The First Bluff City

Many centuries before European settlers arrived, a community thrived here. Archaeology reveals the rich history of the First Americans in the Mid-South.

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Before we begin, a thought exercise: Look around you. Where are you right now, as you read these words? Most likely, you find yourself in the greater Memphis area; perhaps at home, perhaps at work, perhaps fidgeting in a waiting room. Now imagine that time is rewinding. You watch the years flip back from 2024 to 1924. What do you see? You keep going, 200 years, 1,000 years, 5,000 years, 10,000 years into the past. You’re gazing around at where the streets and buildings of Memphis will be. What do you see? Who do you see?

The Things They Left Behind

The Mid-South is a lousy place to do archaeology. The first problem is the climate. One key to the wealth of knowledge about ancient Egypt is the hot, dry desert clime, ideal for preserving physically delicate, information-rich artifacts like textiles and papyrus scrolls. In the Mid-South and Central Mississippi Valley, conditions are quite different. “We are in a wet, humid climate,” says Anthony J. Lauricella, manager of the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, the archaeological site in southwest Memphis. “Except for very rare, kind of lucky occasions, that’s not really conducive to preservation of organic materials.”

The second problem is that none of the First Americans who lived in the Mississippi Valley developed writing. “Prior to European contact, the Chickasaws didn’t read or write, so there’s no documented evidence,” says Wilson Seawright, genealogy manager for the Chickasaw Nation in Ada, Oklahoma. Their knowledge of proto-history “... relies primarily on the oral history, and that’s subject to interpretation. There could be some errors, because it’s passed down from person to person.”

The last few centuries have been a time of great change in North America. European colonists who started arriving in droves 400 years ago saw the land as rich for plunder and development. The wars, forced removals, and genocides that accompanied the expansion of the United States, Canada, and Mexico destroyed cultures and erased thousands of years of history. The colonists found mounds and ruins everywhere they went, but few believed they were the work of the people they called Indians. It was Thomas Jefferson who first proposed that these monumental earthworks were made by the ancestors of the people who still lived here.

The idea was slow to take hold. Over time, the social sciences of archaeology and anthropology evolved. With the addition of geology and climatology, and a renewed emphasis on working alongside Native Americans instead of viewing them solely as subjects of study, a more complete picture has emerged of the First Americans. It is an epic story of discovery and migration, of the rise and fall of empires, all told through bits and pieces of everyday life that were accidentally preserved.

“We’re talking about spans of time that, to be honest, I think the human mind has trouble comprehending,” says Lauricella “We live in historical worlds, so a hundred years is a long time. We’re talking about more time by several orders of magnitude than our nation has existed. It’s hard to wrap your head around.”

Arrival

The first people to reach our area, known as the Paleoindians or Paleo-Indigenous, likely arrived from North Asia via the Bering Strait about 14,000 years ago. “There’s no way to know what they called themselves, so archaeologists create a terminology to apply to these broad cultural patterns that we see in the archaeological record,” says David H. Dye, professor of archaeology at the University of Memphis and co-author of Geology, Archaeology, and Earthquakes of the Central Mississippi Valley (Arkansas Archaeological Survey, 2024). Dye elaborates, “One of the things that’s really interesting — and this is around the world, not just Native Americans — is that people tend to refer to themselves as ‘The People’ or ‘People of the River’ or ‘People of the Forest.’ They see themselves as human beings.”

The Paleoindians traveled broadly, moving in family groups numbering a couple of dozen at most. They could go months or years without encountering another group of people. “They were essentially hunter-gatherers and foragers,” says Dye. “There was no agriculture. The only domesticated animal they had would have been dogs that [traveled] with them.

“These are not simple societies,” he continues, “but they are not organized at higher levels than the family. These are extremely complex people, hunter-gatherers: They know the land. They know thousands of square miles like you would know Walmart or Kroger. If they want something, they know exactly where to go to get it, and how to make the tools to extract it. As I tell my students, it’s not that people are primitive or simple; it’s that our understanding of them is simple.”

The Mississippi Valley landscape they found was very different than what we see today. As the glaciers melted, torrents of water flowed south. The Mississippi River at Memphis was a network of braided channels stretching up to 60 miles west of the bluffs. Mega floods caused by breaking ice dams periodically swept the area. According to Dye, the first recognizable culture is called Clovis.

Named for the New Mexico town where their distinctive fluted spearpoints were first found, the Clovis people were long believed to have been the first inhabitants of North America, but more recent archaeological finds have called this into question. Archaeologically speaking, Dye explains, Clovis spread very quickly. “There are two hypotheses. One is that they were literally moving very quickly across the landscape — which they were certainly capable of doing. The other is that Clovis was not a culture so much as it was a technology. If you have groups of people who are already here, thinly spread across the landscape, then an idea could race through them. So, you may not be seeing people move: You’re seeing an idea move.”

