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.
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