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CERTAIN MOUNDS OF ARKANSAS AND OF MISSISSIPPI. By CLARENCE B. MOORE. PART I. MOUNDS AND CEl\IETERIES OF THE LOWER ARKANSAS RIVER. When it became evident that our quest on the Yazoo and Sunflower rivers in the State of Mississippi (described in the latter part of this report), was not destined to succeed, we turned to the Arkansas river. This river we investigated as far up as Natural Steps, twenty miles above the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, a distance of 194 miles by water, according to the Government survey. This survey, however, was made long ago, and the river in recent years, by cutting its way across bends, has shortened its course; therefore, the distance gone over by us was considerably less than the figures given. The time spent on this work, in our flat-bottomed steamer, with thirteen men to dig and four to supervise, was fifty-six 1 days, including parts of February and April, and all of March, 1908. Our custom to send agents in advance to find the exact locations of mounds, had not been followed in the case of those on the Arkansas river. With the exception of the Menard mound, and the so-called Toltec group below Little Rock, the mounds on the Arkansas river between its mouth and Natural Steps (that part of the river with which this report has to do), are insignificant in number and in size; while aboriginal cemeteries, as to the location of which a clue could be had, were far from numerous. The river is constantly changing its course, and many mounds and cemeteries, no doubt, have been swept away in the past or have been left far inland. When Marquette,2 the first of the French explorers of this region, visited the aborigines not far from the Arkansas River, in 1673, he found them cooking Indian corn" in large earthen pots very curiously made." "They have also," we are 1 Including four days on the White and LaGrue Rivers. 2 B. F. French, Historical Collections of Louisiana, Part II, p. 295. To those who have not access to the original French in Margry's" Decouvertes," the" Historical Collections of Louisiana," edited by B. F. French, will be of interest. The five parts appeared, respectively, in 1846,1850,1851, 1852, 1853. The reader, however, must bear in. mind that the" Collections" contain misprints and mistranslatiolls, and that incorporated in Part I is the fictitious account by Father Hennepin of a journey by him down the Mississippi to the Gulf, which journey the mendacious friar never accomplished. A second series edited by B. F. French, "Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida," two volumes, one published in 1869, one in 1875, complete these" Collections." 61 JOURN. A. N. S. PHILA., VOL. XIII. 482 CERTAIN MOUNDS OF ARKANSAS AND OF MISSISSIPPI. told, "large baked earthen plates, which they use for different purposes. The men go naked and wear their hair short. They pierce their noses and ears, and wear rings of glass [1] beads in them." At nearly every site investigated by us were found beads of glass and objects of brass-sure signs, as the reader is aware, of contact between the aborigines and white men. Human remains found by us along the Arkansas river were usually so badly decayed as to be worthless for scientific investigation. A number of skulls, however, were preserved and were sent by us to the United States National Museum at Washington, D. C. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka has kindly sent us an interesting and complete report on these skulls, which follows this portion (Part I) of our description of the season's work. At one place, Greer, certain evidence 2 was found by us of the presence of a specific disease which affects the bones, this evidence being strongly marked in the case of a single skeleton, many of whose principal bones were seriously involved. We attach but little importance to this discovery of diseased bones, however, inasmuch as Greer cannot, with reasonable certainty, be classed as a pre-Columbian site. It is true that no European artifacts, such as glass, brass, iron or lead, were found there by us; and that the copper beads (present with one burial only) have been shown by the analysis of Dr. H. F. Keller to be pure native copper with only a trace of iron, hence far purer than any product from the smelted sulphide ores of Europe could have been in early times, or indeed could...

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