If we think at all about the earliest inhabitants of south Louisiana, we tend to think of them as living on the higher and drier places away from the coast. But archaeologists have found abundant evidence that ancient people were living in our wetlands thousands of years ago, and living well for those times.
There is some debate about just how many thousands of years, and we hear many theories about what brought them here in the first place, but one of the big attractions might have been one that still brings food lovers here – oysters on the half shell.
Ian Brown doesn’t make that precise point in his report on one of the most significant studies of the southwest Louisiana coast (The Petite Anse Project, Louisiana Archaeological Society, 2015), but he provides a description very suggestive to minds (such as mine) that run as much to imagination as rigorous scientific fact.
“The marshes … are truly a classic representation of nature’s bounty,” he writes. “They are not only picturesque, what with the incredible bird life that paints the landscape with vibrant colors, but the region is absolutely teeming with edible wildlife. An almost infinite variety of fish inhabit the area, which are preyed upon by a multitude of small land animals.
Bradshaw
Bradshaw
“Shell fish… also make use of locations where the water conditions are just right. It was these organisms that provided a solid foundation for human occupation, quite literally. What started as small piles of discarded shells, the product of simple meals, grew over the years to massive mounds of clams and oysters. For millennia, Indians returned to the spots where the shellfish thrived, and as they did, they came to realize that these deposits were getting larger. Soon the shell middens were high enough to camp on, and so they did, often for extended periods.”
Once the ancients began staying on the middens, it was all but inevitable that they would discover that the cheniers, just a shell toss away, were solid enough for permanent living, and probably more comfortable than a pile of oyster shells. “Whereas the shell middens … were occupied seasonally as camps, much as they are today, cheniers were big enough to support much larger populations throughout the year,” Brown writes.
He did substantial research on Avery Island and on Pecan Island, among other places. It seems that salt was one of the things that attracted the first Avery Island settlers and that Pecan Island may have been one of the first places where settlers tried at least rudimentary agriculture to supplement the meat, fish, clams, and oysters harvested from the surrounding marsh.
Brown and Richard S. Fuller Jr. did a second study at Pecan Island and concluded that a series of mounds called the Morgan site was one of the most important along the southwest Louisiana coast. The mounds were occupied by one or more groups of settlers during what is known as the Coles Creek period, about AD 700 to 1000.
One of the most intriguing items found there was a piece of carved deer antler that has come to be called the Morgan Effigy. A local man, not the archaeologists, found it when he was digging a load of fill dirt for his property.
“The most fabulous artifact discovered so far at Morgan did not come from any of our excavations,” the scientists reported. “It is an exquisite human effigy carved from a piece of deer antler. … It is stylistically unique for the region and, to our knowledge, is the only piece of non-ceramic art … of its kind [from the period when the mound was built] ever found.” The effigy is now part of a permanent display at the Alliance Center in Abbeville, and a drawing of it is used as the logo for the Vermilion Historical Society.
The scientists also uncovered many pieces of pottery from sites across the marshes. most of them from cooking pots or urns used for storage. However, some of the pieces appear to have come from neat little bowls that would have been just the right size to hold horseradish dipping sauce – but that stretches even my malleable mind a bit too far.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
