Recent work by SIUC archaeology students suggests a well-known prehistoric mound site dating back nearly 1,000 years is larger and possibly more complex than originally thought.

The investigation at Kincaid Mounds, bordering the Ohio River in Southern Illinois, shows a new platform mound about 250 yards outside of known defensive walls around the site. "At some moment in its history this site was considerably larger than we had expected, or it is considerably more complex, with distinct parts of it in different locations," says Paul Welch, an associate professor of anthropology.

Kincaid was one of the two major political centers of the Mississippian culture (A.D. 900-1500) in the lower Ohio Valley. Located near Brookport, which is on the Ohio about 75 miles southeast of Carbondale, it is one of the largest prehistoric Native American sites in Illinois, and the seventh or eighth largest site of its time period in the eastern United States.

Native Americans occupied the site beginning around A.D. 1000 but abandoned it for still-unknown reasons by about A.D. 1450, several hundred years before French explorers arrived.

The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency owns about two-thirds of the Kincaid Mounds site, which it leases for no-till farming; the remainder is privately owned. SIUC proposed to the agency to determine whether a "bump" in the current cornfield was a prehistoric mound that dates to the same time period of the site's occupation, was built much later, or is a natural land-form.

After last fall's harvest, a scan of the area with a magnetometer--which measures minute variations in the earth's magnetic field--indicated the possible existence of numerous houses buried under alluvium. Fieldwork done to this point has confirmed the existence of two prehistoric houses as well as the platform mound itself. The IHPA provided a small grant to help fund the research.

A group of 11 undergraduate and graduate students--participants in this past summer's annual field school run by the Department of Anthropology and Center for Archaeological Investigations--did most of the excavating.

The project has greatly expanded on work done in the 1930s and early 1940s by the University of Chicago, says Brian Butler, the center's director and an adjunct anthropology professor. That work was "very good and extremely important in the development of American anthropology," he says--but the new work, aided by technology unavailable 70 years ago, indicates there is a "whole series of lesser mounds that is part of the complex on state land that Chicago never looked at."

As a student himself in the 1970s, Butler did intensive survey work and excavations that documented satellite settlements near Kincaid Mounds. "We felt it was time to go back to the Kincaid site itself and start doing some new work," he says.

The now-confirmed settlement on the western side of Kincaid Mounds seems to "balance off" the eastern part of the complex, he says. Radiocarbon testing of burned grass thatch uncovered in the excavations will give a close date--within five to 10 years--for the beginning of mound construction on the western side.

It will now be up to the IHPA to determine if it wants to take the land out of cultivation for further research.

"We hope we are in the early phases of work," Butler says.

--by Pete Rosenbery, Media & Communication Resources

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