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46	MISSISSIPPI: THE GENERAL BACKGROUND
ing sites. There is a theory also that the tallest of these were artificial islands upon which the Indians climbed for refuge when the Mississippi and its lower tributaries overflowed. In this same section, at Phillip in Leflore County, long irregular embankments parallel the Tallahatchie River with the ends abutting on the banks of small bayous. These earth walls, according to Dr. Calvin S. Brown (archeologist of the Mississippi State Geological Survey), probably were used for fortifications. Farther south, one-half mile from the union of Lake George and Sunflower River, in the historic country of the Yazoo, lies a great fortified village site. Surrounded by an earth wall, 25 mounds here cluster about the central or main mound, which rises 55 or 60 feet to command a view of the whole fortification. The main mound is approximately square, with a base covering one and three-fourths acres and a summit area of one-fifth of an acre. This impressive group, known as Mound Place, is a work of such magnificence that archeologists maintain it should be surveyed, mapped, and preserved for future generations.
(The above-mentioned mounds are only several of the outstanding; for additional data and locations, see Tour 3, Tour 4, Tour 12, and Side Tour 3A.)
Within recent years, Dr. Brown and Moreau Chambers (curator of State archives and State field archeologist) have done much to bring the life of the primitive Indian to light. Many implements and objects of polished stone and chipped flint have been found. Of these implements the grooved ones are called axes, and the smooth or ungrooved ones, celts. Stone hoes, spades, mortars, pestles, bowls, cups, plates, nails, troughs, and other agricultural and domestic utensils are additional evidence of the aborigines’ progress. The best collections are the exhibits in the New Capitol, Jackson; the Butler collection of Yazoo County; the Chapman collection, Columbus; the Ticer and the Brown collections, Oxford; and the Barringer collection, Monroe, Louisiana.
The term discoidal stone is applied to a large variety of circular stones. Some of them are concave on both faces, some are convex, some are flat on one side, and others are variously modified. They are popularly called chunkey, or chunky, stones because of the game in which they were used by the Indians. Other artifacts of this class are canoe-shaped boatstones, spuds, heads, banner stones, and animal representations with faces and figures. These are found in the museums and private collections previously named and in the Clark collection at Clarksdale.
The pipe or calumet was of great ceremonial importance to the Indian. It was smoked at the ratification of treaties, at marriages, at declarations of
ARCHEOLOGY AND INDIANS	47
war, and at other important social and political events. These pipes varied in size, shape, and workmanship, and were made of fragile clay unadorned, of pottery, of sandstone, limestone, and other stone. Among the most elaborate pipes found in Mississippi is one unearthed in Jefferson County, the bowl of which is decorated with a seated human figure 5.4 inches high. The figure is holding a pipe in his hands, his chin resting upon the bowl just below the rim. A stone pipe, remarkable in design and carving, found in Yazoo County, shows a naked savage seated with hands resting on knees and legs folded under the body. Two steatite pipes with figures carved on the stems, one from Natchez and one from Jefferson County, are now in the University of Pennsylvania collection. In the Millsaps College collection at Jackson is a more recent pipe made in the form of a tomahawk.
An abundance of shells, both marine and fresh-water, were available to the Indian of Mississippi. Along the coast and the large rivers, shell mounds or refuse heaps accumulated. Shell was a favorite material for the manufacture of beads. In the early Colonial days shell money was used in trade with the Indians; the beads were both circular and fist shaped. The circular type can be seen in the Butler collection, now in the museum at the New Capitol. In the Clark collection at Clarksdale are many of the flat type that were uncovered in a mound in Coahoma County.
The Indians used bone, tooth, stag horn, tortoise shell, and other hard animal parts in manufacturing implements and ornaments. Projectile points and piercing implements were often made of bone and stag horn and many of these have been preserved, a number of them in the collection at the Capitol.
With the possible exception of the pipes, the pottery shows the art of the Mississippi Indians at its best. The Davies collection and the State collection display the finest examples.
Indians
In 1699, when D’Iberville planted his colony on the Gulf coast and began to push slowly up the winding rivers, the territory now Mississippi was the center of an Indian population conservatively estimated at 25,000 to 30,000. Of these the three largest groups were the Chickasaw, the Natchez, and the Choctaw tribes, each a member of the great Muskhogean linguistic family, yet characteristically different. The Chickasaw, who preferred war to farming and whose territory extended northward through western Tennessee and into Kentucky, had their principal villages along