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79 11. In a Cotton Field I n the summer of 2010, a farmer was plowing his cotton field in Natchitoches Parish in northwestern Louisiana when he hit something with his plow near the edge of the road. He got off his tractor to see what it was and discovered a human skull. He called the sheriff. Sheriff’s deputies and the coroner, Dr. Curtis, arrived at the scene and soon noticed that more than just a skull was present. The coroner called me. When we arrived at the site after a three-hour drive, the sheriff’s deputies and coroner’s investigators were there waiting for us. They had placed a canopy over the remains to help shade us from the sun. A recreational vehicle was parked nearby for our needs, and food and drink were plentiful. Natchitoches Parish soil is full of iron oxide and has an orange tint to it. As we began the slow process of excavating the bones, we could tell that the dried-out bones had taken on the color of the soil. They, too, had an orange tint. Since bone is porous and will take on the color of the soil around it after a considerable period of time, we believed we were working with remains that had been there for quite some time. We noticed all of the old home sites around the area and speculated the farmer may have happened upon an old grave site. But was the “burial” formal or clandestine, one that someone had tried to hide? Our imaginations began to take off. Deliberate burial? Saturday-night fight where someone was killed and simply hidden away in a cotton field? Someone who had been hit by a car accidentally quite a few years before and no one had seen anything? We had no idea at the time just how far from the truth we really were. Enter the regional archaeologist, Dr. Jeff Gerrard. Jeff came along a few hours after we had set up our archaeological burial unit, while we were recovering the remains. One of the things we were 80 Bone Remains intrigued about was the fact that the remains were very shallow, just below the farmer’s plow zone. They clearly were not buried the usual three feet or so down. (Almost no one is ever buried six feet under.) Also, as best as we could tell, no obvious clothing was present on the bones. The bones had no odor, were completely clean, and were all dried out. Jeff had an idea. He asked what I thought of the possibility that the remains could be those of a soldier. “A soldier? And what war might that be,” I asked. “Why, the Civil War,” he said. I rested back on my heels and contemplated that suggestion for a very long moment. Though I could not see the coroner’s representative at the time, I felt that if she had heard that suggestion she might be breathing a sigh of relief. Jeff went on to explain that the location where we were working was just down the river from what had been a fairly significant local battle of the Civil War, one that was called the Battle of Minotte’s Ferry. Though I had worked on several Civil War sites over the years, Minotte’s Ferry was not one with which I was familiar. We kept digging. I knew that whatever we pulled out of the ground would first have to go back to the FACES Laboratory and be analyzed before we could even begin to decide whether it might be a soldier who was covered over by a few inches of dirt some 150 years earlier. As we continued digging, I thought about the archaeological work we had conducted over the years at multiple Civil War sites and the metal buttons we often had found representing both Union and Confederate armies. I wondered if we would be fortunate enough to find such metal buttons, if indeed this was a soldier. In the field, instead of metal buttons, we found a few, small, white buttons in the soil, but no clothing remnants. Also, in the area of the feet, we found metal fragments. Additionally, we found some type of metal material near the waist. We loaded everything into our vehicle and began the long trek home. Jeff’s suggestion was an intriguing possibility. We could not wait to get back to Baton Rouge to do preliminary x-rays of...

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