EP: 447 | A Discussion of Native American Life

On this episode we’re joined by Dr. Ashley Dumas, the Professor of Anthropology at the University of West Alabama. We are all fascinated by the Native American artifacts we often find on our hunting properties and hearing how they thrived in the wilderness. How did they hunt, forage, fish, make tools, set up villages and camps? Dr. Dumas explains fascinating aspects of the culture of the Native Americas. 

Listen, Learn and Enjoy.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I am Jeff Foxworthy and welcome to Gamekeeper Podcast. If you want to learn more about farming for wildlife and habitat management, then buddy, you are in the right place. Join the Gamekeeper crew direct from Baltiok Land Enhancement Studio as they discuss the latest wildlife and habitat management practices. News, and of course, honey. There's no telling what you'll learn, but I'm gonna tell you. I bet it's interesting. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

We're live in three, two, one.

SPEAKER_03 0:29

All right, Lanny. I tell you, Dudley, uh, this is gonna a subject that's really interesting. We always talk about it around here.

SPEAKER_10 0:37

Yes, it's kind of baked into our culture to a certain degree.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Well, when we're out on properties, invariably somebody will find a whether you refer to it as a spear point or an area, or just anything. And you touch it and you just your mind goes back to who is the last person to hold this. And that there's so much of this culture across the South and the country for that matter. And the world. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 0:58

It is.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

I hadn't thought about it like that, Dudley, but you're right. Dudley just brought up. Bobby Cole worldwide. You should have known that. Well, let me get our guest introduced today. So we've got uh a lady that has traveled up here to be with us, uh Dr. Ashley Dumas. And she uh she is from the University of West Alabama. Yeah, places close to the to it to us here at Mossad.

SPEAKER_09 1:21

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:21

Really smart about all this kind of stuff. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

It's my pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 1:25

Yeah, we've uh I've been reading a lot about you on the internet. It sounds like you you're quite uh you've you've you're you've got a a lot of subject matter expertise here.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Yeah, I guess I tend to um I tend to take a scattershot approach to research. There's just a lot, a lot to be interested in, a lot to a lot to keep me busy. So um I have a focused on the contact era, the the American period, I focused on the pre-contact, you know, Native American period, and and um a little bit in between even.

SPEAKER_03 1:59

Well, let me let me just tell you a little bit about her, guys. All right. So she grew up in Fair Hope, Alabama, down there where the Jubilee happens. That's right. Have you participated in a Jubilee?

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Yes, I have that.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

One day we've got to talk to somebody about a Jubilee. Yes. What's going on? But she received her PhD in archaeology of complex societies from the University of Alabama. University of Alabama. She's been teaching at the University of West Alabama since 2009, where she established the minor in anthropology, the black belt slave housing survey in regular field schools at Fort Tombeckby archaeological, archaeological site. She has also edited three books on the importance of salt in ancient societies and is working on two more. She is currently making final edits to a co-authored book about the search for Mobila project, if I'm saying that right. And her sons who are 15 and 12 love to kayak and fish. All right. How about that?

SPEAKER_02 2:58

That's right. That's impressive, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:01

Well, so uh we've got a couple of we've got about three topics we want to talk to her about. And w we're we're gonna hold off the mobila.

SPEAKER_10 3:11

Yeah, you can uh can we at least explain that to me a little bit?

SPEAKER_03 3:14

Well, I think we probably can, but we're gonna go into a little bit deep dive on another podcast.

SPEAKER_10 3:18

And so what is mobila? I thought you were mispronouncing it. Ancient civilization or a civilization?

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Well, it's two things really. It's a the name of a native province or chiefdom, and it's also the name of a large town within that chiefdom. And it's famous because it is the place where Chief Tascaloosa tried to fight off um Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1540.

SPEAKER_10 3:48

And this is around what part of the country?

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Well, it's somewhere in Alabama. That's the great mystery.

SPEAKER_10 3:55

Ah not like a north or a south, just somewhere?

SPEAKER_02 3:58

Somewhere in Alabama. I'll save that for the next podcast.

SPEAKER_10 4:02

I love it. I can't wait. I can't wait for the next podcast. There's a lot of drama involved in that, I think, too. There is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:10

Wow. It kind of sounds like a couple things. Well, much has been made about Hernando de Soto, and I'm not sure that it's just because what he's famous for finding the Mississippi River, and I think we would have found that on our own had he not Eventually.

SPEAKER_09 4:26

Hernando of Soto. Huh? Oh. Yeah. Is that what it is? That makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 4:32

Day is of, isn't it?

SPEAKER_08 4:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:34

So Ashley, let's start here. And what we want to be very respectful to all this. How should we refer to is it Native Americans? Is it indigenous? What and some of the ways I mean we find airheads laying on top of the ground, and I'm assuming that that it's fine to pick those up. But what is it different in different states legalities about artifact? Could you just kind of cover some of that for us?

SPEAKER_02 4:57

Sure. So starting with your first question about, you know, what to call the the native peoples of this area. Um native is fine. Uh Native people, or if you want to get fancier, indigenous people. Um, but uh I usually say native. Um Indians is still used. Um it's become, you know, cultural feelings about this are always shifting. Um and you'll see mostly in archaeological publications now people saying native or indigenous. Um, but you'll also note that many native peoples are members of tribes that have the word Indian in the tribal name. Um, so it's I think a lot comes down to the context of how it's used, um, you know, what you're what who you're talking about, who you are when you're talking about it. Um, but safe to just stick with native, I guess, is the safest, safest option. But I wouldn't go so far as to say like Indian is a bad word. You know, we see the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians, you know, or the the um and so uh that's it's still out there and still used by by uh the people themselves.

SPEAKER_03 6:10

Uh yeah, we had the chief on here. We did, we had thoroughly enjoyed him. He sat right there.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Yeah, what a big I watched that episode. Yeah, I did. That was great.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

He was a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_09 6:19

Yeah, he just uh you remember his license plate number? Yes. One it was one, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 6:26

And and the same guy, and the guy with him, his was two. Two.

SPEAKER_08 6:31

Perfect.

SPEAKER_03 6:32

Well what he was such an interesting guy. Yeah, yeah. Really enjoy it. Guys, if y'all have not seen that one, you ought to go back and watch it. He was worth worth listening to it. Chief Cyrus Ben.

SPEAKER_10 6:41

Is that one on YouTube?

SPEAKER_03 6:42

That is correct.

SPEAKER_09 6:43

Look at that, you can go to YouTube and check him out. Yeah, you sure can.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

Yeah, so getting to your second question about um, you know, finding artifacts, because I, you know, so many of us who spend time outdoors are eventually going to find an artifact or or think we have found an artifact. An artifact is just anything that a human has made or used or altered in some way in the past. I don't want to distinguish that for your listeners from a fossil, right? A fossil is something non-human, some formerly alive non-human thing. And that generally can go back millions of years, right? So we tend to stick with artifact. And um, so you know, my granddaddy had an airhead collection. He was a uh farmer in Middle Georgia, and that's one of the ways that I got interested in it is laying on the floor in the in the TV room looking at his his um collection that he picked up in those fields. Um, you know, my dad, as you know, when he was hunting, he would bring me things that he found out, you know, in fields hunting. Um, so it's really common because there have been people living in this part of the country for about 15,000 years. And um they made stuff and dropped it or broke it and threw it out the way we do today. Um now, if this is found on private property, right, that belongs to the landowner, period. You can get permission from a landowner to go collect artifacts from the surface, that's fine. That's a no up to the landowner. Um if something is on federal property or state property, then it belongs to the federal government or the state government, that is all of us collectively. And you can no more go, you know, take artifacts or dig artifacts or collect artifacts from federal or state property than you can go up to Jackson to the Capitol House and you know, dig up your favorite Camellia Bush. Right that kind of belongs to everybody. So so those are the general, those are the general um uh guidelines and uh they they they pretty much make sense, I think. Um what belongs to the landowner belongs to the landowner.

SPEAKER_03 9:02

You know, we all know somebody that's I mean, I think it was pretty common back in the back in the day for our grandfathers to have a shoebox full of cigar box.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

A cigar box is what mine came in. Yep.

