Environmental Archaeology

Environmental Archaeology. . Picture yourself standing at this spot, centuries ago, long before cars and highways parking lots and interpretive trails. It is springtime. You stand in an Indian village dotted with clay-walled houses; there is smoke rising from numerous fires, dogs barking, children playing. Look farther, beyond the houses and the nearby cornfields with their young plants, past the carefully tended plots of newly sprouted sunflowers, and what do you see?, Flowers! An open grassland sprinkled with prairie clover, white and lavender asters purple coneflowers, black-eyed Susans. A nearby rise cloaked with oak and hickory trees rises like an island in a sea of bluestem grass. The white petals of hawthorns and wild plum are vivid against the gnarled post oaks, their trunks still sooted from last season's burning by the villagers. At the edge of one cornfield, an erosional gully cuts through the sticky, yellowish-gray clay that was the bottom of a shallow sea that covered the area tens of millions of years ago. The small creeks surrounding the village run shallow and clear, a source for many different kinds of fish and turtles; a group of children stand knee-deep in the cold water, helping their parents gather mussels for the evening meal. Acorns and hickory nuts will be plentiful in the fall, a rich source of food to be stored for the winter months. , Archaeologists carefully recover plant and animal remains left behind by prehistoric peoples. These are compared to modern species for identification, and sometimes this work reveals surprising things. Wood charcoal recovered from Pocahontas shows that the stream margins were forested with oaks, chestnuts, and other hardwoods, a scene that must have been familiar in prehistoric times. One kind of freshwater mussel found in abundance at Pocahontas is Cyprogenia aberti, the western fanshell. Until its shells were found at archaeological sites, biologists believed that this animal's range was confined to the Ouachita and Ozark uplands of Arkansas and adjacent states Thanks to archaeology we now know that it also lived in streams in the Mississippi Delta and in the Jackson Prairie, where the Pocahontas site is located. It must have disappeared from these streams early in Historic times, probably the victim of modern agricultural practices that caused soil erosion into nearby streams. , Beyond teaching us about the daily lives of prehistoric American Indians, the remains left behind at Pocahontas teach us what the local environment was like before modern impacts. Armed with such knowledge, we can work to recreate a sustainable balance between humans and nature.