History
The construction of the Anna Site began c. 1200, corresponding to the beginning of the interaction among various Lower and Middle Mississippi cultures, leading to the formation of the Plaquemine culture. There were minor occupations at the site but the most significant period of occupation at the site starts during the Gordon Phase 1000–1200 of the Coles Creek period (700-1200). Mound construction may have begun during this period but had definitely begun by the succeeding Anna Phase (1200 to 1350) and continued through the Foster Phase (1350-1500) and Emerald Phase (1500 to 1680). This 300-year period saw the transformation of the site into a regionally significant multi-mound center, possibly ruled over by a burgeoning hereditary elite class. The site was occupied until c. 1500.
There is no indication that the site was later reoccupied. The site was excavated in 1924 by archaeologists Warren K. Moorehead and Calvin S. Brown. James A. Ford, Jesse D. Jennings and John L. Cotter also worked at the site at different times over the next fifty years. The site was recommended by both Ford and Jennings to the State of Mississippi for purchase and future excavation and as a property for an archaeological museum, but the recommendations were not followed through. Cotter's 1951 excavations and analysis of the site were important in establishing the phases for the Natchez Bluffs chronology. The Gulf Coast Survey and the Alabama Museum of Natural History conducted joint excavations in 1997 and reaffirmed the previous chronological placement of the site.
Read more about this topic: Anna Site
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)