Holly Bluff Site - Excavations

Excavations

Looting, erosion and cultivation have extensively damaged the Holy Bluff site over the years. This has caused some debate over the form and degree of some of the earthworks. Clarence B. Moore noted in 1908, following a visit, that some thirty rises and mounds, small and large, could be counted within the enclosure. Nine years later Calvin S. Brown visited and counted only twenty-five or so mounds within the wall. In 1928 and again in 1936 James A. Ford recorded only twenty-two mounds. In a site report in January 1941, Jesse D. Jennings described twenty-seven mounds and some questionable rises. C. B. Moore’s original estimate is believed to most accurately reflect the situation; many of the smaller earthworks have been lost to recent and intense cultivation.

In January and February 1908, Clarence Bloomfield Moore received permission from the then owner Judge William Andrew Henry of Yazoo City to excavate the sites along the Yazoo River and its tributary the Sunflower River in his steamboat, The Gopher. On his excavation Moore recorded eleven sites and partially excavated eight, including Holly Bluff: “with a large force to dig, including May who had been in our service before, we go directly to work on such mounds”. Moore commented on the physical appearance of the site: “Strewn over the enclosed area, among the mounds and on them…are chert pebbles; fragments of chert; bits of mussel shell; and small parts of earthenware vessels" Most of the earthenware was undecorated, he recorded, and mostly shell tempered with some stone tempering which is common in the Yazoo-Sunflower region. C. B. Moore’s excavations produced various small artifacts including projectile points, a pebble ax of fossilized wood, a chert hammerstone, and a zoomorphic effigy pipe of shell-tempered pottery. He was disappointed, however, in finding nothing of great importance other than two disturbed burials in a mound on the lake front. Moore’s disappointment was evident in his failing to map the site and his statement, “it having become evident to us that our search was inadequately rewarded”.

Numerous other archaeologists with varying degrees of success followed up Moore’s excavations. Each of the later excavations found an extremely different system of mounds. In the 1920s the site was damaged by the then-plantation owner Mr. Charles W. Perry who pastured cattle on the large mounds and cultivated the smaller mounds. The cattle foraged the cover of the larger mounds and their trampling eroded much of the site, erasing the ramps described by Moore. In 1949 Philip Phillips, Paul Gebhard and Nick Zeigler began performing test excavations of the Holly Bluff site. These were the first truly scientific excavations carried out at the site. The interpretations of the data provided the first reliable conclusions of the culture history. These tests finally provided evidence that the Holly Bluff site had been occupied for approximately one millennium. The conclusions proved that the Holly Bluff site was an important phase of the Coles Creek culture. From 1958 to 1960, “hundreds of skeletons were removed” from Mound C.