MISSISSIPPI'S FIRST EZINE



A Window on the Past
by Bill Pitts

 

It was sometime around the early '60s when I first saw Emerald Mound near Natchez in south Mississippi. I don’t recall my exact age on that first visit, but I do remember being extremely impressed with its size. I thought it was big — way big. But, then again, I was quite small and anything larger than my parents' car would have looked huge to me.

So, with this in mind, I was wondering what my impressions of Emerald Mound would be today in the early spring of 2004. We turned off of the Natchez Trace Parkway near mile marker 10, just north of Natchez, and drove a mile west on a narrow winding road towards our destination. We arrived at the mound unexpectedly. I was distracted by the local hair salon and an abandoned country store on the left side of the road when Emerald Mound suddenly jumped into view on the right. It was not exactly the type of location I would have expected for the second largest Indian ceremonial mound in the United States.

But there it was; no visitors’ center, no concessionaires, no crowd. Just an empty parking lot and eight acres of history to wander over. The fact that we were only a small group on the mound that day made it seem that much larger. Once again, as when I was a child, I was very impressed.



This view looks southwest across the platform towards the larger of the two sub-mounds and the walkway up from the parking lot..


Cotter’s 1948 dig helped to give a general date to Emerald Mound through ceramic fragments found there.

Looking out across the vast platform of earth from the top of the trail that leads from the parking lot, I recalled a conversation I’d had a week earlier with Jim Barnett, the director of the Grand Village of the Natchez. I had asked him what there was to see besides the mound. He’d told me that “Not a lot of artifacts have been dug up at Emerald Mound.” Among archaeologists, continued Barnett, the philosophy of wanting to dig everything up has changed. If an archaeological site like Emerald Mound is being preserved under National Park Service ownership, then the best thing to do is leave it alone. “We have enough information from the two digs there to know the general time period that Emerald was built, to know who built it, and the way it was built,” he said. “And that’s enough information to interpret the site.”

Five ceremonial pipes, each approximately five inches long, were found at Emerald Mound in the early 20th Century by Vincent Perrault of Natchez. They were described by Calvin Brown in his book Archeology of Mississippi as (from left) a winged serpent, an owl or hawk, another winged serpent, an unidentifiable monster or animal, and a crouching man.
Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Barnett was referring to two digs that took place in 1948 and in 1972. The ’48 dig was directed by John L. Cotter under the auspices of the National Park Service. This took place just before the property was given to the Park Service. Among other items, ceramic fragments were found that helped archaeologists assign some general dates to Emerald Mound. The second and last dig was conducted by Jeffrey Brain of Harvard University. A series of small excavations uncovered more about the approximate age of the mound from pottery fragments found there.

Vincas Steponaitis, Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, was a student on the dig in 1972. He states that “Emerald is one of the largest and most spectacular mounds in North America.” Steponaitis told me that he eventually wrote up the results of the dig as his undergraduate thesis.

Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz ( 1695 – 1775) was an ethnographer, historian, and naturalist who lived with the Natchez Indians from 1718 to 1734. Here is an engraving of his showing the Great Sun being carried at the head of a procession of warriors.

Emerald Mound, built sometime around the 13th Century by ancestors of the Natchez people, was occupied during the Mississippian period and probably served as a ceremonial center. The Mississippian period was a time roughly between 800 AD and 1500 AD, when Native Americans were developing a mound-building culture unrivaled in all North America. Emerald is the second largest example of an earthen mound built by this culture while Monks Mound at the Cahokia Mounds Historic Site in Illinois, a United Nations World Heritage Site, rivals in size (at its base) any of the three great pyramids at Giza outside Cairo, Egypt, according to an article in the February issue of Discover magazine (“Uncovering America’s Pyramid Builders” Discover, Feb. ’04).

Remember that these mounds were built by hand, one basket of dirt piled upon another.
Look upon these works with that image in mind and marvel at the immensity of a project such as this.

Barnett says that the Emerald Mound location was abandoned prior to Rene-Robert de La Salle’s 1681 expedition down the Mississippi River for France. He also mentions that, unlike some other mounds, Emerald was not used for burials. John C. Tramp, writing about Emerald Mound in his book Prairie and Rocky Mountain Adventures, or Life in the West, recognized the magnificence of the structure in the 1870s. “When walking on the vast terrace one can but think of thousands who trod the same earth centuries ago, of the battle songs that might have rolled in thundering volumes into the still air above, of the chant over the dead, of the ceremonies of a wild and mysterious worship—and of the dreadful hour, when before the tempest of battle or the anger of pestilence, national power melted away, and the surge of empire, in its flow to other lands, ebbed from this mural thrown, leaving it voiceless and a desert.”

In May of 1838, Tramp explored Emerald Mound along with “a large company of gentlemen, about twenty-five in number,” contemplating “the vastness of the creation” that “renders a full measure of homage to the proud unknown nation that left behind them such a mysterious hieroglyphic of power,” while uncovering pottery that exhibited “a rare, and oftentimes beautiful structure.”

Following in Tramp’s footsteps 134 years later, it’s easy to understand his feelings about Emerald Mound. There is nothing else in our common experience that compares. Standing atop the larger sub-mound, the wind gives one an unnatural sensation of movement.

And looking out over the broad expanse of the plaza below, the scene of countless ceremonies, one can begin to gain a very limited glimpse of this site through the eyes of the legendary chief, the Great Sun, standing high above his subjects, on level with the tree tops, closer to his god, the Sun, from whom he is descended.

Emerald Mound is truly a remarkable sight, well worth the trip no matter where you live. Don’t make it a quick stop-and-go visit, though. Plan to spend at least an hour there. Walk the length of the plaza. Sit atop the smaller sub-mound for a while and gain a feel for the immensity of this structure. Climb the steps to the top of the larger sub-mound and gaze out over the tree tops as the Great Sun might once have.

In the words of Steponaitis, “It’s one of Mississippi’s great archaeological landmarks.”

 

This newspaper photograph (left) shows the first passenger train on the Mississippi Central Railroad that once ran from Natchez to Hattiesburg. Part of the Longleaf Trace follows this old route.


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