Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, November 25, 1997

Archaeologists debate when Indians found Iberia

by Jim Bradshaw

It is that perhaps that has caused much argument over the years.

Basket fragments, stone implements, and thousands of pieces of broken Indian pottery of a type made about 1300 A. D. indicate that there was an Indian salt business on Avery Island. Brine from salt springs was evaporated in large clay pots, and the salt was traded to other Indian tribes living as far away as central Texas, Arkansas, and Ohio. But the Indians were long gone by the time white settlers found the island, and the Indians refused to come back to it.

In the late 1790s, Johnny Hayes, the young son of the first white settlers on the island, took a drink from a brine-filled spring, and discovered that Avery Island was made largely of salt. His discovery raised two questions: He wondered about the source of the salt, but also why the Attakapas Indians of his day would no longer hunt on the island. They told him this island was taboo, that something had happened there many generations before. They would never tell him what it was, and may not have known. Some people think they had forgotten whatever incident had occurred here and only knew through their long tribal memory that it was a bad place.

No one since has discovered the secret of the Indians.

It was not until the Civil War, when the brine springs at Avery island were used to supply salt for the Confederacy, that historians and archaeologists got a peek at a little bit of the Indians' secret. The need to produce more and more salt caused John Marsh Avery, who then owned the place, to try to clean out the springs so that more brine, and more salt, could be produced. In the process, he uncovered the rock salt that is at the island's core, and also several interesting artifacts.

Charles Dudley Warner wrote about that discovery in 1887 in Harper's Magazine:

"In stripping away the soil several relics of human workmanship came to light," Warner would report, "among them stone implements and a woven basket, exactly such as the Attakapas make now. This basket, found at the depth of sixteen feet, lay upon the salt rock, and was in perfect preservation."

In November 1863, Richard Owen, a Union army officer, went to see the salt mine. He found more Indian relics, including a basket made of split cane, charcoal remains of fire and torches, a rope made of bark, wooden hooks, stone axes, and pottery. Owen sent his findings to the St. Louis Academy of Science, and opened a debate over just when Indians first began to gather the island's salt. The debate goes on today over whether the Indian relics are as old as mastodon and other animal bones found nearby. If the animal fossils and Indian relics are the same age, it means that men were here much earlier than we now believe. But there are real questions to be answered.

Joseph Leidy reported to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1866 that J. P. Cleu, who lived on the island, had found Indian basketry close to the bones of an ancient elephant, and reported more findings in 1889.

"The bones and teeth are stained chocolate brown and black, are otherwise little altered, and are not rolled or water-worn," Leidy said. "They consist of remains of Mastodon americanus, Mylodon, and of a Horse."

In January 1890, miners uncovered other Indian relics and animal bones. Joseph Joor, a New Orleans physician and botanist, went to investigate. He found still more animal bones, shell and pottery, a 4-inch-square piece of cane matting, and twisted strips of bark he thought to be basket handles. But he also reported: "I see no reason for assigning any very enormous antiquity to these relics."

Arthur Veatch, visiting in 1889, "carefully searched in the bone bed for objects which could be unquestionably attributed to man, "but was unable to find any. He reported: " Numerous pieces of cane were found in this layer, and some had a peculiar split appearance which was first thought to be artificial, but turned out to be due to unequal weathering. Veatch found the evidence that the animal bones and basketry were of the same age "unconvincing".

Others thought differently:

"Some ... scientific gentlemen have reckoned that the mastodon, or mammoth, was here with the (Indians), Warner reported. "That (they) were here contemporaneously has been demonstrated by finding pipes and pottery wares ... with images of the mastodon engraved upon them. As the (Indians) had no written language, they could know nothing from having read of the mastodon, but must have gained their information from a personal acquaintance with his majesty."

Most modern scientists say it is only an accident of geology that the remains were found side-by-side. Shifting lands and running water laid them together by coincidence. Later finds and less-than-complete investigations have served more to fuel the debate than to finish it.

In 1960 and 1961, and again in 1968, Sherwood Gagliano tried radiocarbon dating on the relics and fossils. He found that they were very, very old, but his dates didn't answer the question of when Indians first arrived at Avery Island.

Scientists cannot say for certain whether the mammoth and the Indian lived together in Acadiana. It is probable that they did not. But, it is known that by the time of European exploration, the Attakapas tribes were among a series of Native American settlements along the Gulf Coast from the Rio Grande to Tampa Bay. These tribes were Karankawa, Tonkawa, Attakapas, Chitimacha, Bayagoula, Mugoulasha, Pascagoula, Biloxi, Maubila, Pensacola, Chatot, Apalachee, Timucua, and Calusa.

Historians think, after studying language and artifacts, it is likely that these Gulf Coast tribes played at least a minor role in an "international" network that included the Caribbean, Mexico, the southwestern United States, the Mississippi Valley and the U. S. Northeast.

Students of Native American languages have found that Indians of the southeastern United States spoke every one of the five major language families of eastern North America. The Cherokee and their neighbors spoke a version of Iroquoian, while the vast majority of people in the middle South spoke various dialects of Muskhogean. The Catawaba and their neighbors of the Carolinas spoke Siouan, as did the Biloxi of the Gulf Coast. On the western edge of the Southwest were the Caddo, whose fellow Caddoan speakers were stretched out to the north -- Wichita, Pawnee, and Arikara. Even Algonkian was spoken by the peoples of the Virginia area and by wandering groups of Shawnee.

The scientists say that the fact that so many languages are found along the Gulf Coast indicates that there once must have been some kind of connection between its peoples and peoples of other Indian nations.

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