The Gathering of the Tribes

The Paleoindians increased in number for 6,000 years. Megafauna such as woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and giant sloths disappeared as a result of human hunting and climate change. The ice-age glaciers melted, and the Mississippi River began to look more like the river Memphians today might recognize. Human contact — outside family units — became more frequent.

Yet we know very little about these cultures. Dye offers two reasons for the absence of knowledge. “One is that what remains of their technology is very limited. They used a lot of woven and wooden objects that [did not endure]. The other reason is that, at least in the Mississippi Valley, [what objects do remain] are under 20 or 30 feet of sediment.”

The artifacts we have from the earliest periods tend to be found along eroding riverbanks, which means they lack context. That makes accurate historical dating very difficult. “You can’t date stone,” says Lauricella. “If you were to find one of those [artifacts], to get a secure date on it, you would have to find it in association with some sort of stratified organic material that you could do carbon-14 dating on. And that’s a very rare occurrence.”

The emergence of the Dalton culture around 3,500 BCE marks the beginning of the Archaic period. “Almost all of the Dalton sites have been destroyed in the area between the Ozarks and Crowley’s Ridge. We call it the Western Lowlands. There were thousands of sites there. It was an incredibly rich culture. Nearly all of that stuff’s gone as a result of rice farming — they just land-leveled everything. Dalton’s really interesting, because they created the earliest cemeteries that we have found in the New World.”

Dalton period burials near Slone in Northwest Arkansas show the first signs of hierarchy and religion: High-status individuals like chiefs and shamans were buried with oversized spear heads. Useless as tools or weapons, the spear heads seem to have indicated social rank. “Dalton is really the beginnings of what we think of as tribal society,” says Dye.

Seasonal camps started to become permanent about 5,400 years ago, in the middle of the Archaic era, when an unknown people built the first mounds at Watson Brake in what is now northeastern Louisiana. The oval arrangements of eleven earthworks predate Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. As cultures became more complex, more mounds arose. At Poverty Point, located across the Mississippi from Vicksburg, a semi-circular complex of earthworks arranged around a central plaza formed an actual town around 3,700 years ago.

Poverty Point was probably a ceremonial center where a priesthood lived full-time, visited regularly by hunter-gatherers. While these people did not have recognizable agriculture yet, they did have commerce: Trade goods from as far away as the Appalachians, the Ozarks, and Ohio have been found at the massive site. Indeed, it was apparently the center of a widespread culture; artifacts from Poverty Point have been found as far south as the Gulf Coast.

Then, something presumably very bad — and now, very mysterious — happened. After 600 years of occupation, Poverty Point was entirely abandoned. No one lived in the Central Mississippi Valley for the next 500 years.

The Woodlands

When the Woodlands Period began, about 3,000 years ago, people began to build mounds again, such as the Pinson Mounds site near Jackson, Tennessee, believed to be connected to the Hopewell culture. Another site of the same vintage near Marked Tree, Arkansas, was destroyed in the early 1980s. About 1000 BCE, signs of occupation returned along the Mississippi, but they were small and temporary. Trade remained limited.

By around 200 BCE, log-lined tombs began to appear. “You do have mounds, but they’re not places where people are living for a long period of time,” says Dye. The Plum Bayou mounds outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, are typical of the period. The large ritual center is circled by an embankment and a moat — not for defense, but rather to separate sacred from mundane space, Dye explains.

In the late Woodland period, weaponry evolved as atlatl spear throwers, the weapon of choice for millennia, were replaced by bows and arrows. Tribal feuds were more deadly, and people began congregating in larger groups for protection. Agriculture had become more sophisticated during the Woodland period, and maize (corn) was introduced from Central America.

At first, it seems the new crop was rare, eaten only on major feast days. Farmers learned to plant maize next to squash and beans. “Beans fix nitrogen into the soil, and are eaten,” says Lauricella. “Then, squash spreads its runners out, and that sort of shapes the ground. You don’t lose as much water to evaporation.”

These “Three Sisters” crops increased food production, and field farming took off. With it came a population explosion, and more complex social hierarchies. Massive floods, which may have driven the depopulation of the Mississippi Valley, became rarer as the climate stabilized. The time was ripe for revolution.

A New Religion

By 1050 AD, First Americans had been building mounds on and off for 4000 years. But there had never been anything like Cahokia. Situated in Southern Illinois just across the river from St. Louis is the largest archaeological site in North America. At its center is Monks Mound, an earthen pyramid 30 meters tall. Its 17-acre base is wider than the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt. Even more remarkably, Monks Mound was the center of a complex of more than 120 mounds. Places like Poverty Point and Plum Bayou evolved and grew over time. Cahokia was built all at once, in a human lifetime. It was a planned community that experts believe once housed 20,000 full-time residents. The population swelled with visitors during feasts and festivals where thousands of deer were eaten.

