Plaquemine Archaeology

Preface

I wish I could be sure when I ¤rst encountered the term Plaquemine, but it cannot be less than 50 years ago. Probably it occurred when I was in Ann Arbor in 1949–1950 with Jimmy Grif¤n, although I trust that my earlier Yale mentor, Ben Rouse, could not have been ignorant of it either, due to his amazingly broad knowledge of world archaeology and his having been the editor of American Antiquity. In the text herein, I am cited as using the term in a 1956 article! Wow, how little one remembers of one’s own past. However, we Lower Valley scholars must not be too brazen in our knowledge and usage. I am sure that we cannot make Plaquemine a broadly known term in the eastern United States or even in the southeastern corner of our nation. But we can take heart from other quite well-known terminology and realize that every area in American archaeology has its own best-known words: “Clovis and Pecos” for New Mexico, “Cahokia” for Illinois, “Hopewellian ” for Ohio, and so on. So why not “Plaquemine,” then, for a culture in the southern part of the Lower Mississippi Valley, named for a town in Louisiana? Of course, I do support large overviews from the elders. My own introduction to the Lower Mississippi Valley began even before Ann Arbor in the 1950s; it actually began with a December 1948 visit to the Sandy Woods site in southeast Missouri with my father and my twin brother, Philip. I had been working in the Yale Peabody Museum on an archaeological collection from that site for my Senior Honors paper. I grew up—one through ¤ve years—on the very banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. But enough of the past. From southeast Missouri the whole Lower Mississippi Valley lay ahead for me: Nodena in northeast Arkansas, the Lake George site in the Yazoo Basin, and also much farther south still with the Lower MisPreface sissippi Survey through Louisiana, only ending at Avery Island on the Gulf of Mexico. The Lower Mississippi Survey from the Harvard Peabody Museum has been there and done that, starting with Phil Phillips’s work in the late 1930s. So back to Plaquemine: this volume provides a very good coverage on the topic, and there is not too much more that I can add. When the readers ¤nish this lengthy discussion on Plaquemine I think they will have learned quite a lot of useful information on this perennially discussed topic. Stephen Williams, Professor Emeritus Harvard University xiv preface ...