RESEARCHERS SEEK ANSWERS IN WICKLIFFE

Prompted by new information gathered at Wickliffe Mounds, university archaeologists and students will begin searching this summer for ancient Indian villages they believe are still hidden among the region's farmlands.

"We know some of those sites have to be out there," says Kit Wesler, director of the Wickliffe Mounds Research Center in Wickliffe, Ky.

The Indian culture at Wickliffe Mounds was thought to have mysteriously disappeared about the year 1350. But new data the center has developed about the cemetery there leads archaeologists to conclude that some of the Indians must have remained in the area generations longer.

The center's decade-long delvings into the site, and especially the past two years of studying the burial ground, have brought about much greater understanding of the complexities of these ancient societies, says Wesler. "This project has drastically changed our view."

Wesler, an archaeologist at Murray State University, delivered the 1993 Thomas Beckwith Memorial Archaeology Lecture Sunday afternoon at the Southeast Missouri State University Museum.

The title of his lecture, "Vacant Quarter: The End of Prehistory in the Middle Mississippi Valley," refers to the Mississippian culture's puzzling vanishing act. "There is no good reason why the area would have been abandoned," Wesler says.

The approximately 150 skeletons which have yielded new knowledge once were part of a privately-operated tourist attraction called the "Ancient Buried City," which was donated to Murray State in 1983.

Protests by Native American groups led the center to remove the display of buried human remains between 1991 and 1992.

During the past two years' study of the burial site, archaeologists determined through carbon dating and analyzing the layers of ground that the skeletons are not as old as the nearby village.

Wesler said the people buried in the cemetery must have lived in other villages as yet undiscovered. Unlike Wickliffe, those villages almost certainly were not built around mounds, since it's unlikely any mounds have yet to be located, he said.

Wickliffe Mounds is considered one of the best-preserved examples of the Mississippian mound-building culture in existence.

Wesler and the Middle Mississippi Consortium, which consists of archaeologists and students from Southeast, SIU, Murray State and Eastern Kentucky University, will begin looking for those undiscovered villages this summer.

He said they'll also go over old sites "to make sure we haven't misinterpreted them."

The surveyors won't dig any holes but will walk farm fields where plowing may have unearthed pottery, chipped stone, animal bones or fire-cracked rock (the result of campfires).

Wesler said the skeletons were buried on land historically claimed by the Chickasaw tribe but are not traceable to any tribal group.

Members of the five tribes moved from their homelands along the Trail of Tears eventually will conduct a ceremonial reburial of the remains, Wesler said.

The center's exhibits are open every day from 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. through the end of November.