Blog Posts & News | Arkansas Archeological Survey

Remote Archeology of Magnolia’s Drive-In Movies

The COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot of our lives outside of the house. Take-out food, home delivery, and drive-in service became normal, while anything done in groups basically stopped. Here, in Magnolia, Arkansas, restaurants closed to diners and even churches went to drive-in or parking lot services. We do not have a movie theater in town (the Cameo closed 2012), but theaters around the country have been very hard-hit. One kind of business that has had a resurgence is drive-in movie theaters, which have become popular again, as people can watch new movies outside of the house while being physically distant.

Magnolia used to have TWO drive-ins. Let’s look at them using some remote sensing tools!

First, let’s look at the Joy Drive-In and Rocket Drive-In, two theaters in the same place. The Joy operated from 1949-1951, then was demolished and rebuilt as the Rocket. The Rocket was around from 1955 until the 1970s. It lies on the south side of town, near where South Jackson street and Renfroe street come together. Our remote sensing tool of choice here is simply Google Earth. If you pull up that area and roll the imagery date back to 2006, you see… this:

Let’s highlight what we’re interested in, using Adobe Illustrator:

The blue highlighted area shows the old berms that people would park their cars on. They point towards the screen, which stood at the northwest end of the site. It looks like there were maybe 10 berms there, allowing people to point their cars up at the screen for ease of viewing. The Cinema Treasures page for the Rocket has some photographs of it in operation. Check it out!

The other theater is a little harder to pick out…

Known as the Sunset Drive-In, it did not last as long as the Rocket. Cinema Treasures says it opened in 1951, but was gone by the mid-1960s. It was on North Vine street, near Highway 82. This is what the area looks like today:

Don’t see it? It’s right there!

Don’t worry, it took some sleuthing to nail down the location, then roll back to get this image. Going from the Cinema Treasures location for it, I got on the U.S. Geological Survey website and downloaded LiDAR data for the area. LiDAR is laser-based data that allows for you to get a very high-resolution and very precise map of the ground surface. It even allows you to strip off some of the tree cover digitally. This site, however, presented some challenge, as the forest cover is SO THICK. So, with the data processed at 0.5m resolution (roughly 18″), we get this:

This isn’t terribly clear yet, but let’s talk about what you see. You can see the alignment of North Vine Street on the left-hand side of the image, plus some buildings and that clear-cut area. The stippling in a mix of green and yellow are the trunks of trees in that pine forest. It’s a little too thick to totally remove them without some time-consuming extra work, but it is enough to let us pick out the site. We just have to look for patterns (archeologists love patterns).

We can see from the patterning in the tree trunks that the berms are still there, still visible to the laser’s eye!

So, while Magnolia does memorialize the theaters that once stood up and around the Square, theaters like the Joy, Ritz, and Cameo, we should remember that there were these other two, as well. Modern technology lets us pick them out pretty readily!

Carl Drexler, station archeologist

Methodology Matters in Battlefield Archeology

One of the things we did out at Pea Ridge National Military Park during last summer’s Arkansas Archeological Society Training Program was a systematic metal detector workshop. We took the first couple of days to test the differences in efficacy between three different approaches to surveying battlefields.

The first of these was what we could call a “relic hunter” approach, with little structure, just a lot of groups of metal detector operators working within a defined area, focusing on it until they were satisfied, as a group, that the area had been covered. We flagged all of their hits, but did not dig them.

Afterwards, we laid out corridors, as we commonly do in archeological projects, and swept back through the same area, again locating but not digging hits.

Finally, we did what we call the 2-2-90 method, where we lay out 20m grids and put two different metal detectors of two different types in each, working at 90 degrees to one another. This time, we both plotted and dug the hits.

There have been very few studies to quantify the differences in these techniques, and this is far from an extensive one, but we did get an interesting result:

Technique	Hits
Relic Hunter	92
Corridors	83
2-2-90	135

While I was a little surprised to see that the corridor method came in last, I would state that more time was given to the relic hunting approach, which may account for some difference. Clearly, though, the 2-2-90 method produced the best results.