Cahokia was the epicenter of a cultural revolution. From Iowa to Ohio, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, everyone adapted the same mound-and-plaza town plan. Was this the result of conquest by a great king? Probably not. Even though a burial was found, at Cahokia’s Mound 72, of a high-status individual dressed in lavish beaded garments, he probably wasn’t a monarch. Cahokia was the center of a new religion.

“Cahokia was a pilgrimage area,” says Dye. “This idea of pilgrimage has a long, deep history in Eastern North America. Cahokia is a more recent iteration of that phenomenon. I think, for the most part, these are elites that are going up there. Ritual and religion are always tied to politics.”

Consultation with contemporary Native Americans have allowed anthropologists to reconstruct some of the myths that made Cahokianism so compelling. For thousands of years, First American society had been based on elaborate kinship networks and shamanic societies. The beginning of the Mississippian period is marked in the archaeological record by the sudden appearance of red pottery with complex designs symbolizing the sky, where Hero Twins (thunder and lightning) lived; the earth, where the people lived; and the Beneath World, the realm of the Great Serpent and evil giants.

According to one legend, Red Horn was a master of chunkey (also called tchung-kee), a game where a smooth round stone was rolled down a track. Players threw spears in the path of the stone, and the winner was the competitor whose spear came closest to where the stone stopped rolling. Red Horn traveled to the underworld to play chunkey with the giants. When he lost, the giants claimed his spirit. The Hero Twins took pity on Red Horn, using their magic to bring him back to life, and returning him to rule over the Earth.

When tribal elites traveled to Cahokia, the theory goes, they were taught the ritual of Red Horn, and became honorary kin. Thus, a system of family ties was transformed into something like a nation-state stretching over most of North America.

Chucalissa

After a period of increasing violence, peace appears to have taken hold as the new belief system spread. Mississippian sites at Obion, Reelfoot, and Shiloh in Tennessee were early adaptors of Cahokianism. On the bluffs above the Mississippi River a settlement now known as Chucalissa was founded. “There’s some small Woodland sites all through Shelby County, as there are through all parts of North America,” says Lauricella. He explains that in this period, pottery, agriculture, and cultivated crops were more common, as were mound-building and village settlements.

“Chucalissa was a typical Mississippian site,” he says. There is a platform mound and a plaza, surrounded by houses. Higher-status people, presumably involved with the leadership of the group, lived on the chief’s mound. Lauricella notes that he and colleagues believe the fields below the bluff were used for agriculture.

At its peak, about a thousand people lived in the first Bluff City. “There were bigger Mississippian centers. However, if we were to look across the planet at that time, that would have been, in its own right, a fairly large settlement,” says Lauricella. “It was probably connected to the mounds downtown, where the Metal Museum is, which haven’t been investigated scientifically in the way that Chucalissa has been. Then, even farther away, there were smaller farming communities that traded or had family connections with Chucalissa. Most of those smaller sites were plowed under years ago by early European farmers, unfortunately. We may only be getting a very particular window, essentially based on luck.”

Downfall

The peace of the Cahokian time lasted for about a hundred years. At Cahokia’s Mound 72, there are hints of a dark side within the uniting religion. Nineteen women are buried in a mass grave, dating to roughly the beginning of the city. Were they sacrificed? War captives? Rebels? We may never know. Around 1150 CE, civil war broke out. A huge palisade wall, made from more than 20,000 thick tree trunks, was built around one neighborhood. Two other neighborhoods were burned.

“By 1180, people were beginning to leave,” says Dye. “By 1250, half of the people are gone. By 1300 there’s tumbleweeds in the street. All those people who were at Cahokia headed in different directions and created new communities. A lot of them come into Southeast Missouri, and we think droughts were driving them out. The droughts were really stressing people during the early part of the Little Ice Age, and those stressors probably undermined religious beliefs.”

Where the Cahokian refugees went, war followed. Early Mississippian warfare was a mannered sport for aristocrats. After Cahokia fell, it was ethnic cleansing. At Crow Creek, South Dakota, 486 people — an entire village — were massacred, their bodies dumped into a half-completed defensive moat. In one Illinois cemetery from the period, one-third of all adults died from blows to the head. At first, the Mid-South was spared the violence. Then, in 1375, the 90-house village of Powers Fort was burned. Drought returned yet more, and Chucalissa was mostly abandoned around 1400.

