Watson Brake - Discovery and Dating

Discovery and Dating

Reca Bamburg Jones, a local resident, was long aware of three of the mounds on the overgrown site and, in the early 1980s, she was instrumental in bringing the site to the attention of professional archeologists. In 1981, after logging revealed more of the site, she discerned the pattern of eleven mounds connected by ridges, a complex 280 yards across. In 1983 she and John Belmont published the site in a survey of pre-history in the Ouachita River Valley. She contacted Joe Saunders, then regional archeologist for the state, to show him the site.

The site had been privately controlled since the 1950s. Approximately half the site is still owned by several family members, who have allowed archeological excavations and associated work. With recognition of the site's significance, in 1996 The Archaeological Conservancy purchased half the site and later sold it to the state for preservation.

Since the 1990s, radiocarbon dating by a team from Northeast Louisiana University has established the great antiquity of the site. The team of Joe W. Saunders et al. published a paper in Science in 1997 that established the age of the mound complex.

The analysis of 27 radiocarbon dates indicates that the site was initially occupied around 4000 BCE during the Middle Archaic period. Mound construction began at approximately 3500 BCE, and continued for approximately 500 years. During that time period, the mounds were enlarged in several stages. Excavations indicate that there was sufficient time between building episodes for midden deposits of residents to accumulate on top of the mounds and ridges. In addition, teams from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Washington dated the site by using sand grains and organic acids in the soils.

Saunders believes the evidence of the middens indicate that Watson Brake may have been used as a "base by mobile hunter-gatherers from summer through fall." He and his team suggest that the building episodes at Watson Brake coincide with periods of unpredictable rainfall caused by El Nino-Southern Oscillation events. They may represent "a communal response to new stresses of droughts and flooding that created a suddenly more unpredictable food base." Midden remains showed population reliance of fish and shellfish, and riverine animals, supplemented by local weedy annuals: goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), knotweed (Polygonum spp.), and possibly marshelder (Iva annua). Over time, there was an increasing consumption of terrestrial animals, such as deer, turkey, raccoon, opossum, squirrel, and rabbits, which was likely related to changing habitat and waterway conditions. The site appears to have been abandoned around 2800 BCE. This may have been caused by a "decline in the main channel, gravel/sand shoal habitats, backwater swamps, and small-stream habitats" near the site.

Together with other Middle Archaic sites in Louisiana and Florida, Watson Brake shows the development of complex societies among hunter-gatherers, who occupied the site seasonally but were capable of planning and organizing complex monumental construction over a period of several hundred years.

In contrast to Poverty Point, where its residents made projectile points with materials traded from distant locations, including Wisconsin and Tennessee, the artifacts of Watson Brake show local materials and production. The projectile points are Middle to Late Archaic in age, and were produced more casually than those at Poverty Point. The people also used local gravel for cooking stones, which they heated to steam some of their food. They created fired earthen objects in a variety of shapes, but researchers have not yet determined their functions.