A tip of the hat to Arkansas Archeological Society member Steve Jacober for asking for these numbers and spurring this ever-so-brief write-up.

Carl G. Drexler
Station Archeologist

Prairie D’Ane: The Very Short Report

ARAS staff and volunteers metal-detecting Prairie D’Ane Battlefield

We spent much of this month in the field. When I say “field,” I mean literal fields on the rolling plains of Prairie D’Ane, a centuries-old blackland prairie just north of Prescott, Arkansas. It is a beautiful place, with sweeping vistas and a great blue dome of sky. It was also a place where, in 1864, thousands of people came together to do battle. Prairie D’Ane was one of the battles of the Camden Expedition of 1864, which was the U.S. Army’s attempt to cross southwest Arkansas and invade Texas.

Several decades ago, Mark Christ, of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, started working to preserve a portion of the battlefield. In recent years, Mark and dozens of volunteers from Prescott, Little Rock, and farther afield sought to raise funds to acquire an 800 acre tract. With help from AHPP, the Civil War Trust, and many, many others, they were successful, and the purchase went through earlier this year.

With the land acquired, AHPP asked the Arkansas Archeological Survey to figure out where the footprint of the battle was within that tract and to see what of the battle we could recover. Accordingly, we spent three weeks this month conducting systematic metal detector sweeps across a large portion of those 800 acres. This is what we learned:

Our volunteers are fantastic! We had 26 different people from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana chip in 460 hours of volunteer labor. Our greatest thanks to all of those who came out and helped!
This was, in many ways, a much harder project than some others. The land to be covered was almost twice as large as Elkins’ Ferry, which we did in 2016. It is much less-well documented than Pea Ridge. The land has not been protected from relic hunters until recently, so it has been picked over a lot in the past fifty years. Still…
We found a good collection of war-related artifacts. There were bullets for infantry and cavalry weapons. We recovered three cannonball fragments, all for 12-pounders. Our work at Elkins’ Ferry (which took place a few days before Prairie D’Ane) recovered only 6-pounder artillery ammunition, so we can tell we had different units playing a role here.
I think we found a cannon position, probably a federal one. Just downslope from one of the ridge crests, we started finding some long strips of tin-backed lead. I’ve seen dozens of these at Pea Ridge, and they are fragments of sabots for a kind of cannon known as a James rifle. Interestingly, right in that same area lay one of our cannonball fragments. Maybe that was some counter-battery fire.
The battle may have been farther west than some thought. A lot of historical sources use Arkansas 19, which crosses I-30 at exit 46, as the wartime Military Road. If that’s true, then there should have been artifacts right up to the road. They weren’t. When we did start finding them, we also happened upon an old, deeply-incised road bed. I think that is the Military Road of the time.

We’re shifting gears right now, as the University of Arkansas Field School and Arkansas Archeological Society Training Program are upon us, so we’re going to be at Pea Ridge for the next month. That’s going to be another battlefield project, in many ways, but on a different scale with different goals. We’ll keep you posted!

Carl Drexler
Station Archeologist

GPR in Cemeteries: It’s almost never this clear

The Arkansas Archeological Survey does a very small amount of geophysical survey in cemeteries. This is usually when the site is under threat or certain conditions are met (see our “Guidelines for Cemetery Preservation Support” on our Cemetery Preservation page for more information). Such survey can (but do not always) identify unmarked graves below the surface.

Under the best conditions, we get something like… this!

Double-internment shown in GPR transect slice.

This is a slice of data from a ground-penetrating radar. Imagine that the top of the slice is the ground surface, and the instrument ran along it, collecting data below, moving left to right. The slice shows the things underneath the ground as if you were standing underground looking right at them. In this case, the hard black-white parabolas in the center of the plot are two intact caskets situated right next to each other. Because of the way the radar waves travel, the tops of the caskets are at the tops of the parabolas, and the banded areas underneath do not mean that the caskets are that tall, but that they are blocking the signal.

That’s what they look like ideally. Often, it’s a lot harder to pick them out, so we look for patterns in the data that suggest graves are present. This means consistent lines of data blips, generally oriented east-west (for Christian graves).

