Bragg Family South

While summer may not "officially" start for a couple more days, it has been here in south Arkansas for a while.  We've embarked on another hectic summer schedule, with our work weeks punctuated by explorations of regional culture...The picture above and below are from a local festival held in Magnolia, Arkansas, featuring a steak cook-off (and, obviously, a car show, as the gorgeous Plymouth GTX pictured above shows): Our big event early in the summer is the Arkansas Archeological Society's annual training program.  For most of the past decade, Bragg Family South has joined dozens of other archeology enthusiasts and professional archeologists for days of digging...Well, all is not digging--we have a blast camping with a great bunch of people!  Below is a picture of the camping area, hosted by Parkin Archeological State Park in eastern Arkansas: Over the years, we have become close friends with many of these people, and made new friends constantly.  They...

So this blog post is somewhat out of temporal order...You may recall that the last Bragg Family South posting was a business trip I made in late April to western Arkansas.  This trip, to Waco, Texas, actually occurred a week before, but I've only now got time to post the pictures and narrative...  Well, as you can see, we went looking for mammoths!  The kids are pictured above with a life-size painting of a Columbian mammoth unearthed at what is now one of the newest gems in the National Park System--Waco Mammoth National Monument (https://www.nps.gov/waco/index.htm).  This national monument is a site found when some mammoth bones started washing out of a gully--turned out to be a large number of these Columbian mammoths (and some other animals, like camels) that got caught in a flash flood and buried thousands of years ago--the park displays and interprets the remains and this event: Below is a cool old Texas live oak along the trail from the parking area to...

Today, a business trip has taken me to western Arkansas.  Nestled in the scenic Ouachita Mountains (pictured above), Queen Wilhelmena State Park (http://www.queenwilhelmina.com/) is located on the top of Rich Mountain, a long, narrow, and steep ridge that runs from western Arkansas into eastern Oklahoma.  I will be here for the next few days providing part of a silviculture training program for US Forest Service silviculturists from across the southeastern US.  Rich Mountain is well-known for its unique flora and fauna, some of which are only found on this long ridge.  I took a walk after arriving at the state park, and boy what a show!  The spring wildflowers are going full-bore; the blog that follows is a partial sample of their glory. The first picture is that of a rather unusual trillium, the green trillium: Yes, those are green petals--hence the name!  The flowers pictured below are actually from a small shrub, a type of buckeye (I'm not sure...

Doesn't he just look suave in this fedora?  It is hard to believe we're already a week into April...March just evaporated right past us!  What a busy month!!  March started out pretty tame--we snuck out a few times to our lease to let the kids explore: Which was a good thing they splashed in this little creek BEFORE the big rains hit...Monticello ended up getting about 14.5 inches of rain for the month of March (our usual average this time of year is 4-5 inches per month)!  Note how wet our backyard got: Other parts of southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana had a lot more rain than we got in Monticello, and had some major flooding issues.  I was worried how all the rain would impact the archeology opportunities I had this month...Fortunately, they had little impact.  I spent a couple days working on a late Mississippian site in northeastern Arkansas, pictured below: The dark soil is the "midden" or organic matter-rich soil formed by long...