circumstances, identify buried archeological features without digging them. We are processing the data, but a friend-of-the-station asked on Facebook for more of the backstory on the place. So, here we go!

The site lies in Miller County, near an old channel of the Red River. It consists of two known mounds (Mound A and Mound B), one of which, Mound A (see picture), is built into the levee. Mound A used to be much taller, but was knocked down in recent decades.

While we know *of* the site, we don’t know a ton about it. We know of it because it was one that Clarence B. Moore and his crew dug at in the 1910s. The pots recovered were lavishly illustrated in his 1912 Some Aboriginal Sites on Red River. Those illustrations became the basis for two pottery types widely used by archeologists to study Caddo pottery, both of which are named for the site. These are Haley Engraved and (see picture) Haley Complicated-Incised (Suhm and Jelks 1963:59-62).

Since Moore’s digging, there has not been, frankly, substantial digging at the site, but not a lot of archeology. There was a major excavation there in the 1960s, but this was geared towards collecting pots, and this was never written up, so we don’t know what was found, where it was found, and what more we can learn about Caddo and Arkansas history from it.

Our trip out was the first effort in both better understanding the site by getting a glimpse of the off-mound buried aspects of it, and a chance to document the past century’s history of digging there, to know how extensively it was disturbed and try to salvage some information in the wake of these activities. We are taking a similar tack with the Lockesburg Mounds site, which will be the location of next year’s Arkansas Archeological Society Training Program. You can join the Society and aid in learning about, preserving, and protecting Arkansas’s and Caddo heritage by clicking here!

What are you doing next June 4-18? Because, if you’re interested in learning to do archeology correctly, I have an opportunity for you.

The Arkansas Archeological Society will be hosting its 2022 Annual Training Program, the first since 2019, in Sevier County. Keep checking back here and follow the Arkansas Archeological Society and Arkansas Archeological Survey for more information as it comes out.

The Pandemic challenges us in more ways than any of us want. In the very focused world of Arkansas archeology, it limits our changes to gather for lecture and conferences and nixes our volunteer excavations. As conditions improve, we look eagerly to returning to these missed opportunities. The Arkansas Archeological Society offers two major events, the annual conference and the Training Program, that are on the calendar for the fall. The conference is September 24-26, in Conway, and the Training Program is to be October 30-November 5, in DeQueen.

Well… the Training Program was going to be October 30-November 5.

The very short version of this is that the 2021 Training Program is cancelled. The Society’s Executive Committee made that decision this past weekend.

It is important that you understand why this decision was made. It is a matter of timing and logistics. The conference is almost invariably at the end of September, while the Training Program is normally in June, which gives the Society’s administrators about three months to pull together the final conference details while also recuperating from the MASSIVE amount of work that it takes to put on a Training Program (arguably the harder of the two events).

This year, we were trying to do a shorter Training Program and one of the few windows of time that afforded is the one mentioned above. This would be threading the needle between 1) the Southeastern Archeological Conference, which many of the Survey staff attend, and 2) the start of Modern Gun hunting season here in Arkansas. This would put little more than a month between the conference and the Training Program, and it was determined that, with the way that the year has developed, that it was no longer feasible to pull together the Training Program for November. So, they decided to cancel.

Of course, I am disappointed to miss out on the chance to be in the field with so many friends and colleagues, but I understand why the decision was made and support it. I expect that the plan will be to return to a normal June program in 2022, but I do not know where that will be.

As we close the book on 2021, I’d like to thank the Society’s Executive Committee for their work and honesty about what it was practical to achieve, and particularly thank Marilyn Knapp, the Society/Survey liaison, for her efforts in trying to get the Training Program to work. I’d also like to thank the Caddo Nation in Oklahoma for their partnership in developing the project, and UA-Cossatot, in DeQueen, for their support. Many within the Survey contributed a lot of time and effort into making this work, and you also have my thanks.

I look forward to seeing everyone at the conference in September and in the field again in 2022!

Sincerely,

Carl Drexler

Station Archeologist and [former] Dig Director of the 2021 Arkansas Archeological Society Training Program