Marksville culture

The Marksville culture is the name archaeologists give to the Middle Woodland societies of the lower Mississippi valley and the nearby Gulf Coast, dated broadly from about 100 BCE to 400 CE. Its people built burial mounds and earthworks, made finely decorated pottery, and took part in the far-reaching exchange network associated with the Hopewell tradition of the Ohio and Illinois valleys. It is the southern expression of that wider Hopewell world.

The culture is named after its type site, the Marksville Prehistoric Indian Site near the town of Marksville in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, the first site of this culture to be scientifically excavated. Archaeologists define it chiefly by its pottery and its mound burials. Its range covered the lower Mississippi, Yazoo and Tensas valleys in present-day Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, and reached east along the coast towards Mobile Bay. Settlements tended to be large and sat on terraces above major rivers.

The type site lies about a mile south-east of modern Marksville. Its burial mounds are enclosed by a horseshoe-shaped earthen embankment roughly 900 metres long, and it has large ring-shaped features not known from other sites. It is among the largest sites of its period in the south-eastern United States. Formal investigation began in the 1920s, and radiometric dates point to use between about 0 and 400 CE. The site was named a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

Excavated burial mounds suggest that they were raised for people of high status. They were built in stages over many years, beginning with a low, flat platform. Burial ceremonies may have been held years apart; people who died in between were apparently kept elsewhere and later buried together. Grave goods included objects made from imported materials, such as copper panpipes, ear spools, bracelets and beads, mica figures, marine shells, freshwater pearls, greenstone celts and stone platform pipes, some carved with an animal whose back held the bowl. These goods show that leaders who organised the ceremonies had access to distant trade.

Marksville potters used local clay but decorated their best vessels in styles very close to Hopewell pottery from Illinois and Ohio, which suggests that contacts were wider than once supposed. Typical decorated pots were small, often incised with geometric patterns or stylised birds, and were probably made for ceremonies, while plainer wares served daily needs. Marksville styles influenced Santa Rosa pottery, a hallmark of the Santa Rosa–Swift Creek culture, which flourished at the same time further east along the Gulf Coast. Food was gained much as in earlier times, through fishing, hunting and gathering.

The Marksville culture grew out of the earlier Tchefuncte culture of the same region. It was followed by the Baytown culture further north and, in south-eastern Louisiana and western Mississippi, the Troyville culture, which in turn led to the Coles Creek and Plum Bayou cultures. Archaeologists regard it as ancestral to the historic Natchez and Taensa peoples, who lived in the region when Europeans arrived.

Our maps label the area Marksville Culture and draw it on the maps for 100 BCE, 1 BCE, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500, centred on the lower Mississippi in today's United States. The outline is an approximation of a cultural area, not a political border, and the 500 map shows it somewhat later than the usual end date of around 400 CE.