SPEAKER_10 9:14

And you said laying in the TV room. I remember the same thing because we had one TV and it was in one room. Yes, that's right. It's hilarious. Well, what about um can you speak to I mean, I think we understand that there's also you can look for stuff on the surface, but you're not supposed to excavate in any way, shape, or form, are you?

SPEAKER_02 9:32

Um again, that's you know, that's up to you and up to the landowner. That's not illegal uh to do that. Now, it's illegal to dig knowingly dig up a burial, a human burial. Just like you couldn't go out to any cemetery and and start digging up a grave. You can't do that on a Native American grave either.

SPEAKER_06 9:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:54

Um, knowingly do that. That's the catch, right? Um, so there's a difference between what's legal and not and what is ethical and not. So that's that's there's the rub, right? Um all of us, I mean, we're in here talking about this because it's interesting. Because, you know, when you find an artifact, you pick it up, and you know, just like you, I think, wow, who was the last person to touch this? You know, who made this? What were they thinking? How did they use it? What did it mean to them? How did they lose it? You know, were they mad when they lost it? Um, and that's just natural human curiosity, and there's nothing wrong with that. And I certainly don't want to stifle anybody's natural curiosity, nor do any other archaeologist that I know. Um it's just that archaeologists have have learned over the over the years that when you dig something, when you like you know you've got an archaeological site, and when you start digging on it, um there's a there's a way you can do that to learn about the people who left those things behind. And then there's a way you can do it to just collect the stuff. Right? So archaeology um is a lot more than just the stuff. And here's a metaphor that I'll often use with my students, if you give me a just a second. So all right. So here's here's a metaphor. I don't know if I came up with this or if somebody else has come up with it independently, but this is what I like to say to my students. Imagine going into a library full of history books, and you want to learn about some part of Mississippi's past. So you go up and you pull a history book about Mississippi off the shelf and you open it up, and it's so old that it's fragmentary, and there are pages missing, and there are words missing, it's just deteriorated, right? Well, if you're going to read that history book, you're gonna start at the beginning and you're gonna go very slowly and systematically and work your way through every word and sentence, keeping them all in order, right? And you're gonna turn the pages one by one by one and read it chapter by chapter by chapter, and do the best you can to put it together with what's left of that ancient book. Well, every archaeological site is like an ancient history book. They're they're unique, and the way the artifacts are put down in the ground is generally like a history book, but in reverse. So the things that are the deepest are the oldest. The things that are most recent are on top. So the reason archaeologists dig carefully is not necessarily to not break anything, because 99.9% of everything we find find is already broken, right? We're digging people's garbage. Um, but we dig it carefully, a little bit at a time, one layer at a time, going further and further down into the ground or down into that book to read that archaeological site and put the story together. And when we so when we dig, you know, we're not just digging a big hole to get out the artifacts. We're keeping the artifacts in place or in context, just like you wouldn't read a history book by taking an apple core to it and pulling out only the beautiful words, right? They're gonna be out of context. Yeah, you can say, here I've got this big beautiful word or this collection of big beautiful words. Aren't they big beautiful words? Well, who knows what story they tell because they're out of context, right? So that's why archaeologists dig carefully. That's the difference between um that's the difference between digging and excavating. And and I I don't know, I might get in trouble with some of my colleagues, but the truth is that archaeological excavation is not rocket science. Anybody can learn how to do it. Anybody anybody can do it. You know, you just keep track of where you find things, take photographs and and notes before you pick things up, and then you know, make sure you keep everything because all those words are are necessary to tell the story. So you can read that, you can read that history book.

SPEAKER_10 14:16

What a great explanation. Yes. Yeah, 100%. When you're when you're going down, is it are you looking at like soil types or are you just going like a half inch at a time?

SPEAKER_02 14:25

You can do both. Um sometimes you you're working on a site where like the further down you go, or with say every um occupation of of a group of people from the past, the soil is sort of a particular color, and then it'll change as you go back further in time. Or let's say maybe there was a a flood of a nearby creek and deposited a bunch of sand, right? And then you know you're in a different layer, and then you can go deeper than that to a different layer. Um, but then sometimes you'll be in a in a situation where the soil just builds up um maybe more quickly or maybe very, very slowly, and it's hard to see those color differences. And in that case, you just say, okay, well, we're just gonna dig 10 centimeters at a time and keep you keep everything in that layer together because that's all part of the same chapter.

SPEAKER_10 15:15

And y'all are m detailed mapping this out, gridding it.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

Yeah, the grids are helpful because um I know I tell my I tell my children, you know, that Cartesian coordinate system you learn in the fifth grade, it it we actually do use it in archaeology. So we put sort of an imaginary grid over the ground, um, and then we'll just you know excavate one grid square at a time. And everything in that grid square and every layer in that grid square is kept separately, and it's all given different labels so that when you get back to the lab, you can put it all back together. Because excavating is destruction too, right? I mean, we're when you're excavating a site, you know, you can't put that stuff back the way you found it. We're just excavating very, very systematically and documenting it. Documenting in the whole thing, exactly.

SPEAKER_05 16:05

How would somebody like me, uh, that you know, I like to surface hunt, you know, when I'm out hunting? Yeah, yeah. How would I properly document something so unlike my granddad, if my grandkids, you know, want to go through my collection, would would be more beneficial to them?

SPEAKER_02 16:27

Oh yeah, that's a great question. So um one thing you can do is get a good um, you know, GPS app. Um, I've got one called Gaia, and um it allows me to put a little dot on the map, and I um just um type in Gaia GPS or it's gonna bring up something kind of weird about new age religion. Gaia GPS, yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So so you know, uh you can put a waypoint down and then label it with what it is you found. And at first you're gonna you're at first it kind of feels like I don't know why I'm doing this. This is, you know, this this seems pointless. But after a while, say if you're collecting in the same field, you're gonna start to see a pattern. You will start to see a pattern of where things have been left or where things have been dropped or where things are clustering. And that's the that's the real information you want. And then like number every waypoint and put that number on that artifact. So you can kind of, you know, it's like doing a puzzle in reverse.

SPEAKER_05 17:35

Right. Yeah. That was always my frustration is I would see this cigar back box full of artifacts and I never knew where they came from. Exactly. I mean, I've got a buddy, you know him. Uh I can message him and he'll tell me, you know, the name of the point, you know, the the age estimate, all of that kind of stuff. The material. But um, you know, if it's just sitting in a box, you don't know exactly where it came from.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

That's right, yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_05 18:03

That's like that's one of the lost history in my opinion.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

It is, yeah, it is. It at that point it becomes kind of, you know, as useful as like a a a beautiful, you know, object in a museum display. You know, it's really pretty. I mean, you can admire the the skill and the artistry that went into making something like that, and you can marvel at how old it is, but it's lost its place in history without without knowing where it came from and without its association to everything else that it was with. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:38

That is, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

But come up, you can come up with your own system too for recording locations. It is tedious, but I promise the payoff is is worth it in the end to see those patterns come alive.

SPEAKER_03 18:50

So why don't we do this, Doug? Uh uh, let's ask her your rapid fire questions. Yeah, we were we were getting too serious. Yeah, rapid fires, and we're gonna get back, uh we'll get back to some serious stuff, but uh rapid fire is brought to you by our friends at Nutrient Ag Solutions. We really appreciate them. Yes, we do.

SPEAKER_05 19:12

All right, Ashley. Uh gonna ask you a few questions. Uh just need a quick answer. We're trying to get to know you better.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 19:19

Um, are you ready?

SPEAKER_02 19:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 19:22

All right. How many languages can you speak?

SPEAKER_02 19:24

Two.

SPEAKER_05 19:24

Ah. Have you ever had a salt life sticker on your car?

SPEAKER_02 19:28

No.

SPEAKER_05 19:29

Has a colleague or friend ever referred to you as Salt Bay?

SPEAKER_02 19:34

Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 19:36

Um does pottery or napped artifacts interest you the most? Which one?

SPEAKER_02 19:42

Pottery.

SPEAKER_05 19:43

Uh describe a really cool surface find you stumbled upon while out and about. Is there one that stands out?