The data shown here are from the Ebenezer Cemetery, in Nevada County. It’s a project that we collected the data on in 2015, but for a host of reasons, are just getting processed now.

The Arkansas Archeological Survey at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference

The Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA, or “The SHAs”) meets next month down in New Orleans. This is the biggest historical archaeology conference in the world, and the Arkansas Archeological Survey (ARAS) will play a big role in it!

Survey Archeologists at the SHAs

Dr. Jodi Barnes (ARAS-UA Monticello station archeologist) will host a session on foodways, with contributors from around the world. Her sessions’s abstract is:

Food is not only nutrition. It is culture and history. Much of the foods people eat on a regular basis are the direct result of long complex historical processes. Archaeology not only provides insight into what people ate or how they prepared it, it also offers a lens into cross-cultural interactions and the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and other axis of difference. Participants in this symposium explore the interactions between people across time and place to uncover the history in our food and discuss the ways they use the archaeology of foodways as a tool for public engagement and social justice.

She is also second author on a paper with Kim Christensen (University of California Berkeley) on the effects of feminist critiques on public archaeology.

Our Fayetteville station archeologist, Dr. Jamie Brandon, and University of Arkansas graduate student Victoria Jones put together a poster. It is a presentation on last summer’s archeological field school at Leetown, in Benton County. Another graduate student, Breanna Wilbanks, will present on medicinal artifacts from the former Sisters of Mercy convent, in Fort Smith.

Finally, our own Dr. Carl Drexler will co-chair a session with Dr. Michelle Sivilich (Gulf Archaeological Research Institute) on the state and future of conflict archaeology. His contribution in the session is a paper on the research we have been doing on the Camden Expedition. He is also running the pre-conference workshops for the organization.

Once these papers are over, our staff will still be busy, because all are part of the SHAs committees!

Other Arkansas Research

The Survey archeologists are not the only Arkansans who will be there. Friend of the Survey and proud Arkansan C. Andrew Buchner (Panamerican Consultants – Memphis) will also be at the SHAs, and will present on work at Jacksonport State Park. He is particularly interested in the 19th century clay pipes found there. Looking forward to hearing about it, Drew!

A New Chapter for the Chapter

Fifteen avocational archeologists met on the campus of Southern Arkansas University in November of 1970 and formed the Kadohadacho Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society. It is still with us and holds meetings and lectures on the 2nd Tuesday of every month during the school year. The name chosen for the chapter comes from the branch of the Caddo people that once lived in southwest Arkansas and reflected the focus of avocational archeology in the area at the time. Namely, people were very interested in prehistoric sites, which the associated with the Caddo people, now of Binger, Oklahoma.

The state-level organization of the Society came to us a few months back, asking us to spend some time formalizing some structural matters, so we called a meeting of Chapter members. This took place last Saturday. We worked on bylaws, discussed membership criteria, and dealt with some minor issues (such as dues… which we are not having). Since we were in a business mode, we discussed the name of the chapter, and decided to change it. There were several reasons for this. First, “Kadohadacho” is a tongue-twister, and you cannot really mention it to newcomers without getting into the whole story. Second, there are 12,000 years of human habitation in southwest Arkansas, and the name “Kadohadacho” has a very small window of time in which it would be considered appropriate. Both before 800 AD or thereabouts and after about 1835, the name just doesn’t apply. Finally, there are matters of appropriation involved.

Why a Change?

Why change it? What was wrong with “Kadohadacho”?

1: Time Range

First, “Kadohadacho” is only really appropriate, to the best of our knowledge, for a certain period of time. We know it was used at the time of American arrival, so it would be appropriate for sites extending up until the early 1800s. Yet, we think the Caddo came together as a people around 800AD, so this label would be valid for at best one millennium, from 800-1800AD. Before that, probably not, and after that, the Kadohadacho had been forced out of the area. A different name would not imply the same focus, and embrace the 12,000 years of human history we have here in southwest Arkansas.

