RESEARCHERS STUDY MOUNDS LIFE AT WICKLIFFE

WICKLIFFE, Ky. -- Between the Viking invasion of East Anglia in northeast England in about 1000 and the signing of the Magna Carta in 1213, there lived a pre-historic civilization of native Americans called Mid-Mississippians.

They resided in communities along the banks of the Mississippi, Ohio and other rivers in the central and southeastern parts of North America. They were known as mound-builders because of the large, earthen mounds they built in their communities. They are thought to be ancestors of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Tunica Indian tribes of the southeastern United States.

One of those Mid-Mississippian communities was built on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi at what is now Wickliffe, Ky., in western Ballard County.

For some 300 years the Mid-Mississippians lived in what is now Wickliffe and other riverside communities in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. They fished, hunted, and farmed the fertile riverbottoms. Then, for reasons still not understood, almost all of the mound cities, including the one at Wickliffe, were abandoned some 50 to 75 years before the first Europeans discovered North America.

What became of this civilization that once extended from Cahokia, Ill., to the Gulf of Mexico, and why did they abandon their well-structured towns?

"Around here that is the No. 1 question," said Murray State University archaeologist Kit Wesler, director of the Wickliffe Mounds Research Center. "We have some theories, but right now that is about all we have."

The Wickliffe Mounds Research Center was established in 1984, after Western Baptist Hospital in Paducah donated what had been called the Wickliffe Ancient Buried City to Murray State.

The site had been controlled since F.W. King developed it in the 1930s after highway construction uncovered the mounds and a cemetery containing a large number of human remains. Although some archaeological research was done by King during initial excavation of the site, Wesler said it was primarily a tourist attraction, and skeletons uncovered at the site were the biggest attraction.

In the 1940s, King donated the site to the hospital during a fund-raiser for a new hospital. The hospital donated it to Murray State when King's wife died in 1982. The university then began an 11-year research and excavation project that concluded this month.

In 1992, the research center formed a research and field school consortium with the archaeology programs at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

With the latest excavation concluded, Wesler and his staff of students and graduate students will begin to examine and catalog all of the artifacts recovered over the past 11 years, as well as the approximately 85,000 artifacts that were unearthed by King, who died in 1959.

"We have done what we set out to do 11 years ago," said Wesler. "Now it is time to spend several years analyzing what we have discovered and report that data in publications and in museum exhibits at the research center.

"Although we are shifting the focus of our work away from excavating the Wickliffe site to doing more regional research in Western Kentucky and Southeast Missouri, the research center is not closing," he said. "In fact, the museum and other exhibits were never closed during excavation of the cemetery. They will continue to remain open to visitors."

Wesler said confusion over closing the center probably arose when a decision was made to remove human remains in a cemetery exhibit. While the cemetery exhibit was closed the skeletons were replaced with plastic replicas.

"The bones are now in the laboratory where they will be examined by anthropologists," said Wesler. "They will provide valuable research information about these people: how they lived, the lifespan of the adults and children, their diets, and any diseases that affected them. When the work is finished the remains will be buried in a dignified manner."

A problem researches face in trying to unravel the mystery of the Mid-Mississippian civilization is that they left no written records. Like many native American civilizations before the arrival of Europeans in the mid- and late-1400s, Mid-Mississippians and the Woodland Indian civilization that came before it had only a spoken language. They passed along their history verbally from generation to generation. Today, most of that history has been lost.

"Although the Mid-Mississippian civilization existed at the same time as the Medieval period of England and Europe, the Mid-Mississippians are considered prehistoric because they had no written language and left no written record of their past," said Wesler. "All we know about them is from the physical artifacts that are left behind.

"We now know the Wickliffe site was established around A.D.1100," said Wesler. "It was a very small village with a central plaza and no mounds for the first 100 years. Then they started building mounds and expanding the village so that it eventually covered the entire bluff."

Wesler said they have determined the community at Wickliffe was fairly sophisticated. A chief lived on a mound in a rectangular wood-and-mud house with thatched roof, he said.

"The Mid-Mississippians that lived in Wickliffe weren't a wealthy people, but they were able to raise enough food and find enough fish and game to live comfortably enough to find time to do some very fine artwork and pottery," said Wesler. "We have evidence left in the clay of some very fine weaving.

"We also know that they lived a relatively healthy life. If a child survived beyond 1 1/2 years of age, they lived a pretty normal life."

Wesler said the Mid-Mississippians at Wickliffe were part of a widespread network of trade and commerce among other Mid-Mississippian communities along the rivers. He said evidence of the trade and commerce comes from copper relics from Michigan and shark's teeth from the Gulf of Mexico that have been discovered at Wickliffe.

Why the people of the Wickliffe mound city abandoned their village remains a mystery. Wesler said it could have been a result of a breakdown in local government, or the people just grew tired of living in the village and moved into rural areas, where other Mid-Mississippian Indians lived and farmed. Wesler said, "Without written records, we may never know for sure."

Wesler said excavation of the cemetery at the Wickliffe mounds indicates the people who are buried there were returned to the site long after the village had been abandoned.

"The people buried at Wickliffe are of a much-later time period than those who actually lived in the village," Wesler said. "We believe they were brought back after they died to be buried there, but we are not sure if it is the same group of people a couple of generations later or an entirely different group of people. We do not know at this time exactly when the cemetery was established."

The site is along U.S. Highway 51 at the northern edge of Wickliffe. Admission is $3.50 for adults, $3.25 for senior citizens, $2.50 for children 6 to 11, and free for those under 6. Tours and group rates are available by advance appointment.

For more information contact the center at 1-502-335-3681.