SPEAKER_02 19:51

Let's see. I a really cool surface find. Um yeah, so uh about three years ago I was looking for um evidence of a of a um Mississippian period, you know, prehistoric um house of a particular age, and I was uh I was about to storm and I'd been looking all day and I was really frustrated. And I finally looked down in this plow field and saw a piece of pottery with just the right decoration on it, and and I I might have shed a tear. I was so relieved that my companion thought something had happened or you know, like I'd stubbed my toe or something because I was crying, but I was just really relieved and happy.

SPEAKER_05 20:40

That's awesome. I love it. Yeah, yeah. I found one a long time ago called a Motley Point in the middle of a road. Yeah, good find my favorite one.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

Good find.

SPEAKER_05 20:50

Um Do you think Native American hunters have ever had a thing for big antlers? Yes or no?

SPEAKER_02 20:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 20:59

All right.

SPEAKER_10 21:00

That's a great question.

SPEAKER_05 21:01

Uh have you ever patronized the brass monkey in Livingston, Alabama? Yes or no?

SPEAKER_02 21:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 21:08

Oh, right. Does anyone in your family hunt and fish?

SPEAKER_02 21:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 21:12

Okay. Uh what pre-modern time period interests you the most? I know you're you're probably back and forth, but yeah, I'm back and forth.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

I guess right now that would be October 18th, 1540. Oh, is that the That's the date of the Battle of Mobila.

SPEAKER_05 21:31

Okay. And last but not least, name a local prairie plant species you find in your neck of the woods that interests you, uh that that indigenous folks probably utilized.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

Okay, fantastic. Mm one of my favorites is uh just the common Queen Anne's lace. I love it. It's a relative of the carrot, and I wouldn't be surprised if the roots were used somehow.

SPEAKER_03 21:59

Okay. Cool.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:01

I'm glad to try that. I see a lot of it on the side of the roads right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Yeah, yeah. And of course, yeah, prairie cone flower is just gorgeous. Echinacea. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:11

Good. She's talking your language. Good stuff. Yeah, that's great. I figured she would know. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 22:16

All right.

SPEAKER_03 22:17

Well, and guys, before we get uh down in the deep ends, we've got uh a new sponsor. Uh the guy I got some products on the table here. Golden Eagle. And for you, speaking of Alabama, yeah, they've made this delicious syrup for like 97 years.

SPEAKER_09 22:30

It's the first syrup I remember ever seeing in my house.

SPEAKER_10 22:34

Unbelievable how good it is. And my dad's super excited.

SPEAKER_05 22:37

And now, look, we that caramel corn. Yeah. It is off, it is so good. We had some in the Left Field Lounge when we swept LSU last weekend.

SPEAKER_03 22:47

Everybody was eating it. And this pecan pie. Pecan pies are delicious. Never put anything better in my why would you ever make a pecan pie when you can buy peanuts?

SPEAKER_09 22:56

Is it pecan or pecan? It's pecan.

SPEAKER_10 22:59

And they also have pecan granola, which is delicious too. Yeah. So I was trying to eat it this morning, but Bobby wouldn't let me because we needed to show it to you. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 23:07

So, guys, it's available at a lot of convenience stores and grocery stores. Just watch for it. It's got your real unique packaging. They're great folks. They're out of Fayette, Alabama, which isn't very far from here. So we're just proud to have them on board. So all right, let's get back to the topic. And I want to ask you when you were talking about earlier and you used the word occupation and how you're you're going down deep. So is it that a site that someone that some group chose many years ago, then it was a worthy site for the next group that came along? That there was something about that site, so they just built on top of each other?

SPEAKER_02 23:39

Yeah, generally, yes. Um if you um say excavate in any town, you could I mean you could, you know, excavate and where I'm from Livingston, Alabama, right? You could excavate down and you're gonna go through rubble from whatever building was demolished there before. And then beneath that, you'll find, you know, objects from when people were occupying that building, and then beneath that, you know, a construction layer, and beneath that another destruction layer. So yeah, so in a city, you know, you can go down really, really deep through all the different layers of building and destruction. I've done that in downtown mobile, and that was really fascinating.

SPEAKER_10 24:19

Well, I bet it was down there.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Yeah. Um, and uh generally, you know, whatever you know, the places that we think would make a good place to live today have always have been a good place for a long time in the past. Some place that's well drained, you know, you don't want to live in a swamp, but near water is good. Um, sort of a high spot, catch those breezes. Um, good agricultural land. So it's not uncommon to find, you know, an archaeological site that has evidence of people from fairly recently to thousands of years ago, to 10, you know, 10,000 years ago.

SPEAKER_03 25:01

So so uh you know, I've always heard that like where these like a major creek kind of runs into the river that a lot of times at those points, those are there would have been villages, I guess what might be the word. Is there a side of the creek that they preferred to be on or would did that depend on the the I guess how high a bank may be?

SPEAKER_02 25:22

Yeah, I think it would just depend on the the uh topography. And you know, obviously the side that doesn't flood was is preferable, and then um uh probably just depends on what creek and what river you're talking about as to as to where people would be setting up household.

SPEAKER_03 25:39

So has lidar been a benefit to you guys when you're trying to look at you know rough country that you hadn't walked on before to identify we need to go look right here.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

Yeah, LIDAR, so light detecting and ranging, right, is I I guess most everybody by now knows what it is, but in case anybody listening doesn't, it means that you have a essentially a laser in a in a drone or in a plane, and you fly it over the landscape and it's constantly shooting, you know, rapid series of of beams down to the ground, so many so quickly that it will go through vegetation, through all the holes in the vegetation, hits the surface of the ground, bounces back up, and a machine will record all of that elevation data. So the huge benefit of LIDAR in archaeology is that you can fly it over a densely forested area and is basically see what's on the ground that you wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. And this is why there have been so many discoveries recently in like Central America in the jungle and in South America in the jungles there. Um, I mean, these are places that are like impenetrable forest, right? And like Indiana Jones kind of stuff, but with LIDAR, they've been finding lost cities and and roadways and you know, house mounds and all kinds of stuff. So yeah, it can be really useful. Um, of course, I do a lot of my work now in the Black Prairie, and that's mostly open. And um, but I am working with the Corps of Engineers out of the Mobile District um next week. They're gonna be shooting lidar from a drone at Fort Tom Beckby. And Fort Tombeckby's on the Tom Bigby River. It gave the Tom Bigby its name, and um, it's a originally a Choctaw word, and this is a French fort dating to the um 1700s. And um so the lidar with the lidar, we're hoping to pick up not just a great map of what's left of the fort, but maybe any um old roadways or pathways that the Choctaws were using to uh go into the fort or out of the fort. And we're also gonna be um doing lidar of the bank of the river at that point because it's eroding a little bit because of the barge traffic. And we want to get a better idea of how quickly it's eroding and um how quickly we're losing pieces of the fort into the river. So LIDAR can be used for preservation purposes too.

SPEAKER_10 28:20

And where's that for?

SPEAKER_02 28:22

It is on so it's on the Tom Bigby. Um, the best way to describe it is if you've ever taken Highway 11 out of Livingston headed north, like to Utah and Tuscaloosa, you can kind of see it off the Highway 11 bridge.

SPEAKER_10 28:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's real close to 2059. You take the Epps exit off of 2059, and it's about three miles from there. It's gated, but if anybody is has a particular desire to go see Fort Tom Beckby, we have um it we have like um interpretive signs up, and there's a real nice picture of the white bluffs. Uh, just uh shoot me an email and I can get you out there.

SPEAKER_05 29:06

Neat. That's really cool. And we have some friends that have a brand called Tom Beckby in there.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

That's right, Tom Tom Beckby.

SPEAKER_05 29:13

They incorporate a lot of mossy oak into their design.

SPEAKER_03 29:19

Well, does Onyx have LIDAR?

SPEAKER_05 29:21

Yeah. I mean, you can see like hundred-year-old little bitty cattle pond dams that wouldn't show up on a topo map, you know, things like that.

