The Tunica treasure is a group of artifacts from the Tunica-Biloxi tribe discovered in the 1960s. Their discovery led to a protracted legal battle over their ownership, and the eventual passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
Trudeau Landing, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is located in Tunica, Louisiana.
The term Tunica treasure was introduced[ when? ] by archaeologist Jeffrey Brain, a name which he later came to regret. [1]
In the spring of 1541 Hernando de Soto and his army approached the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, coming upon the Province of Quizquiz (pronounced "keys-key"). These people spoke a dialect of the Tunica language, which is a language isolate. At that time, these related groups covered a large region extending along both sides of the Mississippi River in present-day Mississippi and Arkansas, as the expedition would soon learn. [2]
It was 150 years before another European group recorded the Tunica. In 1699 the LaSource expedition (coming downriver from French Canada) encountered the Tunica, describing them as a modestly sized tribe numbering only a few hundred warriors. They and other peoples had suffered from smallpox epidemics, which had high mortality rates as they had no natural immunity to this new disease carried by Europeans.[ citation needed ]
The Tunica were skilled traders and entrepreneurs, especially in the manufacture and distribution of salt, a valuable item to both native and Europeans. [3]
By the early 18th century, the tribes along the lower Mississippi River were a target of Chickasaw raids for the English slave trade in South Carolina. By 1706 the Tunica decided to move.
As their enemies the Natchez were to their immediate south, they moved to the Mississippi side of the Mississippi and Red River confluence. This allowed them to keep control of their salt trade, as the Red River also connected to their salt source in the Caddoan areas. [4]
They established a loose collection of hamlets and villages at present-day Angola, Louisiana. The archeological remains of a small hamlet from this time period were discovered in 1976 by an inmate of Angola Prison. It is known as the Bloodhound Site. [5]
In the 1960s, graves at the site were dug up by a local self-described treasure hunter, who worked as a guard at Louisiana State Prison (Angola). He took many artifacts from the area, which had been deposited as grave goods with the more than 100 graves. The Tunica felt that he had stolen tribal heirlooms and desecrated the graves of their ancestors and were outraged at the violations. He tried to sell the artifacts to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, but the transaction stalled when the museum found that he did not have legal title to the items.
In the 1970s, the site was excavated by archaeologists, who uncovered large amounts of pottery, European trade goods, and other artifacts deposited as grave goods by the Tunica from 1731 to 1764 when they were in residence. With help from the State of Louisiana, the tribe filed a lawsuit to obtain the title to the artifacts.
A decade passed in the courts, but the ruling became a landmark in Native American history, and it helped lay the groundwork for new Federal legislation, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990. [6] It was also used to prove the ancient heritage of the Tunica peoples, and helped them to gain state and Federal recognition. [7]
A museum to house the artifacts was built by the Tunica-Biloxi, in Marksville, Louisiana. They are using it also as a conservation and education center for preservation of their artifacts.
In the 1960s a treasure hunter named Leonard Charrier began searching for artifacts at the Trudeau Landing site in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. The Tunica, who felt he had stolen tribal heirlooms and desecrated the graves of their ancestors, were outraged.
In the 1970s the site was excavated by archaeologists, uncovering large amounts of pottery, European trade goods and other artifacts deposited as grave goods by the Tunica from 1731 to 1764 when they occupied the site. With help from the State of Louisiana, the tribe filed suit to gain title to the artifacts, which has subsequently become known as the "Tunica treasure". The case took a decade to be decided in the courts, but the ruling became a landmark in American Indian history. It helped to lay the groundwork for new federal legislation, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990. [8]
Because the artifacts had been separated from the original burials and connections were lost, the tribe decided to build a museum to house these items. Members of the tribe were trained as conservators in order to repair damage done to the artifacts by the centuries underground and handling during the ten-year court battle. The museum was built in the shape of the ancient temple mounds of their people, with the earthen structure to take the symbolic place of the original burial underground. It opened in 1989 as The Tunica-Biloxi Regional Indian Center and Museum. [9] Due to structural problems, it was closed in 1999, with plans for a new larger facility underway. Today the Tunica Treasure collection is housed in the Tunica-Biloxi Cultural and Educational Resources Center, a state-of-the-art facility that includes a library, conservation center, distance-learning center, conference facilities, tribal offices, and museum on the tribal reservation in Marksville. Eighty percent of the artifacts of the Tunica Treasure have been restored. [10]
Effigy Mounds National Monument preserves more than 200 prehistoric mounds built by pre-Columbian Mound Builder cultures, mostly in the first millennium CE, during the later part of the Woodland period of pre-Columbian North America. Numerous effigy mounds are shaped like animals, including bears and birds.
Avoyelles is a parish located in central eastern Louisiana on the Red River where it effectively becomes the Atchafalaya River and meets the Mississippi River. As of the 2020 census, the population was 39,693. The parish seat is Marksville. The parish was created in 1807, with the name deriving from the French name for the historic Avoyel people, one of the local Indian tribes at the time of European encounter.
Marksville is a small city in and the parish seat of Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, United States. The population was 5,702 at the 2010 census, an increase of 165 over the 2000 tabulation of 5,537.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Pub. L. 101-601, 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 104 Stat. 3048, is a United States federal law enacted on November 16, 1990.
The Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe, formerly known as the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe of Louisiana, is a federally recognized tribe of primarily Tunica and Biloxi people, located in east central Louisiana. Descendants of Ofo (Siouan-speakers), Avoyel, and Choctaw (Muskogean) are also enrolled in the tribe.
Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, Southeastern cultures, or Southeast Indians are an ethnographic classification for Native Americans who have traditionally inhabited the area now part of the Southeastern United States and the northeastern border of Mexico, that share common cultural traits. This classification is a part of the Eastern Woodlands. The concept of a southeastern cultural region was developed by anthropologists, beginning with Otis Mason and Franz Boas in 1887. The boundaries of the region are defined more by shared cultural traits than by geographic distinctions. Because the cultures gradually instead of abruptly shift into Plains, Prairie, or Northeastern Woodlands cultures, scholars do not always agree on the exact limits of the Southeastern Woodland culture region. Shawnee, Powhatan, Waco, Tawakoni, Tonkawa, Karankawa, Quapaw, and Mosopelea are usually seen as marginally southeastern and their traditional lands represent the borders of the cultural region.
The Avoyel or Avoyelles were a small Native American tribe who at the time of European contact inhabited land near the mouth of the Red River at its confluence with the Atchafalaya River near present-day Marksville, Louisiana. Also called variously Shi'xkaltī'ni in Tunican and Tassenocogoula, Tassenogoula, Toux Enongogoula, and Tasånåk Okla in the Mobilian trade language; all names are said by early French chroniclers to mean either "Flint People" or "People of the Rocks". This is thought to either reflect their active trading of flint for tools from local sources on their land in the eponymously named modern Avoyelles Parish or more likely as their status as middlemen in trading flint from Caddoan peoples to their north to the stone deficit Atakapa and Chitimacha peoples of the Gulf Coast.
Spiro Mounds is an Indigenous archaeological site located in present-day eastern Oklahoma. The site was built by people from the Arkansas Valley Caddoan culture. that remains from an American Indian culture that was part of the major northern Caddoan Mississippian culture. The 80-acre site is located within a floodplain on the southern side of the Arkansas River. The modern town of Spiro developed approximately seven miles to the south.
The Biloxi tribe are Native Americans of the Siouan language family. They call themselves by the autonym Tanêks(a) in Siouan Biloxi language. When first encountered by Europeans in 1699, the Biloxi inhabited an area near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico near what is now the city of Biloxi, Mississippi. They were eventually forced west into Louisiana and eastern Texas. The Biloxi language--Tanêksąyaa ade--has been extinct since the 1930s, when the last known semi-speaker, Emma Jackson, died.
The Winterville site is a major archaeological site in unincorporated Washington County, Mississippi, north of Greenville and along the river. It consists of major earthwork monuments, including more than twelve large platform mounds and cleared and filled plazas. It is the type site for the Winterville Phase of the Lower Yazoo Basin region of the Plaquemine Mississippian culture. Protected as a state park, it has been designated as a National Historic Landmark.
Fort St. Pierre was a colonial French fortified outpost on the Yazoo River in what is now Warren County, Mississippi. Also known as Fort St. Claude and the Yazoo Post, it was established in 1719 and served as the northernmost outpost of French Louisiana. It was destroyed in 1729 by Native Americans and was not rebuilt. Its location, north of Vicksburg on the east bank of the river, was discovered by archaeologists in the 1970s, and was given the Smithsonian trinomial 23-M-5. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2000.
The Plaquemine culture was an archaeological culture centered on the Lower Mississippi River valley. It had a deep history in the area stretching back through the earlier Coles Creek and Troyville cultures to the Marksville culture. The Natchez and related Taensa peoples were their historic period descendants. The type site for the culture is the Medora site in Louisiana; while other examples include the Anna, Emerald, Holly Bluff, and Winterville sites in Mississippi.
The Trudeau Landing site, also known as Tunica Village and Trudeau, is an archaeological site in Tunica, unincorporated West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, United States. It was once occupied by the Tunica tribe. Later European settlers developed it into the Trudeau Plantation.
The Tunica people are a group of linguistically and culturally related Native American tribes in the Mississippi River Valley, which include the Tunica ; the Yazoo; the Koroa ; and possibly the Tioux. They first encountered Europeans in 1541 – members of the Hernando de Soto expedition.
The Nodena phase is an archaeological phase in eastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri of the Late Mississippian culture which dates from about 1400–1650 CE. The Nodena phase is known from a collection of villages along the Mississippi River between the Missouri Bootheel and Wapanocca Lake. They practiced extensive maize agriculture and artificial cranial deformation and were members of a continent wide trade and religious network known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, which brought chert, whelk shells, and other exotic goods to the area.
Earl Joseph Barbry Sr. was an American politician and Native American leader who served as the Chairman of the Tunica-Biloxi tribe from 1978 to 2013.
The Carson Mounds, also known as the Carson Site and Carson-Montgomery- is a large Mississippian culture archaeological site located near Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi, in the Yazoo Basin. Only a few large earthen mounds are still present at Carson to this day. Archaeologists have suggested that Carson is one of the more important archaeological sites in the state of Mississippi.
Quigualtam or Quilgualtanqui was a powerful Native American Plaquemine culture polity encountered in 1542–1543 by the Hernando de Soto expedition. The capital of the polity and its chieftain also bore the same name; although neither the chief nor his settlements were ever visited in person by the expedition. Their encounters consisted of messages sent by runners and a three-day long canoe battle on the Mississippi River. Multiple archaeological cultures, archaeological sites, and protohistoric and early historic period Native American groups have been proposed by historians and archaeologists to identify the polity, but their identity will probably never be known with any degree of certainty. The chroniclers of the DeSoto expedition said the chiefdoms near the Mississippi River, especially Guigualtam, were the best they encountered during their three-year journey through the southeastern United States.
Horace Pierite Sr. was an American politician, farmer, trapper, and Native American leader.
Horace Pierite Jr. was an American politician, farmer, and Native American leader.
The 'Tunica Treasure' is the label I carelessly applied to this extraordinary collection for its faintly alliterative sound, but have since come to regret in the light of subsequent developments.
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