2: Tongue-Twisting

I can rattle off “Kadohadacho” quite easily because I write about archeology in southwest Arkansas professionally, and it comes up a lot. It’s a lot less clear for most, and explaining it to newcomers is never easy. There are other labels that are more intuitive and that immediately call up clear regional affiliations, and we might change to one of those.

3: Appropriation

There is a long history of non-Natives using Native names without consulting them, and changing away from “Kadohadacho” would lower that number. It’s a good thing.

All Hail the Red River Chapter!

So, we voted to change the name, and chose “Red River Chapter.” Names like “Great Bend Chapter” and Southwest Chapter” were also on the table. It’s the same chapter, but with a new name. So, keep an eye out for more Red River Chapter material in future!

Carl Drexler
Secretary/Treasurer, Red River Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society
Magnolia, AR

The following is an overview of Chapter Speakers for this school year. More information and event reminders will be sent via our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/arassau/ every month. We look forward to seeing you in Magnolia!

Fall Semester

September 12, 2017:

Magnolia Room, Reynolds Center, SAU Campus
Jamie Brandon
Bluff Shelters of the Arkansas Ozarks: One of the most interesting aspects of archeology in the Arkansas Ozarks is the many dry bluff shelters and caves that have been intermittently occupied for 10,000 years. The dry conditions created in these caves and shelters provide a rare glimpse of the kinds of artifacts that usually rot in the wet climate of the Southeastern United States. This talk will outline the history of archeology in the region, examine the “bluff dweller” concept and its implications and summarize current research on bluff shelters in Arkansas.

October 10, 2017:

Foundation Hall, Reynolds Center, SAU Campus
Jeff Girard
Dugout Canoe Found on the Red River: A Native American dugout canoe was found on the Red River north of Shreveport in June 2017. After securing landowner permission, Jeff Girard visited the discovery and recorded the canoe which is 33 feet long and almost 3 feet wide. A wood sample has been sent for radiocarbon testing to get an exact age.

November 14, 2017:

Magnolia Room, Reynolds Center, SAU Campus
Tad Britt
Athanase de Mézières’s Homesite: Mézières lived from 1719-1779; he was an infantryman and politician. More information soon.

December 12, 2017:

Magnolia Room, Reynolds Center, SAU Campus
Carl Drexler
Battlefields and Public History: More information soon.

Spring Semester

February 13, 2018:

Magnolia Room, Reynolds enter, SAU Campus
Mary Beth Trubitt
The Dragover Site: May be subject to change, more information soon.

March 13, 2018:

Magnolia Room, Reynolds Center, SAU Campus
Bob Scott
The Tillar Site: May be subject to change, more information soon.

April 10, 2018:

Magnolia Room, Reynolds Center, SAU Campus
Carl Drexler
Excavations at Pea Ridge National Military Park: Overview of excavations that were conducted in June of 2017 as part of a field school for the University of Arkansas.

https://web.saumag.edu/aas/2017/09/14/971/

Kadohadacho Chapter Organizational Meeting

The Kadohadacho Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society will hold a meeting at 1 PM on September 16, 2017 to discuss organizational changes to the Chapter. The meeting will be at the Southern Arkansas University Research Station in the Bruce Building, Room 103. You are invited to participate in this meeting as we discuss officer elections, rewriting bylaws, changing the chapter’s name, and plan for the future of the organization. Your input is much appreciated!

The Arkansas Archeological Society is reviewing the organization of its chapters and has requested that we make some updates. Topics to be discussed at the meeting will include:

Statewide and Local Membership to Society: It is required that at least 10 Chapter members also be paid members of the Arkansas Archeological Society.
Chapter Membership: We may need a formal membership list and discuss dues.
Mission Statement Rewrite: The mission statement currently states that “The purpose of this organization is to unite those persons in the area who are interested in the archeology of Arkansas and to encourage their interest and participation in the scientific investigation, study, and interpretation of Indian remains”. This was written several decades ago and since then, our research focus has branched out from solely studying Indian remains.
Bylaw Rewrite: We need an updated version of bylaws. Our current President, Clay Newton, has written a rough draft which can be seen here- Rough draft_SouthWestChapterAAS.
Officer Elections: It is time to elect/re-elect officers. We will take nominations and decide a time to hold the elections.
Name Change: We will discuss the possibility of changing the name of the “Kadohadacho Chapter” and take suggestions for a replacement. Similar to the reasoning for rewriting the mission statement, we want the name of our chapter to reflect the broad research foci in this region.