SPEAKER_03 29:30

Yeah, that's that's that's LIDAR. Yeah. So uh look, walk me back like I'm one of your students. Okay. Help me uh Richie, what's going on? Nothing's going on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 29:40

I'm just thinking she's talking about this plane. I'm just gonna and flying over to get this detailed data. Well, if you And we think I mean we think Onex has flown over everything that's on my phone.

SPEAKER_05 29:49

Well, they got the data from LIDAR.

SPEAKER_10 29:53

Because Onex is a huge sponsor of ours. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

I love Onex. When you hit that button, they release a plane.

SPEAKER_10 29:59

When they hit that button, they release a plane. It says LIDAR on it. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

It is, it is. They're getting it from they're getting it from other companies who do the who get it.

SPEAKER_10 30:08

Yeah. Okay, my bad. Anyways, you ought to hey, you ought to check the feature out of LIDAR feature on One. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 30:15

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_09 30:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:18

So so help me understand. What was it like? I mean, let's walk back a couple of hundred years and what was a what was what was important to them? Where did they want to live? What was what was it look like? A hundred years? A couple of hundred years.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

A couple hundred years? We'll go back a little bit further. Let's go back five hundred years. Okay. We'll go back five hundred years.

SPEAKER_03 30:40

So take me back to where it's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 30:42

Before before any kind of European contact or, you know, development of like, you know, the trade trades uh but with Europeans or anything. So completely reliant on on native-made stuff.

SPEAKER_03 30:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:59

Um I think it's really important that we understand how much people of the past have really been, and this is gonna sound kind of hokey, but I really mean it in tune with nature.

SPEAKER_10 31:12

Oh, that is wow. I'm so intrigued with it.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

I mean, we're we forget we move we move from our air-conditioned cars or trucks to our air-conditioned buildings, and you know, we may pause to look up at the stars before we go inside, but um, you know, these people really lived and breathed the environment and knew how to make use of it. Now, I don't want to give the impression that there is like this sort of um kumbaya, you know, peacenick sort of conservationist native person. That's that's sort of a a a stereotype that we've that we made up. It is. You remember the Keep America Beautiful commercials from the 70s and 80s with the weeping, the weeping native person. All right, that's so we've kind of invented that in a way. Um, but uh I mean if there's a resource, you know, they're gonna use that resource uh as as much as we would, um, any as anybody anybody would. But um uh, you know, understanding where to where to go to get the clay for making a pot in which you must cook your supper. That's a a body of knowledge that has to be passed on, probably from mother to daughter, um, and it has to be practiced, or from grandmother to to granddaughter, and it has to be practiced and perfected. You know, this was school, right? Learning how to do those things. And every bit of it was about daily survival. At the same time, using the pot as an example, again, um a lot of what was happening was never really separated in my mind at least, um, and I would encourage you to talk to living native peoples to get their take on this, but it's never really that far separated from spiritual beliefs. When you think about a clay pot, um, think about everything that goes into it, all four of the major elements of the earth. Earth for the clay, water, because you gotta you gotta have water to mold that clay, fire to harden it, air to keep the fire going. So just making that clay pot itself is is about experiencing the earth and all of the elements on the earth. And then think about cooking that pot, cooking with that pot, um, and the steam rising out of it up to the heavens, right? You've got this connection between, say, the upper world and this world and the beneath world where the earth, the clay itself came from. And this is a common way that many um native peoples in the southeast viewed the cosmos sort of in three layers upper world, this world, and beneath world. And each layer we know was probably associated with certain animals. So frogs and snakes and fish would be, you know, beneath world. This world uh would be a good example, would be a deer, right? And then you've got all of the birds, for instance, associated with the upper world. And some of the the uh drawings and sculptures of Southeastern peoples will represent um uh probably characters from mythology that either combine these animals and these worlds together, or they're you know, they're um they're part of a story that kids might have been told growing up or that's represented in the heavens. And I don't want to get too, you know, uh weird on you, but this is this you is really difficult in many um traditional societies to separate your everyday living from your spiritual life. It's not just set aside for you know one time during the week in one place, it's all the time everywhere.

SPEAKER_05 35:25

We need to learn from that a little bit. So it would be like a I may be way off, like an effigy bowl with a wood duck head.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Absolutely that would exactly, exactly. And even some of the pottery that I've that I've brought here that's on the table, um, that dates to about 500 years ago. And the designs on it, um, I argue are symbols of the upper world and the middle world and the beneath world that were uh that women were choosing to put on the pottery at that particular time for a particular reason. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 36:02

Well, I think everything you just said is why we're so fascinated uh with all of it. I mean, for here, for us at Moss Yog, like we try to live this, you know, one with nature, you know, kind of lifestyle, but it never, we're never gonna get close.

SPEAKER_05 36:17

I mean, it uh I I took ceramics in college. I was an art student, and uh I remember my professor kind of bringing that up. Uh and one time we went to a site and dug our own clay and tried to make our own pot. Of course, mine blew up in the kiln, but no, the the fire when we fired it in a real fire. But uh I've always thought that would be really neat, like to make your own pot and like cook a pot of beans in it in the in the in a fire.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I know a lot, I know several people who kind of that's their hobby, right? Is to figure out how it was done, how this was perfected, and and how um and how uh yeah, go go the whole way, right? Like grow the food, cook the food that way. And we're learning a lot. We're learning a lot. We, you know, as archaeologists, we've we've learned um pretty well how to read the these artifacts over time and and interpret them. And when you combine all that data that we know how to gather with uh with say stories that anthropologists collected very early on from living native peoples, and then you talk to modern day Native peoples, you put all that together, and you can come up with pretty good, I think, pretty accurate idea of not just how people were living, but what they thought about how they felt how they felt about it.

SPEAKER_05 37:46

I don't even know where to go. It's so interesting. Like uh I it it brought it this kind of reminded me of one of my favorite plant species is the Chickasaw plum. Um and I've heard or I I think I believe that they selected that uh for like bigger fruits and whatnot. Um and it seems like you can go to one spot and they're almost kind of weedy and wild and the fruits are small, and then you go to another area and you may find some with a lot bigger fruits on it that may taste a little better. I just would like to believe that that they were selected.

SPEAKER_09 38:22

They were doing it.

SPEAKER_02 38:23

Yeah, why not? Why not? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:25

Well, talk to us about the daily life. I'd like to learn how they fished. Um I mean, I can envision how they probably hunted and stuff, but can you explain some of that kind of stuff to us? Just the daily life.

SPEAKER_05 38:36

So um with uh maybe with this era we were talking about, like the more recent.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

Yeah, with this, with this, with this era. Um, and I'll speak specifically to the Black Prairie because the Black Prairie is a bit I've been studying that in the Alabama Black Prairie for the past several years. And um it's kind of there's there's been an interesting sort of debate uh regarding the Black Prairie in daily life. You know, could you sustain hundreds of people, thousands of people in the Black Prairie um in the prehistoric past, water being one concern, right? Um sources of of uh permanent water. Um fishing, you know, they had fish hooks. We we found them made of bone. Um and um I wonder in the Black Prairie specifically, one problem that had to be overcome was a lack of good stone for making stone tools for everyday life. You needed stone, right? You needed it for your spear points, for your arrowheads, for your knives, for your awls, for your drills, for your whole toolkit, right? Is stone or bone, or perhaps antler. Um, but if you didn't have a lot of it, what did you have in the Black Prairie that you could use as quiz time?

SPEAKER_04 40:04

Yeah, turning the table. Uh cane, uh cane.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

Yeah, absolutely. Cane, sharpen cane. Uh loads and loads of river cane would have been important. Um, so river cane, sharpen river cane, maybe um uh blackthorn.

SPEAKER_04 40:22

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Those things are scary and they're hardened too.

SPEAKER_04 40:27

Oh, like the honey locus thorns.

SPEAKER_02 40:29

Honey locust thorns, yeah, honey locust thorns. Um had one puncture a tractor tire on a project not not long ago. Um so uh daily life depended on stone and having the right materials, having enough of it. And um, if you didn't have it, knowing people who did and making friends with them and trading for it.

