This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

Ian W Brown
Crossed the Buffaloe at Dr. Wood?s plantation on new suspension bridge. A small round Indian mounds [sic] stands on a level field on north side of Buffaloe to the east of the road, and in view of the Buffaloe. It is not now more than five or six feet high, and has trees growing on it. The ground around very level and in cultivation, immediately about it (3/19/1852; Brown 1996:3)
Conclusion
Benjamin Wailes was truly a Renaissance man, but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that he was a toiler in the vineyard rather than a sower of seed. As Charles Sydnor, his biographer, relates:
Wailes had little or no formal training in any field of science. On the other hand, he was evidently an indefatigable student of nature itself?its phenomena, however, rather than its laws. Furthermore, he was attracted to nearly every part of the vast panorama of nature, profiting on the one hand by the breadth of his interests, and losing on the other by his failure to concentrate...(1938:182).	^	^
Sydnor describes Wailes as a collector of natural history, rather than as a systematizer or interpreter of data (1938:177), and that certainly applies to his archaeological contributions as well. Wailes never did finish his ?Aboriginal Remains? monograph, but one senses that it would not have been much more than a compilation of site descriptions had he done so. And that is not necessarily bad, at least from a late twentieth-century perspective. Unlike Montroville Dickeson, his earnest archaeological companion in the Natchez region, Wailes seldom speculated in the descriptions of the sites he recorded. In many ways, Wailes? archaeological methods were equal to if not better than the finest contributors to this fledgling discipline. He reveled in recording distances, angles and elevations of the mound sites that he visited, and his descriptions are so detailed that they are the envy of many contemporary archaeologists. One thing that is apparent in his diaries, which is astounding to me, is that he did not dig, or if he did so, he certainly avoided the issue in his diaries. Rather, he was a master of the survey, and when he was not actually describing sites, he was visiting the many cabinets of local collectors. The digging he left to professionals, like Dickeson, and we are most sorry he did. I rather suspect that Wailes would have maintained the same level of detail in his excavation records as he did