Bragg Family South

Before I digress into our spring break action, first an update from something before...  Kenny is shown above with the poster he assembled from an experiment he (and with careful supervision of Mom) conducted looking at what effects carbon dioxide (CO2) and the lack of oxygen (O2) have on fire--basically, he added vinegar to baking soda and watched how the chemical reaction that ensued extinguished a small tea candle.  His work earned him a second place trophy at the school's science fair, which made him (and his parents) very proud.  We spent a good chunk of our spring break this week at another archeological dig--this time at a location in southwestern Arkansas called Dooley's Ferry: Dooley's Ferry operated on the Red River near Texarkana, Arkansas, from before the Civil War until the 1930s or so, and was a key location on the old Southwestern Trail that led into Texas.  Nowadays, there is almost nothing visible on the site to indicate it's important histor...

This strange object I'm holding is one of the most important things we found in our recent work on a site in Ashley County, Arkansas, that has been heavily looted, particularly during the last year.  It is known as a "Poverty Point Object" or "PPO", which means it is a lump of mud (silt/clay) shaped into a particularly form, then heated until it hardens into a rock-like object.  These PPOs were then heated and used to provide a more controlled heat source for cooking food and boiling water.  Why, you may ask?  Well, because these people didn't have many rocks to use for this purpose, and these people lived before clay pottery was available.  We've taken a number of y'all to the large site in northeastern Louisiana called "Poverty Point" (this has the very large bird shaped mound).  On this site we also found a number of arrow points (from a later occupation than the Poverty Point Culture), like the broken one in my hand: We received...