(As an aside, as we drove over, we had a chance for an up-close view of the harvest of cotton in this area. The cotton combine looks much like a hay combine. It spits out bales of cotton wrapped in yellow plastic. We had never seen cotton harvesting before.)
From about 1350 AD to about 1650 AD, a palisaded village existed at the Parkin site, which is situated at the confluence of the St. Francis River and Tyronza River. Archaeological artifacts from the village have been dated to between 1400 and 1650. The Parkin site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964, and, two years later, the Parkin Indian Mound was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Many archaeologists believe it to be part of the province of Casqui, a part of the Mississippian civilization.
Casqui was a Native American polity discovered in 1541 by the Hernando de Soto expedition. This group inhabited fortified villages in eastern Arkansas. The tribe takes its name from the chieftain Casqui, who ruled the tribe from its primary village, thought to be located at the Parkin site. Information about Chief Casqui and his people comes from journals made during the expedition of Hernando de Soto in 1541. During the preceding periods, homesteads and small villages had developed throughout the area, but by this time endemic warfare had forced the populations to consolidate into the palisaded villages. They would leave their villages during the day to farm their fields, collect wood, and hunt, but at night return to the safety of their well-defended villages.
When de Soto's expedition arrived in the area the Casqui walked over a mile from their village to greet the travelers and invite them to stay in the town. The travelers declined the offer and made camp outside of the village. The journals report that de Soto gave a speech to the Casqui about religion and baptized several of the villagers as Christians. The journals report that the villagers helped them erect a large wooden cross on the central mound. In 1977, a large charred posthole was found at the summit of the large substructure mound at the Parkin Site, and then, in 2016, a portion of a cypress log, believed to be part of the cross that De Soto erected on the site in 1541, was unearthed. It is now on display at the visitor center. These are consistent with a passage in the de Soto expedition diaries which related that, at the request of chief Casqui, de Soto had a large cypress cross erected next to the chief's home. A Catholic Mass was celebrated at its erection and, mystically, the next day, a rainstorm came to end a 4-year drought that the native Americans had been suffering. This is said to be the reason that de Soto won the friendship and respect of Chief Casqui and why this meeting was the only peaceful meeting de Soto's expedition had with Native Americans.
Further corroboration that this was the site of the village visited by de Soto lies in Spanish artifacts discovered at the site. In 1966, a Spanish trade bead, which matches descriptions of the seven-layer glass beads carried by the expedition, was found at the Parkin site, as well as a brass bell known as a "Clarksdale bell". The bell was associated with a child's burial, which also contained four pottery items, all known types of Parkin Phase pottery. This is one of only a handful of sites in the Southeast where items from the de Soto expedition have been found in a datable archaeological context. Here is a photo of the bead and bell, which are on display in the visitor center:
Inspired by this history, David tried to imagine himself as one of the de Soto expedition members:
The Casqui village comprised over 400 houses sheltering over 2,000 people. It was protected by a wooden palisade, and beyond that a huge moat filled with water from the nearby St. Francis and Tyronza Rivers. Here is an artist's depiction of what the 17-acre site may have looked like:
Today, remnants of the site can be seen on the ground. From the vantage point below, one can look across the huge moat that surrounded the village, toward where the palisades surrounded the 17-acre site, and to the mound on which the chief's house was built in the background:
The park path follows the perimeter of the village and crosses the site of the original moat in several places:
On one side of the village, we got a view of the St. Francis River:
Eventually, we reached a viewpoint where we could see the mound on which the chief's house perched:
The park visitor center displays hundreds of artifacts that have been recovered from the site, including the pottery below, making it one of the richest and most developed and documented Native American archaeological sites in North America.
Researchers have unearthed a significant number of pottery bowls and jars fashioned in the shape of human heads:
Other pots were shaped in intriguing, dramatic forms:
While we had heard about the Mississippian culture, we had not realized how extensive or sophisticated it had been. The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American civilization archaeologists date from approximately 800 to 1600 AD. It was composed of a series of urban settlements and satellite villages linked together by a loose trading network, the largest city being Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, Missouri, believed to be a major religious center. The civilization flourished from the southern shores of the Great Lakes in western New York and Pennsylvania, extending into the lower Mississippi Valley and wrapping easterly around the southern foot of the Appalachians barrier range into what is now the Southeastern United States.
As we return through the Midwest on future trips, we hope to find other archaeological sites, such as Cahokia, to expand our understanding of this lost civilization.
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