Longtime archeologist recognized during 40th Mid-South Archeological Conference
“Excavating an Indian site is sort of like opening Christmas presents. You never know what you’re going to open up and find. There’s something different about every one of them.”
Local archeologist John Connaway used those words to describe excavating the Carson Mounds archaeological site near Stovall and west of Clarksdale for the past 10 years. The Carson Mounds project highlighted many of Connaway’s achievements discussed at the 40th Mid-South Archeological Conference at Hopson Commissary in July.
Connaway, originally from Helena-West Helena, Ark., received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ole Miss and worked out in the field for a couple of summers. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History hired him in 1968 and he has lived in Clarksdale ever since. He retired in January, but is still working on excavating the Carson Mounds site and is far from finished.
Connaway said he spent more time at the Carson Mounds site than anywhere else.
Connaway is working on the project with Bo Pitts, who spoke at the conference. Pitts is from Madison and met Connaway at a conference in Natchez.
“It’s something I always wanted to do.,” Pitts said. “I had a deep love for it. I retired and jumped in with both feet.”
Pitts had all praise for Connaway.
“I learned more from him in several years than I could learn in a lifetime,” Pitts said.
Both Connaway and Pitts discussed their experiences and everything they have been able to find.
“It started out, they did some land leveling out there,” Connaway said. “In the process, they exposed the number of Indian burials. So that’s what got us involved in it was trying to get those recorded before they were destroyed by further agriculture. We found more and more features like pits and houses and stuff.”
Connaway specifically said trash, garbage and burial pits were found.
Pitts said 71 houses have been found along with corn, hickory nut husk, pecan husk, deer remains, small mammals and reptiles such as turtles.
The site is a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long. Only an acre and a quarter of the 40 to 50 acres have been excavated, as the whole thing has been done by shovel and hand.
“It would take 10 lives to excavate the site,” Pitts said.
Connaway said Ole Miss professor Jay Johnson and Tulane professor Jayur Mehta have brought many students to help excavate the site and teach them in the process.
“The first thing about it is this site is about a mile long,” Connaway said. “We only worked a little over an acre of it. It’s a very small percentage of what’s out there. We don’t really know what was going out much in here other than on these mounds.”
Connaway said the pit houses belonged to people from the Cahokia area in Illinois.
“It’s (Cahokia) a huge site with over 100 mounds, the largest mound in North America,” said Connaway adding it was east of St. Louis across from the river.
He said people lived there at around 1100 AD.
“Cahokia was beginning to decline at that time and a lot of people were leaving because one reason there were so many people there, they had depleted a lot of the environment,” Connaway said. “They killed a lot of animals. They had to go further and further away to get supplies for the city. They started moving out. They apparently came down the river and settled here because these pit houses are typical of what we find at around Cahokia. We don’t find them around Mississippi. These are the only ones that I know of. We’ve recorded seven here and there’s probably more that are buried.”
Pitts also talked about Cahokia.
“These tribes were out there before there was a name tribe,” he said. “This was 600 to 800 years ago. We think there was a total of at least three tribes that lived out there. At the time, they were unnamed. It wasn’t like Choctaw, Chickasaw and things. With the exception of what we now know as the Cahokia and that’s up in Illinois, they’re having strong evidence that they lived down here.”
However, it had never been recorded in Mississippi.
“It’s a big thing to know that they came down here and know that they had houses down here,” Pitts said.
“The site started out, it was like a farming community, which eventually turned into a trade and post. This is over about a 400-year period and later became a cemetery. There are many, many burials on this location.”