SPEAKER_05 40:51

I guess I could go uh about a hundred miles west and get get some maybe.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

About a hundred miles west, get some. Yeah, you could go south down to the uh Tallahato Formation and get some uh or go way up to the Tennessee Valley and and find plenty like what's on the table here, that that chart there. You can also get some from river gravels if you go to big rivers and get and get um pieces of uh river gravel and and chip that into uh what you need, perhaps.

SPEAKER_05 41:28

I guess that's what I was thinking of because there was gravel in Holmes County where I grew up and you Yeah, that's right. But some of the artifacts you find wouldn't be from that gravel, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:38

Right. That's right, yeah. So uh the the way of life really ch uh you know it it changed over time over the thousands of years. So you've got very early on people perhaps hunting megafauna, right? The big game, big woolly game, right? Um, with big spear points, right? The earliest, perhaps we're not positive about this, but perhaps the earliest being something like a Clovis point or a fluted point, right? Um 12,000, 13,000 years old. And if you line up, if you've ever seen one of these posters or drawings of of the progression of spear point technology through the millennia, you'll notice that the the sizes and the shapes change over time. So some of that is is change in technology, not just a change in style, but a change in technology, and that technology may be a response to a change in the environment, right? We know that the the megafauna disappeared around 10,000 years ago. So there has to be a shift in what people are focusing on for their major source of food. Um then there were there were periods of time when people began to really settle in larger villages and they would take advantage of food resources, say in the uplands during the fall and the winter, do more uh hunting, you know, with animals like deer, um, who were focused on mast, you know, acorns and such. And then the spring and summer be down in the river valleys looking for just about anything that would crawl to eat, right? Uh to fish, you know, fishing or or or slithering about, right? Anything that you could.

SPEAKER_03 43:22

Um uh you know, I I grew up in Montgomery and there was the archives there in Montgomery, which I've toured, and there's just thousands of artifacts in there. And I think every major city in the South has something like that. Um University of West Alabama, y'all probably have a collection of artifact. Mississippi State does. The Tennessee Valley up uh if you ever travel up into Florence, there's this giant mound, and then there's a building there that's just full of artifacts. There's just so many. It it's and and we run in people, everybody's grandfather seems like has a cigar box full of it. Must have been millions of Indigenous people that have lived here in the South through millennia.

SPEAKER_02 44:04

There have been millions, yeah. I think that it's really hard to estimate the you know, get an accurate estimate of how many people, but there have been millions, right? Wow. And the one reason and and I will I'll say two things. Um one reason we tend to focus on, say, spear points or arrowheads and pottery is because those are the things that last, right? That's what we have that survives. But there was a lot more to daily life than spear points and stone and pottery. There was basketry and there was fabric and there was rope and nets, right, for catching birds and small game and fish, and um, you know, probably bone um artifacts and wood, all the wood artifacts that, you know, all of the the wood that would have been used for for making houses to making, you know, whatever you can think of. Um, and uh all of that kind of disappears. So uh I just I think sometimes we get a little biased view of say uh a native household of the past, we think it's just full of stone and pottery, but there would have been full of all kinds of material culture. And the second thing I'd like to point out too is that around a thousand years ago, or a little a little bit more than a thousand years ago, there was a major shift in the way people were living. And that is that they began to rely more on growing their own food and settling in large villages or in little farmsteads near a larger village, um, kind of like we do today, and uh growing corn. They're corn farmers for the last, you know, 500 years. And um, and that involves a major shift in in um the way you relate to other people on the landscape, the way you feel about the land, right? You start putting your labor into a piece of piece into a piece of property, you start to feel a little territorial about it, right?

SPEAKER_07 46:08

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

And uh I wouldn't know anything about that.

SPEAKER_07 46:11

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 46:12

So that we can't forget about the role of agriculture in uh native life ways, especially in the the last 500 to a thousand years. They figured out a lot.

SPEAKER_10 46:22

Yeah, they did and and what isn't there a um uh speaking to that hunter-gatherer period before they made the transition into, I guess, agriculture. Um there's a I I it I just remember this. I when you were talking, I remember it from being in school, there's a a theory of something like the original affluent society was hunters and gatherers.

SPEAKER_02 46:42

Oh, right. So I think I know what you're talking about. Um are you talking about like how in in some hunting-gathering societies um it it was is believed that people had more leisure time, yeah, more time for uh yeah activities. For activities. If you're not a nomadic hunter-gatherer, I would imagine that in the southeastern part of North America that could have been true because food is abundant here. Lots of water, lots of animals, you know, really a really uh an abundant of abundance of of things to survive on. Um sources of stone, you know, in some areas are especially abundant. So I could I can see that playing out that that um people sp were able to spend uh quite a bit of time uh telling stories and teaching these skills to one another, to their children, and yeah, run out and knock a couple of deer in the head and hang out for a couple weeks. Right. Sure.

SPEAKER_05 47:51

I'm kind of interested in what their structures were like. Um you know, can you can you go into that a little bit, you know, maybe specific to this area and and some of the more recent so like houses? Correct.

SPEAKER_02 48:05

Yeah, so um so let's start by dispelling the myth that the further back you go in time, the more likely it is that somebody lives in a cave.

SPEAKER_04 48:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 48:16

Okay. Um there's this kind of there's this stereotype of like, you know, earliest humans being cavemen and you know, dragging their women around by their hair and having a big club or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Keeping all this stuff in it. Right. Um, one reason that we find a lot of uh evidence for human life in caves is because caves are protected environments. So there's a lot left to be found in a cave. But um I think um if we if we stick to our say 500 year ago, you know, just prior to European contact theme, houses would have been um more or less uh the ones were seen more or less square, um made of upright wooden posts and um um maybe a foot, foot and a half apart, and jammed between the upright wooden posts horizontally would be like smaller sticks called waddle. You fill that up with with smaller sticks as much as you can, and then you plaster over the whole thing with daub or uh clay. Uh clay mixed maybe with like grass or Spanish moss or something like this to make it hold together really well. And then you'd have uh sort of uh um grass or rattan or cane roofs, depending on where you are. Palm meadows, you know, south here and in some river areas, I'm sure, would have been really, really helpful for that. Um it's not uncommon to see evidence for houses to be burned. Um and what happens is we find as archaeologists um big lumps of like brick, it looks like uh irregular brick, and that's that daub that has just fired to brick hardness. But if when you when you look at it, if it has lots of obvious impressions of grasses and little sticks and stuff, that's probably from a burned native house. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:23

Wow, yeah. Yeah, so teepees were more of a western thing.

SPEAKER_02 50:28

Teepees were a western thing, yes. I mean, you can have a like a lean to, and there are actually some very early um European um artist depictions of of native shelters that are like lean twos and they're covered with um palmetta branches, for instance. But these were more temporary shelters, right? Um after people began settling in large villages, they're not they're investing in in making a house that's more substantial, right? TP is not a not a uh southeastern thing. Yeah. And that kind of brings to mind too the the fact that that native peoples across the southeast were not like monolithic. They weren't like just one single culture. I mean, you're talking about dozens of different languages. Um, you know, you could start it, say, the the Gulf Coast, and you're gonna find people down there who call themselves one thing, and you go up into the Mobile Bay or up into the Delta, and you're gonna find a different group of people who maybe speak a related language but not exactly the same and who make their pots all you know completely differently. Then you're gonna go up the river. Let's say you go up the Alabama River, um, you're gonna find, you know, people finding, you know, doing it a different way. And then you go up the Tom Bigby River, up to say the Columbus area, you're gonna find people who are who are um making their pots, you know, a different way, the different style of living, different way of talking. So it was really, really culturally diverse. And that's something that I think we tend to forget when all we've got is the all we've got is the the the pots and the stone to look at. But um one of the reasons that archaeologists are so obsessed with pottery is not only because we have a lot of it, but because the styles of the pottery, like the form of the pot and the way it's decorated, and all of that is like say walking out into a parking lot and looking at styles of uh cars and trucks to figure out when they were made.

SPEAKER_05 52:35

Um so I don't know if we're set up for this, but is there is there something on some of this pottery you have displayed that you could show us uh I don't know what what they were saying with that design?

SPEAKER_02 52:49

Yeah, sure. Actually, um if you could you can grab that one that's right there in front of you. Um yeah. Uh that one or the or the one next to it, yeah. That one.