Again, this meeting will take place Saturday, September 16th at 1 PM.

The AMDA Workshop at Bennington Battlefield, New York

Not too long ago, archeologists thought of metal detectors as a evil tool, used only by looters. Some still think this way. However, many are coming to see them as a useful tool, if used in the right way. The Modern Heritage Foundation supports a workshop series called

Participants at the AMDA workshop in Bennington, NY (8/27/2017, image courtesy of Chris Espenshade)

“Advanced Metal Detecting for the Archeologist,” or AMDA. These workshops take place across the country, and offer training to archeologists in using metal detectors in the right way. I spent last weekend at the AMDA workshop in at the Bennington battlefield (1777), in New York.

The Workshop

The workshop took three days. The first was a classroom day, with lectures on how to metal detect, how to work systematically with a metal detector, and what kinds of sites metal detectors work on. Most people think of battlefields, and they do work well there. They also are great for outlining historic homesteads, blacksmith shops, and other metal-rich sites. Metal detectors even work on precontact sites, as they can be used to find things like hearths, which are magnetic. That takes some skill, honestly, but it has been done.

We spent the other two days in the field. Literally. It was the field where the Americans and British fought, and where the British surrendered (woot!). We laid out long rows of masonry string, then carefully swept down each. Two students worked with each instructor, who made sure we did things right and didn’t miss anything. We learned how to read and listen to the different kinds of machines to know what kinds of things they were finding.

The Finds

What did we find? Well, a lot of things.

AMDA volunteer showing the six-pound British cannonball discovered during the project (image courtesy of Chris Espenshade)

Many hits turned out to be nails, suggesting there had been a house nearby. With time, the participants developed an ear for the way the detector chirped, and could generally guess when something was going to be a piece of iron (there were a lot of nails). Not all of those pieces of iron were small and insignificant (read: nails), though. One participant dug a large iron hit that turned out to be a six-pound British cannonball! Also, we found musket balls from several different guns and a few buttons and sleeve links (think of a cuff link, but older) from soldiers’ uniforms.

An Arkansan Abroad

So, why did the Survey send me up there? Several reasons. First, I am interested in working more closely with AMDA in the future, and before you can be an instructor, you have to take the class.

Dr. Drexler (l) and Mr. Bill Rose (r) investigate a hit (image courtesy of Chris Espenshade)

We are very interested in hosting one of these workshops here in Arkansas, probably on one of the Camden Expedition battlefields from 1864. Seeing how they work will help with planning that workshop in the next few years. Second, next summer’s University of Arkansas field school and Arkansas Archeological Society training program are likely going to be at Pea Ridge National Military Park, near Bentonville, and will include training in systematic metal detection. Taking this workshop will help with organizing that training, as well.

— Carl G. Drexler, Station Archeologist

A Classic of Southwest Arkansas Archeology

A long time ago, I tried to make writing weekly posts on classic books on southwest Arkansas archeology a habit. Frankly, it didn’t take, but let’s take another shot at it.

What are we reading?

In 1970, Hester Davis edited Archeological and Historical Resources of the Red River Basin. It remains an important book, because covered what archeologists knew about the history of the Red River Valley at that point. It gave a generation of archeologists something to work from. Also, it focused on more than Arkansas. It had chapters on the Red River region in Texas (by E. Mott Davis), Louisiana (by Robert Neuman), and Oklahoma (by Don Wykoff). Michael Hoffman wrote the section on Arkansas.

Also, it was the first of the Survey’s Research Series, which now numbers 67(!) books.

Obviously, we know more about the region now than we did then. The authors in the book did not know much about the Archaic period, for instance. This would be a much longer book today, if we were to rewrite it. But, that is the nature of research and science.

How do you get one?

There are a few copies left at the Coordinating Office in Fayetteville. Check out our publications catalog to get your own copy.

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