OCR Text |
Show Keeping Up tScIene Ify Scencejl er wee G acieace Service. W.NU Service. Scientist-Sleuths View Indian City Visited by De Soto Ancient Louisiana Site Was Capital of Tribes New Orleans. A great Indian In-dian capital in Louisiana, visited vis-ited by Hernando de Soto in 1542 in his weary quest for gold, has been explored to its depths by scientific excavators. The modern archaeologists, seek- j ing prehistory rather than gold, have better success to report man j the Spaniards had. I Digging has revealed the career i of one of the largest Indian "cities" east of the Mississippi. The great mound which has been explored was once built to a height of 80 feet, making it perhaps the highest Indian mound in the South. A number of technical reasons for believing that this site is most probably the important Indian cap- I ital of Anilco, are found by Winslow M. Walker who explored the mound for the Smithsonian institution. Was Thriving Community. Accounts from Spanish conquest times describe this city as having about 400 good houses, with a beautiful beau-tiful square in the middle. The corn fields bore abundantly, and there were good stores of beans, maize, walnuts, and dried persimmons persim-mons in this and surrounding towns. The Indian chief drew up before the town with a battalion of 1,500 picked men, but when De Soto's army advanced, the barbarian horde fled without shooting an arrow. ar-row. This Indian capital is now shown to have been an old, old settlement even then. The first settlers who started the great mound carried masses of clay in skin sacks and dumped and packed down the clay to build a platform. The detective science of archaeology infers from their broken pottery that these unknown un-known Indian pioneers were very much like the famous Mound Building Build-ing Indians of the Ohio valley. Story of Mound Building. Their mound building was interrupted inter-rupted when, the platform was only a few feet high, and the raised place remained a camping site, littered lit-tered by ashes, charcoal, bones and broken dishes while two little pecan trees grew up to mark the passing of time. Then, Mr. Walker found, building was resumed by these people or others. With logs and cane layers and sand, a group of mounds were raised, and the whole was finally combined into one great terraced platform with ramps. Whether this platform mound, perhaps 45 feet high in De Soto's time, was the high place on which the temple or the chief's house stood, is not certain. Lesser heights were raised for other structures about the town. The temple is described de-scribed by the Spaniards as containing con-taining bones of the chiefs of Anilco in coffin baskets, and around the building were pikes on which the heads of captured enemies were stuck. |