Unearthing Prehistory, One Shard at at Time

Frank McMains is digging into Louisiana’s archaeological past

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It’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 hours 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.

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.

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 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 archaeological importance. Still, Poverty Point is not the oldest site of ancient civilization in Louisiana. That distinction belongs to Watson Brake, which was built over five thousand years ago. The LSU Campus mounds are older too, built twenty-six hundred years before Poverty Point.

[Read more about archaeology in Louisiana here.]

Today, there are hundreds of mound complexes across Louisiana, representing a span of five thousand years of human history.

Archaeologists have long studied these earthworks and the artifacts discovered around them, gleaning insights into the people who built them. We know, for example, that mounds served both ceremonial and practical functions in what was most likely “a complex mix of practicality, mythology, and religion,” said Charles “Chip” McGimsey, Louisiana State Archaeologist and Director of the Division of Archaeology.

Artifacts discovered around these ancient Mississippi Delta settlements include clay blocks and balls used for cooking and heating; stone tools such as axes; game pieces; carved beads; and atlatls, weapons used to hurl darts at prey.

“When you’re standing in an empty agricultural field in the least populous parish in the state,” McMains said, “the contrast is inescapable.”

Based on these remnants and on the mounds themselves, researchers have been able to develop certain understandings of the people who left them behind. For example, experts have deduced that the 5,400 year old mounds of Watson Brake, discovered in the early 1980s after timber had been cleared in Ouachita Parish, once functioned in part as a calendar. “They were built on lines of sight so if you’re standing on one, and looking out over the top of another, it points you to certain celestial events on the horizon such as solstices and equinoxes,” said McGimsey.

This would have been important information for rituals, which were a vital part of mound culture. For example, McGimsey said, on the winter solstice when days are their shortest, people may have believed they would have a food shortage unless they performed ceremonies urging the sun’s return.

Mounds also served as periodic gathering places for trade, he said, perhaps the way England’s medieval cathedrals weren’t only places of worship or where couples married; they also hosted wool markets where sheep farmers gathered to trade with buyers from mainland Europe.

“Mound complexes would have been part of their way of life,” McGimsey said. “Mayas, for example, believed there were certain times that the souls of the dead could leave this earth and go to the spirit world, and that was a big event for them. Who knows what people in Louisiana were believing?”     

McMains is a man of many interests and seeker of many answers. The former magazine publisher, record producer, and bar owner began his enduring exploration of history and culture in 2014, when he traveled to Southern Mexico. He immersed himself in the rich culture and history of Chiapas. In subsequent years he has spent time photographing people living in the foothills of the Himalayas and other historic sites around the globe, and he has become an avid student of the economics and coinage of Roman and Greek cultures.

McMains’ interest in the ancient cultures of the Mississippi Valley began about five years ago when he found himself studying maps and elevation data for Tensas Parish. He was surprised at how many ceremonial mound complexes he spotted, and how familiar they looked.

“Archeologically, they echoed stuff I’d seen in Central America,” he said. “I wanted to figure out what those were, how many people were around, and what their lives were like.”

For four years, McMains continued to study and analyze northeast Louisiana’s terrain—searching for signs of ancient villages and mound complexes. Earlier this year, he took his search into the field and to ancient villages whose locations were determined by the river system.

“I think it’s valuable,” he said, “to consider how people were able to live in this highly-challenging environment of the Mississippi Valley—with all this water coming through it and the land constantly being re-sculpted through flooding—to see how they lived here for thousands of years.”

Just as flooding and climate change cause havoc in the modern world, the flow and shifting course of the Mississippi River Delta system dominated the environment in which Louisiana’s ancient cultures lived.

“Rather than scouring a stream or cutting deep into the earth, the Mississippi River was more like a hose spraying across a driveway, but depositing all the silt that built what we’re standing on today,” McMains said. “The process is still going, but different.”

The Mississippi River only settled into its present eastern cut eight to twelve hundred years ago, McMains said (though noting that this theory is still a subject of dispute among some). “For maybe three thousand years before that, it was a braided stream in which three or more significant bodies of water criss-crossed each other.”

It was on the ridges that ancient people established villages, and where McMains has found most of his pottery shards and points.

On the particular spring day mentioned above, McMains was hunting in a field near the Balmoral Mounds, a trio of one thousand-year-old earthworks first identified by Harvard University researchers in the 1930s. Billy Guthrie, a farmer who works on the privately-owned property, encouraged McMains with stories about how he and fellow farmers had been plowing up pottery pieces and arrow points for years.

On several artifact-finding expeditions carried out over the course of just a few months this year, McMains has amassed a collection of about four hundred carved pottery shards and more than three dozen points and blades. After discovering them on the surface, he carefully cleans, photographs, and catalogues each piece, which he then displays in framed glass cases in his home.

The artifacts reveal considerable skill and artistry. The points, which are knapped from a locally-occurring quartz rock called chert, still hold sharp edges and would have been effective hunting tools.

McMains shares details about his collection with professors and scholars and hopes to develop it enough to someday donate to a museum or university.

Even more compelling than artifacts themselves, he said, is the search for deeper knowledge and wisdom about the history of mankind living harmoniously with water—both the bounty it helps produce, and the threat it poses.

“All of these (cultures) coalesced or were all wiped out by natural events, so what should we learn? Water is the limiting factor around here,” McMains said. “We have got to come to terms with the way we live in or near water.” 

Keep up with McMains’ photography and explorations at frankmcmains.com