Juliet E. Morrow (ASU Research Station), Randel T. Cox (University of Memphis), Jami J. Lockhart (Computer Services Program) and Sarah Stuckey (ASU Research Station)
The ASU Research Station has been investigating the Old Town Ridge site since 2008. The site is located in Craighead County, Arkansas on a relict stream channel of the St. Francis River system. The site is widely recognized as an important Native American Mississippi period habitation and ceremonial site since the early 1900s was formally recorded in 1967 by local avocational archeologist R.W. (Dub) Lyerly, Jr. The site consists of multiple houses and numerous ceramic and lithic artifacts have been collected from the surface and from unauthorized digging, including a ceremonial mace discovered in 1925 that is now curated at the Gilcrease Institute and a marine shell gorget displaying elements reminiscent of Braden and Craig-style iconography rendered by Native American artists during the Early and Middle Mississippi period. The iconographic images of narratives and characters link communities from geographically-distant sites together, the larger of these sites include the civic-ceremonial centers of Cahokia in Illinois, Etowah in Georgia, and Moundville in Alabama, and the ritual mound center known as Spiro in eastern Oklahoma.
If you look closely, the above gradiometry image shows liquefaction features that crosscut other anomalies that may represent cultural features including the possible palisade/ditch, posts and house walls, burials, hearths, and pits. Some anomalies may be the result of vandalism, uncontrolled excavation, animal burrowing, and other activities. Since 2008, Morrow has observed large badger dens across the entire site. Animal burrows and past uncontrolled excavations may mimic prehistoric features. Recently our research has focused not directly on the anomalies that appear to be cultural features per se, but instead on the natural features that most likely represent past earthquake events called paleoseismic features (sandblows, grabens, dikes and sills) and their relationship to cultural features, particularly the ditch/palisade.
In 2017 Morrow teamed up with Randel Cox to conduct research at the site to answer three questions , 1.) Are there paleoliquefaction features at Old Town Ridge site?, if so, then 2.) how many seismic events generated liquefaction features at the site and what is the age of each liquefaction event? 3.) How do these ages relate to large historic and/or prehistoric earthquakes identified elsewhere in the Mississippi River Valley?
Answering these questions helps refine the recurrence interval of strong ground shaking in the region and the potential for strong earthquakes to have influenced the movements and activities of human groups in the past. Artifact collections from Old Town Ridge and regional research strongly suggest that people abandoned the site sometime around A.D. 1400. Factors that may have influenced the abandonment of the site and numerous other Middle Mississippi period sites in the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) include but are not limited to climate change, earthquake activity, and warfare.
Artifacts dating to the Late Woodland/Early Mississippi period indicate earlier communities at Old Town Ridge. Episodic occupation may have enlarged the village from the Late Woodland period to the Middle Mississippi period. Potential enlargement of the village and expansion of the apparent palisade wall and/or ditch during the Middle Mississippi period is probably influenced by population increase, warfare, climatic changes and possibly even earthquake activity. Establishing a chronology of earthquake activity at Old Town Ridge is an important first step toward future investigations of the Native American communities that lived at the site from as early as 11,000 B.C. to circa A.D. 1400.
We selected a location for a trench at Old Town Ridge to cross a gradiometry anomaly suggestive of a large sand dike where it crossed an anomaly suggestive of a cultural feature (see topo/gradiometry map). Excavation of a 14 m-long trench (Trench A) did indeed reveal a large (3 meter-wide) compound sand dike crossing a cultural horizon. Trench A exposed four sediment deposits (FIGURE), a cultural deposit, and a plow zone. The sediment deposits include a pre-liquefaction alluvial deposit and three separate sand dikes and associated sand blows. The cultural deposit post-dates the alluvium and pre-dates the sand dikes. Sand venting caused vertical displacement of the cultural horizon across the vent zone.