SPEAKER_05 53:02

Don't drop it. I'm not drop it.

SPEAKER_02 53:05

That's a a lar fragment of a large bowl. It came from the Black Prairie of Alabama. And the rim of it sort of flared outward so that if you were looking directly down onto the bowl from above, it would look like the rays of the sun. Oh so that's a symbol for the upper world.

SPEAKER_05 53:28

Wow. Yeah, see, there's the rim.

SPEAKER_03 53:30

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_03 53:33

And you rarely find completely intact bowls. It's mostly that's right.

SPEAKER_02 53:37

Yeah, very uncommon to find anything intact. Um these these are larger than average fragments because they came from a big uh pit, like a feasting pit, and we think that they were tossed in their hole on purpose as like a harvest renewal ceremony type event. So, but it's it's really rare to find anything, you know, in that size. The other reason it's rare to find things that big too is just because of you know 150 more years of plowing tends to break stuff up into little pieces. But we've gotten really good at looking at tiny pieces and and figuring out um what exactly it what exactly you know where it came from and about when it came from.

SPEAKER_05 54:23

Yeah, bowls don't last very long at my house either.

SPEAKER_03 54:27

We used to have a place to that we had to hunt call it was called Portland Landing. It was on the Alabama River, and we we would frequently find little pieces pottery shards. Shards. And that that you could see some of the larger pieces, you would see like some somebody had engraved something on lines across it or something. Right, yes, it's just really unique looking.

SPEAKER_02 54:47

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 54:48

And a lot of the um the the airheads or or spear points we found in there were white. It was like a uh quartz Tallahada quartzite, I bet. That that's what that's what I thought it was.

SPEAKER_02 55:01

Yeah, it could either be quartz pebble or which is white on the inside or or that Tallahada.

SPEAKER_10 55:07

Which was drastically different than what we grew up finding around here.

SPEAKER_02 55:11

Yes, yeah, right. There's some pottery that I've studied from South Alabama, and it has on the outside of it, it has the impressions of nets. And so they were like the while the pot was still soft before it was fired, they had it, they had pressed a net into the outside of it. Some of the nets have big holes, some of them have small holes, you know, like for different type game. And what's really cool about it is you can take a piece of clay and press it onto the surface of that that broken pottery now, and when you peel it off, you can see clearly how the fibers were twisted and exactly what type of knots they were tying.

SPEAKER_05 55:57

Wowzers. Yeah. I mean, you could probably figure out what kind of fiber it was if you there's some pretty good guesses out there, I think.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:05

Hmm. So it would be common for there to be a like a village or a community, and then that and then the the guys that were would hunt, they might have a camp that they would go to if when they were gonna hunt the uplands that they would utilize every year. And you because a lot of times we find I I've got friends that think they know a lot about this, and they'll say this is a hunting camp here. So you're on this side of this creek, and it wasn't a village, this is what it was used for.

SPEAKER_02 56:32

That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. It's that's possible. That is that's very possible.

SPEAKER_03 56:36

And then then in that community, there might be a few folks that we had a guy that sat right where you're sitting and napped some airheads for us. Oh, nice, yeah. And and it took a lot of effort. So I and he I mean, so I that looked like that would be a hard thing to learn to do, but there would be someone in that community that was probably really good at that and they spent the majority of their time maybe doing that and teaching others, and then lady somebody you mentioned ladies making the pots. And so would there be would there would there everybody have something they were really good at and that that's kind of what they did or I you know that's a great question.

SPEAKER_02 57:11

I know I I'm gonna I'm not afraid to say I don't know. Um that's a really good question. I mean you you'd like to think that everybody had some amount of skill to do these or a knowledge to be able to um, you know, make a make a knife, you know, get a sharp edge on a rock, right? Yeah um, but I'm sure there were there were people who were just especially skilled at it. And in fact, we know in the um in the Mississippian period when you had really powerful chiefs um living on top of these big earthen mounds, that they w often had access to some finer pottery um that was clearly made by people are real artisans, you know, people who were born with that skill, just like you know, we we see people today who just are have that talent, right? And um so I imagine that there were some people who were more skilled than others, but these um I don't know that it necessarily conferred any particular um like power advantage to them. It probably gave them some social status if they if they were if they were particularly skilled, but not necessarily any more authority, if that makes sense, if we compare to other um tr more traditional societies around the world.

SPEAKER_03 58:41

Well, when we see these mounds, um there's a bunch in Moundville, Alabama, people should go see that if they had never done it. But from time to time we hear about mounds and on other properties and stuff. What did those really symbolize, if anything, if we could generalize like that?

SPEAKER_02 58:56

Right. So there are several periods of mound construction. Um the earliest mounds are found in Louisiana and go back um before the Aztecs. I mean, they're thousands of years old, several thousands of years old. Um then you have a period of mound construction where it seems that they're primarily burial mounds. Those tend to be sort of conical or rounded off. Um there's one on 45, right, just south of here. Um and then you have a period where the mounds are are leveled or or flat topped, and these are for um elite members of society to live on. And they are the the symbolism behind the mounds um uh varies in some places you'll see alternating colors of dirt, like lighter dirt, and then like a like a uh say a lighter dirt and then maybe like a redder dirt. White and red are important colors, sort of uh in the dichotomy of of um the native cosmos. Um and there'll just be layering like that. Um it's sort of seen as sort of like a um earth island, and every year there would be renewal periods where the trash is swept off the top and you know, new cap of fresh clean dirt is put on top. But everybody would have to would be participating in this. So I often ask my students, like, why if you were living in a Mississippian village and you're working hard on your farm, would you take a portion of your free time during the year and dig dirt into baskets and basket after basket after basket go, you know, sweat and put it on top of this mound to make it higher for that elite person to live on? Why would you do that?

SPEAKER_05 1:00:47

Maybe a almost like insurance. So, like if if I don't know, if if all of you peasants down there flooded out, you would at least have somebody to keep the population going up on top of the hill. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:01

I like that idea. Well, one reason is because you're not just doing this as a good citizen, it's an act of worship to participate in these types of activities because the elite members of society are seen as sort of having a uh being more closely related to the ancestors, right? Right in all capital letters. Um and um so you're not just doing this because someone told you to, you're doing it because that person has some closer connection to the spiritual world than you do. Um, so it's an act of it's an act of worship, right? And we know how motivating religion is across human societies. Um and um so that's you know, that's one explanation behind that. Um the organization of some of these larger mound towns, and there are a lot of them in the Mississippi Delta, right? You um is sometimes symbolic itself, um, laid out sort of on the cardinal directions, um, with big um plaza, you know, or empty area in the interior. Um, some of these mounds um may represent um the seats of authority for different clans. Um and uh so they're not they're not laid out haphazardly. There's there's symbolism in in all of it. Some of it, you know, we're still trying to figure out, um, and we may never know. But um, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:36

It's a lot of Matt had to take a lot of effort, Lanny, to build a mount. And when you look at Mount Will.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:41

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:42

Oh my goodness. It'd take a village for sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:45

Yeah, or Emerald Mound over in in uh West Mississippi. Emerald Mound is huge. It's an enormous, enormous construction.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:54

Never even heard of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:55

The Mississippi Mound Trail uh is definitely worth looking up online. Mississippi Mound Trail, and it's one of the mounds on that trail.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:04

Okay. I heard somebody reference the Batesville Mounds the other day.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:08

Yep, Batesville, that's right. Winterville, they're a whole bunch of people.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:11

And I guess through the years that a lot of times if this mound happened to be in a field before people were really interested in trying to preserve the past, a lot of these were lost to agricultural.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:22

They were. They were, you know, you've got modern day farmers coming in and seeing this as a real obstacle to efficient farming. Um, and so a lot of them were plowed down over the years. A lot of mounds in the eastern part of the U.S. were used for road fill. Um, so the ones that we have left, we really do need to preserve. And uh yeah, and they're amazing. They're amazing.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:50

Well, let me ask this. So it it in today's modern times, uh is there a black market for people buying these kind of art these artifacts and like an under b underworld that kind of goes on and people that go places and excavate at night where they're not supposed to. Does that still happen?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:11

