Kit Wesler

Wickliffe Mounds is just (3 miles) south of the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in Kentucky. In the 1930s, highway construction cut through the site and exposed Native American artifacts and remains. The site was bought by a private entrepreneur, who set it up as a tourist attraction and did some desultory excavation, with off-and-on help from various local universities. Eventually the site was donated to Murray State University, which turned it into an archaeological research center. It’s not very different from hundreds of similar locations in the great river valleys of the Midwest and South.


Archaeological excavation reports are usually not the most stimulating reading matter. The meat of a field report – what’s of interest to other archaeologists – is page after page of charts and tables of lithic assemblages, pottery types, posthole locations, and so on. There will be a section on the interpretation of all this stuff, which would be what would interest the general public or casual amateur, but the cost of printing the whole data set will put the cost of the work out of reach for most people, and it will languish on university library and museum shelves. The authors of this book have taken the approach of writing an accessible summary with basic tables, and including all the scholarly and technical details on a CD, cutting the text from well over a thousand pages to 178.


Although it’s not going to make the NYT best-seller list, what’s left is quite readable (although it will still help to have a basic exposure to American archaeology). What intrigued me was the “meta-archaeology” – not only the Native occupation of the site, but its history and archaeology as a tourist attraction. The operator, Fain King, was a local lumberman who apparently thought he was going to get rich of his “Ancient Buried City” exhibit. He conducted excavations with some oversight from professional archaeologists from the University of Chicago and University of Alabama, and meticulously numbered and recorded all the artifacts he dug up (unfortunately, all his field notes and maps have vanished). There’s an intriguing undercurrent here; a critical event in the relations of Fain King with professional archaeology is described as follows:


"However, sometime during this period, King also acquired a wife, Blanche Busey King. Discounting oral history at Wickliffe, which is entertaining but not relevant here, there is little information about Blanche’s background."


Just a trace of that “oral history” might be discernable in a letter from a graduate student at the site, who said “The Colonel [Mr. King] is alright and knows the ropes. The madam [Mrs. King] is impossible”. Mrs. King apparently strongly influenced her husband’s attitude; he became suspicious that the professionals were out to “steal” his site, evicted the graduate students working there, and began threatening legal action. There’s one photograph of Mr. and Mrs. King at the site; she appears to be much younger than her husband (and outlived him by about 40 years). The site was eventually turned over to a local hospital, which continued to operate it as a tourist attraction while paying an annuity to the Kings (and Mrs. King after Fain King’s death).


Nevertheless, when King was cooperating with professionals, the Wickliffe Site did apparently strongly influence the understanding of Mississippian culture. The artifacts the Kings excavated and those uncovered by subsequent professional work allow reconstruction of the life styles of the occupants. I was interested in any evidence for climatic change during the 250 or so years the site was occupied (about 1100-1350 CE). There does seem to be a large change in dietary habits – the earlier occupants ate a lot more fish while the later ones ate more deer – but there’s no particular reason this had to be due to climatic conditions and the authors don’t even mention that possibility.


In grade school, we did a field trip to Dickson Mounds in Illinois. I had nightmares for some time afterwards; the site was thousands of skeletons laid out chaotically. It has since been covered over under NAGRPA, and there is now a politically correct musuem.


A certain percentage of these things are apparently not burial mounds at all, but platforms for temples or even the homes of elite families. I have only a casual interest in North American archaeology so I'm not sure what the latest theories are. The ability to construct these things does demonstrate a fairly elaborate social organization, though; you have to convince a number of people that it's a good idea to spend time hauling dirt around in baskets. Some of the sites show clear evidence of human sacrifice, which, paradoxically, requires even more social organization; you have to have a pretty convincing argument to get people to give up their daughters to accompany a chief into the next life. A convincing argument might be solid religious beliefs or a bunch of guys at your back with stone axes. It's too bad the moundbuilders didn't leave any written record; it would have been nice to know what was going on.


Again, not the thing for light reading on the bus but interesting for both the archaeology of the site and the history of archaeological tourist attractions.… (mere)