NRHP Reference # 79003382 Added to NRHP 19 April 1979 | Area 75 ha Nearest city Clarksdale | |
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Tulane carson mounds archaeological field school 2014
The Carson site, also known as the Carson Mounds and/or Carson-Montgomery-Stovall was once a large Mississippian culture site along the Mississippi River in the Yazoo Basin of Mississippi. The site was first occupied in the middle of the first millennium A.D. and the large earthen monuments and villages were constructed at the site after A.D. 1200. Only a few large earthen mounds are still present at Carson to this day. Some archaeologists have suggested that Carson was one of the more important archaeological sites in the state of Mississippi.
Contents
- Tulane carson mounds archaeological field school 2014
- Carson mounds archaeological field school 2014
- Site Characteristics
- Built environment
- References
Archaeologists have also suggested that Carson is important because it was either near or part of one of the provinces visited by some of the earliest conquistadors in the southeastern United States. There is no physical evidence that Carson was visited by Hernando de Soto and his men during the westward trek across the southeastern United States. However, they did pass at the very least within 50 – 75 km of Carson and the social disruptions caused by Soto and his men did cause native polities and provinces like Carson to defragment and fall apart .
Carson was first visited by early European explorers in the late nineteenth century, including surveyors for Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, Col. Philetus W. Norris and William Henry Holmes. The site was located on the Oasis Plantation owned by the Stovall and Carson families and a map of the landscape and mounds was published in 1894 in the 12th Annual Report to the Bureau of American Ethnology by Cyrus Thomas. Subsequent researchers to visit the site include the Harvard LMS survey, Ian Brown, Jay K. Johnson, John Connaway, and Jayur Madhusudan Mehta.
This map, in addition to research by archaeologists, established the significant scale of settlement at the site. The mounds stretch across an expanse of land over 1.6 km in length. In the greater pantheon of Mississippian culture sites, Carson is quite large, and it was incredibly important in local and regional political dynamics.
The Carson Mounds site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
Carson mounds archaeological field school 2014
Site Characteristics
Carson is located in the northern Yazoo Basin, approximately 500 km north from the Gulf of Mexico and 120 km south from Memphis, Tennessee. The Yazoo Basin is a floodplain of the Mississippi River and features a variety of geomorphic features created by meandering channels of the Mississippi River. Carson and the mounds were constructed over a crevasse splay which was deposited by the Mississippi River around 2800 years ago. The modern city of Clarksdale, Mississippi is nearby.
Built environment
The Mississippian culture component of Carson is presently dominated by five large flat-topped earthen mounds; in 1894 and well before extensive European settlement in the region, there were over eighty small mounds scattered around the landscape as well. Most of these small mounds are no longer present on the landscape. The remaining mounds, named Mounds A-F, are anywhere between 3 and 12 meters in height. Some of the earthen mounds were formed in arrangements around plazas. Adjacent to Mound A, there was a large enclosed village where archaeologists have currently recovered well over 30 residential buildings.
Some of these buildings have produced evidence of flint-knapping, the production of stone tools, some of which are consistent with blades and drills found at other major Mississippian mound centers including Cahokia and Bottle Creek. Other evidence of interaction with Cahokia comes in the form of Ramey Incised vessels, which are characteristic Cahokia vessels, and which have been found at Carson. Examples of these vessels can be found at the Carnegie Public Library in Clarksdale, Mississippi.