I don't know. I would I would kind of assume that it does. I would certainly be the last person to tell because of the the myth the myth that, you know, oh don't tell an archaeologist if you've got artifacts or site on your land, you know, the government's gonna come take your stuff away from you, right? Which is completely false. Um uh I imagine so. Uh I know that there's a lot of trading and buying and selling that just happens at artifact shows. You know, it's not underground at all. Pardon the pun.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:44

Yeah, right. Yeah, there's a lot of Facebook Facebook groups and oh yeah, oh yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:50

There are, yeah, there are. Yep. And and I'm not, you know, um, I mean, some of my some of my good friends are, you know, started out as collectors or are are collectors, and um, they know a lot of times a lot more about certain artifact point points or you know, uh air points than I do, um, because that's their hobby.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:14

It it reminds me a lot of uh, you know, like we're really into habitat and land management and planting this green field for the deer, and uh people obsess over that, you know. So you don't really have to be a wildlife biologist or a forester uh to these days to to have the amount of knowledge of of somebody that's in the profession because there's so much available to learn from.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:41

Right, right. And I actually I brought a book um that um I hope if you're not familiar with, you should be familiar with. It's the handbook of Mississippi's Prehistoric Indians and Artifacts.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:54

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:55

And this was written by um one of my my friends who started out here. Was you know, he and his father has some land that they hunted on, and he was, you know, making green fields and kept finding artifacts and artifacts and artifacts and wanted to know more about it. Um, and um he finally, you know, he he befriended a couple of archaeologists in Alabama, including me, and um he realized that there wasn't one place where you could go to to find all the information. And so he made that one place into a handbook of Alabama artifacts, and now he's made one for Mississippi.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:30

Wow. Who's the author?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:31

His name is David Johnson, and to get one of these, you go to handbookseries.org.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:39

That's a good look. That's a thick book. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:41

It is a thick book.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:42

Lane is too thick for you. So have any pictures?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:46

Yeah. And if you want to know more about what to do if you find an archaeological site, you go to msarchaeology.com.org. Sorry, msarchaeology.org. That's the website for the Mississippi Archaeological Association, and they have a link on there that'll tell you what to do if you find a site, you know, how to record it, that that sort of thing if you're interested in doing that.

SPEAKER_10 1:07:09

And what's the site again for the book?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:11

Yeah, for the book, it's just handbookseries.org.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:15

That's a great looking book.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:17

It is a great, great resource. And it's all color, it's got all the different point types, it has important Mississippi sites in it, it has information on um, you know, uh collecting and and recording, and it's just a it's a really great book. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:36

Yeah, I found the site um once and uh you know thought I was the first person to find it, and uh I looked into it and found out that it already been recorded.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:48

Oh, well that's good.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:49

Pretty neat.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:49

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. As far as recording sites goes, it's not it doesn't mean anything except that, you know, like in I think in Jackson, in Alabama, it would be at Mounville, there's like a database that puts a dot on a map. And those dots on the maps will just say there's a site here, it's about this old, it's about this big. Um those databases are not publicly accessible. So it's not like anybody's gonna say, oh, there's a Paleo-Indian site here on this person's land. I'm gonna go up in there one night and start digging, you know, trespassing or something. It's all like protected data, but it's like if you were, you know, recording the location of artifacts, it just gives us lots of patterns.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:33

I can see how that would be interesting. Oh, yeah. So so I think we would be remiss if we didn't ask you about the importance of salt to the I want to. I'm glad you brought that up, Bobby.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:44

Right, right. Yeah, I know. It sounds like you know, she studies salt, like this typical egghead esoteric, you know, academic thing. Uh well, so salt in ancient societies uh was really essential for health, especially in those societies that were agricultural and where people were working outside and the heat, you need an extra source of salt to stay healthy, to maintain the level of of w water fluids in your body. Um in hunter-gatherer days, generally the theory is that you get enough salt from the flesh of animals and certain plants that you're eating. But when you're relying primarily on, say, corn or grains of some sort, um, it's important that you seek uh a source of salt. So salt in the past was a really important mineral, really important substance. It was um not found everywhere. So groups that had a source of salt in their territory had a source of power and wealth. And um people, you know, and they would trade it out. So I like to, when people say, well, that just sounds, you know, why is that important today? I like to compare it to oil today. You know, we've got right now high gas prices because our supply of oil is blocked up in the Strait of Hormuz. Well, in the past, salt would have been very important for people's health. And if you have cities of people who are relying on agricultural, you know, uh grains for a large portion of their calories, salt's going to be important not only to add to their food, but also for preserving their food prior to refrigeration. It's important in making textiles or dyeing textiles, it's important in tanning hides and leather. Uh so and of course it has medicinal properties, it's antibacterial. Um, so um salt was especially important in the past, and people were, you know, the lengths that people would go to make salt and to trade it and to acquire it were are kind of comparable to what we do to with oil today. Um, and I got into it because there's a source of salt in southwest Alabama, just north of the Mobile Tinsal Delta, there are some salt springs. And um around 1100 years ago, about the time that they started relying on corn for a major source of their diet, native people began making salt. And then eventually, I argue that some people associated with the Mountain chiefdom came down the rivers and be sort of took over those salt production sites and uh began making it themselves, sort of almost at an industrial scale.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:39

You know, we had a guest on one time that was from Louisiana, then they had a salt. That's right. Over at Tobasco. Tabasco.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:45

Yes. We interviewed the Tabasco historian.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:47

Oh, Shane Bernard.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:49

You've done a lot of work with Tabasco.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:51

Yes, I did. Yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:53

Avery Island, is that what we're doing?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:54

Yes, that Avery Island is a salt dome. Yes, he's a friend of mine. There's a connection there, actually. My dissertation advisor worked on Avery Island as an archaeologist, got to know the family. I went back to Avery Island with him to do my master's thesis on the original Tabasco Sauce Factory, learned about salt there. We came back to Alabama, and then he said, you know, so now you know about salt. How do you feel about continuing with that? But in Alabama. So yeah, that's full circle.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:26

So how was I mean, how was salt made?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:30

Well, you can either mine it if you've got a source of rock salt, right? If you don't, then um you've got to evaporate it out of salt water somehow, either on the coast or at inland salt springs. A lot of the inland salt springs, especially in the um, say in lower Alabama, are saltier than the Gulf. So um early on, people were taking the salt water into small bowls and basically just putting those bowls directly on a fire or hot coals and evaporating it that way. Um that kind of becomes inefficient because if you're using fire exclusively to evaporate that water, you're gonna run out of firewood. You're gonna have to go farther and farther and farther and farther. So they started making bigger pots. These things are sometimes huge. Under the baseball stadium across from Nashville, Tennessee on the river, there was a big salt production site there. Um, and it's some of the biggest um bowls you've ever seen. And they were made big that way and shallow to promote uh solar evaporation of that salt water, and then once you've got this concentrated brine, then you can heat it over hot coals and it is just more a more efficient process.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:50

Wow, that is so cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:51

Yeah, it's super cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:52

We need to try to make our own.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:54

Yeah, it's super cool. And incidentally, the these big clay vessels are called salt pans, and the only way you can really manipulate something like that before the clay is hardened is to support it with a piece of fabric or netting. And so most of them on the exterior have the impressions of fabrics and nettings, and it's one of the it is the largest source of information about um pre-contact textiles that we have is from the impressions on those salt pans.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:31

Pass pass the salt, please. Well, and here in the South, you have have to pass the salt and the pepper, otherwise you're not polite.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:38

That is true.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:39

According to my mom.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:40

There's so much information here. It it it is it's really fascinating how they figured these things out. And I'm thinking about you know, back then somebody like a Dr. Ned back then was smart enough to say we need this in our diet. They figured that out, Lanny. Either that or they died.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:58

But I mean, can you imagine having to eat stuff without salt?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:02

Yeah. Corn corn pudding with no salt.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:05

I mean, anything with no salt.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:08

It is interesting. When you go and travel and talk, what a what what's what's a common thing people ask you that we haven't asked you today?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:16

Uh what's the coolest thing you've ever found?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:19

Ah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:20

That's a common question. Um I guess one of the coolest things I've ever found was a big stain in the ground at Fort Tom Beckby. Um the other reason archaeologists dig carefully is because uh anything that you do to the ground in the past, you're digging a trench for a house or post hole for a fence or you're making a fire or you're making a trash pit, it changes the chemistry of the soil and it stains it. And those stains in the ground will last hundreds and even thousands of years. And at Fort Time Beckby, I found an angular stain, like an L-shaped stain in the ground. It was dark gray and it stood out really well against that chalk subsoil, and it turned out to be the southwest bastion corner of the French fort.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:14

You found it.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:16

Yeah, and that was really cool because once we had that corner, we could compare it to the 1737 map that we have of the fort and see how accurate that map was. The map turned out to be very accurate. It was drawn by a French engineer. So basically, by locating that corner, that stain in the ground, we could then use the map to find anything else in the fort.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:38

So it was like a it helped you find the scale of uh of the map, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:43

Oh, yeah. The scale of the map was is we were kind of testing. It was on the map, but it was like in some archaic form of measurement, like toise or something like that. So we had to figure out how that worked and then and then check it against the map itself, and it turned out to be accurate. So it became like a X marks the spot sort of sort of thing.

