Like the glimpses of the past offered by fragments found in streambeds, the engravings of French ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz offer precious insights into the every day practices of ancient civilizations. Le Page du Pratz, who lived in Natchez, Mississippi for a period in the early 18th century, studied the ways of life of Native Americans in the area and published the landmark publication Histoire de la Louisiane in 1758. Images courtesy of Frank McMains.
The streambeds south of Natchez, Mississippi are full of history. Warm, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico fuels intense rainstorms, the rainstorms release impressive amounts of water. The water carves the hills around Natchez into deep ravines. Those ravines collect the jumbled history of all that’s come before: the distant time on our planet when most life was still confined to the seas, the more recent time when giant sloths and mastodons foraged through the cool, fern-filled forests that covered this area during the last glacial maximum, and then the complex, semi-urbanized civilization that thrived here before the arrival of Europeans.
However, one could mistake all that for the slurry of small, brown, grey, and off-white rocks I crunch through on a cool spring morning. Accompanied by two friends with whom I have shared the occasional previous adventure, on this outing, I had suggested that we would find giant sloth teeth, or maybe giant sloth claws, or even an intact giant sloth. These enticements ended up being unnecessary because, like the rest of the quarantined world, we three were content to take a long walk outside.
Frank McMains
The width of the stream channels vary. Sometimes one walks across a wide bed of pale buff sand; in other places the streams are filled with boulders of oily grey clay or tongues of rounded pebbles constricting the switchback bends. Regardless, the sides of the streams all slope steeply up. The banks are thick with thorny vines, saplings, and woody scrub. The dense foliage and dramatic angle of the stream banks effectively isolate the streams from the surrounding woodlands. Here it is open, and you can see the sky. Giant, black, and yellow swallowtail butterflies prowl the border between sun and shade. Beyond the brightly lit creek is an endless mass of green vegetation. To move through it requires a machete and tall boots, and even then you are likely to be stopped by a fallen tree or another steep ravine. Once we are in the stream bed, we follow it for several miles.
Uniform loess deposits, banded with gravel. “What you are seeing is tens of thousands of years of deposited dust, a massive cataclysm wherein a volume of water the size of the Great Lakes burst out of glacial dams, and carried the mid-continent rocks down here all in a rush, then another 30K years of dust, then another flood, etc.”—McMains
The forces that formed this area are complex, maybe best understood as the recent work of ancient processes. The Mississippi River might appear to be the prime geological force acting on the Natchez hills, but that is incorrect. Between about 100,000 and 15,000 years ago, the planet was much cooler; glaciers extended deep into North America. The loess soil that makes up these hills was deposited by wind that blew across the dry shallow seas that developed seasonally on the edges of these glaciers. From these dry sea beds, the wind picked up fine silt and silica particles, then deposited them in what would become the southeastern United States, through which my friends and I now tromp.
Much, much further back in geological time, between three hundred and four hundred million years ago, before dinosaurs, the area around present-day Nashville was beneath the sea. Volcanic activity and plate movement gradually lifted the area out of the water and the former sea bed and volcanic rock that laid underneath it eroded away. Time and water flows have carried the ancient evidence here, to Natchez, in the form of agates, quartz, and fossil remnants of several extinct species of coral.
All of this history gives the act of standing, bent at the waist, and rummaging through gravel a sense of importance. The gravel collects in shoals, in places where the water slows down and the biggest solids in it fall out. Walking down the gravel mounds, the slipping stones make a wet, rattling sound, like chain poured from a bucket. Groups of minnows flicker through the opalescent, blue-green water. When I stop for a moment mid-stream, I am awake to the contrast between the sweat on my face and the cold water around my feet. The wind moves through the tree canopy of the surrounding forest, making it sound like something gigantic is shuffling around in the middle distance. It is glorious and a tiny bit ominous, like a walk during plague-time should be.
The 1,100-1,800-year-old shard of pottery found on the author’s trek through the Natchez streambeds (depicted in final photo, taken by Brandon Morgan).
People who have recently spent time in some variety of quarantine are likely to be more receptive to the observation that, “time is an illusion.” My companions and I are primed for such a philosophical abstraction, this being all of our first outing is since most of the world had shut down to slow the spread of this novel zoonotic disease (a subject covered in these pages, by this writer, in 2015), but a surprising discovery emphasizes the observation. A pot shard is found.
We unearth no sloth parts of any kind, but my friend Chris spots a piece of grey pottery, roughly as long as a thumb amongst the confusion of rounded stones. It has no fewer than nineteen small marks on its surface, distributed in a loose pattern. Correspondence with a specialist in the early inhabitants of the Mississippi valley would later identify the shard as a piece of Evansville punctated-ware, Wilkinson-type—placing the shard at between eleven hundred and eight hundred years old. This was a relic of a lost people who were only indifferently remembered through place names: the Natchez, the Tensas, the Tunica.
Pottery is one of the few materials that endures from previous civilizations, the tiniest keyhole through which we get the slimmest view of the complex society that created and disposed of it. This is a product of a nearly vanished culture that thrived in southern North America for thousands of years and then was all but erased by unfamiliar diseases, some war, and time. They built complex ceremonial centers, often oriented to astronomical phenomena, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of mathematics. Early European accounts describe bright white pyramids decorated with shells and skulls rising from great communal corn plots; sheets of copper with embossed bird-warrior figures hung in temples attended by hereditary fire-priests.
Time and experience collapse in moments of discovery, when it briefly feels as though the barriers to understanding have disappeared and you can dimly see how the past and the future are just incomplete ways of talking about the endless now. Potshards, pyramids, pandemics— separate and disconnected but jumbled together like pebbles in a streambed. h
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