Return to First Page----ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 2 (June 1943), p.106
The pottery of this period is characterized by deep, wide lines of incised decoration, flat bottoms, straight up sides, thick walls and grit temper. This period is known as the Marksville culture level, and is coeval with the Hopewellian culture of Ohio. Another characteristic is that their burials were mostly flexed and practically never contain burial furniture. They were the first known peoples to build mounds. There are many sites in Clark county that are the former homes of these people,chiefly around the salt works on the Saline Bayou. Other sites that have yielded many evidences of Marksville occupation are on the Caddo river, Bushy creek, Antoin river, Moores creek, Little Missouri, and Deceipher creek, and of course along the Ouachita. It is a peculiar fact that there is more evidence of their occupation of the area along the smaller streams and more or less secluded places. Perhaps the most extensive Marksville site is on the Little Missouri river. (1)
Their period of occupation was somewhere between the first century, A. D., and possibly 1000 A. D. In time they either merged into another culture or, because of war, or pestilence moved out and a culture known as Cole's Creek took their place. These people apparently lived about as the Marksville people did, with some agricultural activity, but chiefly by hunting and fishing. An item of diet among all primitive peoples of Clark county was fresh water mussels, of which there was an abundant supply in all the streams of the county from the smallest to the Ouachita. From the size of some of the ancient shell heaps, notably around Old Horse Shoe, an old bed of the Ouachita river north of Open Banks, mussels must have been the chief article of food for long periods of time.
Cole's Creek culture is distinguished, as is Marksville, by the poetry complex. The rims of the pots were thick and a groove was made around the top of the rim; lines around the rim were made with a sharp stick held at an angle of forty-five degrees to the surface and pointing toward the rim, which gave an overhanging effect.
