By JUDY KOLB
In Indiantown, a community north of Escatawpa,
ancient relics almost 2,000 years old are so plentiful that a light rain
often unearths arrowheads and bits of pottery.
Oscar Scott, who named the area Indiantown
after he found it to be a natural storehouse of Indian lore, owns
a home on top of one the largest mounds. You can go out in
the yard almost anytime, dig a little, and come up with pieces of
arrowheads or crude tools made of stone or flint.
"I first found pieces of roughly engraved
pottery, arrowheads and pot legs when I was excavating for my home in
1964," Scott says.
"I got William A. Sears to examine the
pieces for me. He is the famous anthropologist who unearthed
Spanish treasure galleons on the east coast. At the time I talked
with him he was working for the federal government.
"He told me the pot legs dated 300 years
before Christ and that the pottery was the oldest he had found in the
south."
Finding ancient relics is a lucky family
trait. Mrs. Lana McInnis, Scott’s young niece, and her aunt,
Mrs. A. G. Shampine, are also amateur archaeologists.
Mrs. Shampine lives on Highway 63 about five
miles north of Escatawpa. She and her niece have been finding
arrowheads and pieces of pottery in her back yard for years.
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"Fifty years ago my father, Fred N. Scott,
found the first pieces of pottery we know about,” Mrs. Shampine says.
One day after the field had been plowed, he found a small
baked – clay head with Oriental features, about three inches in
length. He gave the figure
to the Old Spanish Fort, where it is now."
"I used to see my aunt walking around over the fresh plowed
furrows,” Lana said. Every so often she would stoop and pick up something from
the ground. One day I got
curious enough to ask her what she was looking for.
She told me: ‘arrowheads.’
After that I looked with her.
Mrs. Shampine says she even found one arrowhead
lying in Dickson’s parking lot in Moss Point.
Lana became indignant when construction crews
plowed through an Indian mound recently in building a new road.
"The bulldozer blade uncovered an underground
cache of pottery. It was
broken and scattered over a wide area into thousands of pieces," she
says. "Many of the
artifacts are now covered with pavement.
I gathered up some of the broken pieces and shipped them to the
Smithsonian Institute."
George Metcalf, Smithsonian Museum Specialist,
identified the pieces as dating from A.D. 100 to 750.
He compared the plain, smooth ware found in Indiantown to the
early
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Louisiana culture known as
Tchefuncte, a group who built conical
burial mounds, circular structures, and decorated their pottery with
linear punctuate markings.
He suggested that larger, shapeless thick
shards may be pot legs, and large petrified fabric, or net-marked pieces
might belong to a closely related culture from north-east Mississippi
designated as Miller I.
He said the pieces found on an island mound on Three
Rivers Lake and in the Shampine’s field lead him to suspect an
admixture of other cultures.
Experts say these mounds were left by
prehistoric peoples who had almost completely disappeared by the time
Europeans
landed at Plymouth Rock. The
mounds can be found in 20 states besides Mississippi.
They provide the only clues we have as to how these ancient
people lived.
Mrs. McInnis laments the careless attitudes that prevails in destroying
this natural heritage of culture. "We
have organizations to preserve wildlife and forests.
We also need one to preserve these ancient monuments as the
Egyptians do the pyramids."
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