SPEAKER_10 1:17:03

Where do you keep a map from the 1700s?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:05

Well, it's in France, but fortunately, so much of that stuff is online now.

SPEAKER_10 1:17:10

Oh, okay. So that's what's easy to figure out.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:12

Yeah, fortunately it's didn't have it rolled up in the truck. No, did not.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:16

You know, I had a I had a friend one time, Rick Kelly. We all all met him. Mr. Rick. And he was fascinated, he is fascinated by the all this stuff. And he told me that this was many years ago. He'd was going turkey hunting on a place, and when he showed up, there was a bulldozer there, and they had been pushing out a road. And when he came out when it was daylight, as he's walking back, he was kind of he looked down and in the bulldozer tracks was about a six-inch point, half of a point.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:45

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:46

And he he was just so so excited, and then he realized the bulldozer was only so many, not too far away, and and this was in the track of the bulldozer. And he thought, I wonder. And he started counting the back and back up. Yep, all the way back up. Uh and he he crawled around on that bulldozer and found the other half of that. It was still in the dirt in the tracks. Yeah. And put them together. And it was like a 10-inch long that's I don't know what it would have been a spear point or super cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:12

Sometimes people, you know, back then just did things because they could and they thought it was cool.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:18

Yeah, that's just somebody showing off as my bet. Yeah. Well showing off their flint knapping skills. Yeah, caches.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:26

Yeah. Yeah. We had a guy those ceremonial points. You remember uh November South? Yeah. He said he was this the points he made were just beautiful. He's such an artist. And to but to watch him do that with some antler and a piece of deer skin over his head. He was tanning his own stuff too, and every part of it. And building bows himself. Oh, that's real impressive. So Richie, what about asking her a trivia question?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:51

That's a good question. Yep. So, first off, though, who is our trivia project buyer?

SPEAKER_10 1:18:57

Oh, Wes, right. Peanut patch. Bowled peanuts, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:01

Ashley, I'm sure Dan in Livingston, there's if you stop in a convenience store, you ever see the boiled peanuts? Yeah. That's our folks. The peanut patch. We're gonna do a deer hunt with them this this fall. Are we? Yeah. All right. Over a peanut butter. They're gonna bring Booba along. I don't know. Richie, we gotta work on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:18

So first though, before we get to our trivia, though, we have a listener who left a review on YouTube. We're on YouTube now. Yep. He listened to uh episode 436 with uh Mr. Alan Jenkins. Oh, yeah. And uh Lynch Turkey Calls. Uh so Chris Matthews 8690 left a review. Uh absolutely love hearing and learning about the history and the stories of the old call makers in the turkey world. Good to hear from old Mac Mac.

SPEAKER_10 1:19:44

Hey, I told you we need to have Mac Mac on again.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:48

I may have to miss I may have to skip the podcast more often so we can get some Mac Mac in our lives.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:53

So uh but you know, Chris Matthews is right. This this spring, it's been a lot of fun to listen to these older gentlemen tell their stories.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:00

Yeah, it's uh it's making calls.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:03

We uh you know I have i err said uh manufactured costs, but it in the past, but it they were made they made part they were they were they were making and often from just local things they had you know available to them, which is the coolest part to me.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:17

All right.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:18

What's the prize today? The prize is from Skullmaster here, uh Euro Mount DIY.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:23

Yeah, look at that.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:24

Bottom land decked down bottom land.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:27

That's the same guys that had the turkey plate uh that you gave away last week.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:30

Yeah, is it illusion technologies?

SPEAKER_10 1:20:32

Is that the really cool cool kit to DIY uh your own deer mount?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:39

Yep. Check it out.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:40

Skullmaster from Illusion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:43

All right, here's uh here's our finally to our trivia.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:45

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:46

So it's a layup. All right. In Native American terms or definitions, what does the word Alabama mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:55

Oh, yeah. Uh Alabama, let's see, is uh cane cutters or cane uh dwellers.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:04

It clear it had clearers. Yeah, thicket clearers.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:08

The thicket, yeah, reference to clear. Yeah, thicket clearers. Yep, yeah, yeah. Cane clearers.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:12

Yep. It's uh coming from the uh Choctaw language uh to mean uh plant gatherers or thicket clearers.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:19

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:20

That's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:21

I think it's a reference to cane personally. Yeah, yeah, the thickets.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:25

That makes sense. That was probably very useful to them. So see, we're here we go again. So the Choctaw and Chickasaw language, they're very similar.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:37

Yes, they're part of the same family group.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:39

What is that family? It's muskegan.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:41

Muskogee.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:42

Muskogee. Muskogee.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:44

I have a I have a recurved bow that is uh deer killer in I guess Muskogee. And the word I was told is it's a tubby. And it says it's a tubby on my bow.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:57

Oh, interesting. Wow, yeah. Deer killer. You know what Tom Beckby means, Tom Bigby.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:04

Box builder.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:05

Yeah, box maker, right. But the story goes that it's from uh that there was an older Choctaw man living on a little creek there, uh near where Fort Tom Beckby was established, and he was making burial boxes out of cedar. And so the creek came to be named Iditom Igbee, which meant box maker's creek. And that name Tom was the French ri you know shortened it to Tom Beckby, and then Tom Beckby was given to Tom Bigby River. The whole so the whole Tom Bigbee's named Coffin.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:44

How about that? That's where I live. Yeah. I live on the coffin creek. You know, it's when you look at a map though, or you travel going somewhere, there are so many names, so many cities, so many creeks that that that have uh have a uh a Native American influence on them. And then we've I guess Englishized them somehow to change them up just a little bit. But like over in Alabama, Silicaga.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:08

Oh, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:09

You know what that means? Same by buzzard roost. Oh would that be vulture roost or buzzard roost? Things we ponder. Actually, this has been so interesting. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, it's been fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:23

It's been a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:24

Where so can somebody follow you on social media or your work or what what if they wanted to?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:30

Oh no. I'm a I'm a social media shy. I'm so proud of you.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:35

Me too. You can read her publications. You can just Google her name and and uh like Dr. Ashley Doumas Archaeology, and you can find all kinds of cool stuff to read that she has done.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:49

Interesting. I should do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:51

Well, Dr. Ashley Doumas, and if you're with uh University of West Alabama, you've got a lot going on, a couple of books, and uh this new one coming out you've co-authored. Uh we're just uh real impressed and appreciate you spending time with us.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:05

Great.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:06

Lots of knowledge there. Yeah. Is there anything we need to cover? I can't think of anything at the moment.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:13

Yep. Oh, well. We'll do it on the next one. Yeah, we'll do it on the next one. Okay. Why don't you say goodbye, Dudley? Goodbye, Dudley. Get us out of here, Richie.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:21

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Game Keeper Podcast. And be sure to tune in again. Subscribe to Game Keeper Farming for Wildlife magazine, and don't miss the Mossy Oak Properties Fistful of Dirt podcast with my good buddy, Ronnie Gus Strickland.