First Contact

In May of 1539, the conquistador Hernando de Soto landed near Tampa Bay, Florida, with 600 Spanish soldiers, 200 horses, and enough supplies for an 18-month exploration of the new Spanish territory of North America. In 1541, when he crossed the Mississippi River near Memphis, Chucalissa had been a ghost town for more than a century. On the Western side of the river, though, he saw signs of habitation everywhere.

Droughts had pushed people into the area between Crowley’s Ridge in Arkansas and the bluffs at Memphis. Dye estimates that up to a hundred thousand people lived in that area.

At the confluence of the St. Francis and the Tyronza Rivers, de Soto found a heavily fortified Mississippian village under the command of a chief named Casqui. Today, Casqui’s city is the Parkin Archaeological State Park. “Cahokia and other big Mississippian sites were more Early Mississippian. Then they had declines, and we [Parkin] kind of rose during their decline,” says Nathan Odom, Park Superintendent. “We’re a 17-acre site, but 23 other sites in the area range in size.” Collectively they are considered the Parkin Phase. The site at Parkin Archaeological State Park was likely the capital.

The Mississippians de Soto encountered were technologically advanced. de Soto’s scribes recounted canoes holding some 60 people each. The culture’s mythology was represented in pottery. Other “effigy pots” appeared to show portraits of individuals. “The effigy pots are amazing,” says Odom. “Roughly 105 of them are documented. They come from northeast Arkansas, [and] Southern Missouri. One of the leading theories is that [the pots] are like death masks, because they were associated with burials. So it could represent the deceased person. It could represent a revered ancestor. Or it could be a war trophy.”

The warfare sparked by Cahokia’s collapse continued. de Soto’s scribes wrote, “Casqin and his parents, grandparents, and ancestors for many centuries previous had war with the lord or lords of another providence, called Capaha, which bordered his own.”

With the help of the Spanish, Casqui sacked Capaha, destroying their temple and desecrating their honored dead. But the worst was yet to come.

“A lot of people would argue, well, de Soto massacred people, de Soto brought in diseases. They all died,” says Dye. “There’s no archaeological evidence for that. These cultures are booming after de Soto leaves.”

In the early 1600s, the French set up trading posts in Canada. European colonists brought with them novel diseases which the North American population, isolated for at least 14,000 years, had never encountered. Lauricella notes that one skeleton found at Chucalissa shows skeletal evidence for tuberculosis.

“In the 1630s, they’re beginning to engage in the fur trade in the Great Lakes area,” says Dye. “I think that they’re bringing back smallpox, because they disappear overnight. One minute they’re there, and the next minute they’re gone.” Wave after wave of pandemic disease swept through the First Americans. In the Central Mississippi Valley, the death rate approached 90 percent.

First American Heritage

Without the pandemics, the European conquest of North America would have gone quite differently, if it were a conquest at all. As it was, the weakened First Americans were balkanized and divided. Many who survived the cataclysm adopted new identities. The next 250 years would bring a series of wars, removals, and genocides at the hands of Europeans.

Wilson Seawright is the genealogy manager for the Chickasaw Nation in Ada, Oklahoma, and a member of the Nation. He says, “The story about Chickasaw history simply is that they came from some point in the West. Where in the West, we don’t really know. The Chickasaw migrated into the areas of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama.”

Seawright says First American communities, including the Chickasaw, are constantly battling old stereotypes. “There’s just misunderstanding and a lack of knowledge about Native Americans in general. Chickasaws were woodland people. We lived in the southeast part of the United States where there were a lot of timber creeks and rivers. We were not Plains Indians: We didn’t have teepees. We didn’t wear big headdresses. That’s what many people think, because that’s what they see on TV.”

There is a movement afoot to set the record straight. “When people think about First Americans, Indians, Native Americans, most people think about the past immediately. They don’t think about the present. And a lot of people don’t know how successful and vibrant contemporary First American culture is,” says Brady Davis, CEO of the Chickasaw Inkana Foundation. “I’m not going to say that people necessarily intentionally get anything wrong. But I feel that it’s extremely important that groups are able to share their history and their culture from their experience and from their perspective, because that is their identity. That is who they are. They know who they are better than anybody else.”

The Inkana Foundation recently broke ground on a new Chickasaw Heritage Center in Tupelo, Mississippi. Construction of the $60 million facility is funded by the Chickasaw Nation, the federal government, and the state of Mississippi.

“Inkana” means “friend” in the Chickasaw language. The reason archaeologists and anthropologists study the deep past is to help us better know our present selves. “The people who lived here are not fundamentally different from us,” says Dye. “So much of human differences are so thin, and I think people often overlook that. We get wound up with looking at how we’re different. Focus on how we are alike, and maybe we’ll get along better.”