SOME ABORIGINAL SITES ON RED RIVER. 485 
or Nation! of the Rocks, which Pénicaut says formerly dwelt with the Natchez and 
whose customs and religion were the same as those of the people of that tribe. 
Pénicaut places this village as six leagues above Saline river,’ at the base of a chain 
of hills extending north and south. Hills of this description are now about ten 
miles farther up Red river than according to Pénicaut's account. However, it 
should be borne in mind that the course of the river is continually changing, and 
that Pénicaut, though he made a close estimate as to the location of Natchitoches, 
was not in a position to give distances with any degree of certainty. Careful inqui- 
ries made by us near the base of these hills were without result. 
Throughout the Red river region in Louisiana, one hears almost nothing of the 
finding of bones or of artifacts, and we know it requires but few discoveries to start 
considerable talk. But little seems to have been placed in such mounds as there 
are in that region, and presumably fields containing cemeteries, when on high 
ground, have been denuded of the soil in which the burials were by the action of 
rain on earth loosened by the plow, and when on lowlands they have been washed 
bare by the river or covered by deposits from it in periods of high water. The 
waters of Red river in flood time are charged with mud to a degree beyond any we 
have seen elsewhere. Our Captain Raybon informs us that after the flood of 1908 
he saw six inches of deposit on the floor of a building there; and the bottom lands 
have been exposed to many floods. 
Along Red river in Arkansas conditions in the main are different. Stories of 
the discovery of Indian objects—especially pottery—and mounds containing burials, 
some of them richly endowed with artifacts, are fairly abundant. Indeed, we know 
of no other region in all our fields of investigation where the proportion of deposits 
with the dead was so great. In the middle Mississippi region (which lies to the 
northward of the Red river region investigated by us), where the lavish use of 
pottery with burials has been so often described, the investigator has reached the 
maximum when a cemetery yields an average of two or three vessels to a burial. 
Assuredly many burials there have more than three vessels, but many others, on 
the other hand, have nothing. Along Red river in Arkansas, to come upon a 
burial unaccompanied by artifacts is indeed a rare occurrence. 
One is impressed in that region, however, with the few burials in the mounds,— 
we found no cemeteries there, as the reader may perceive,—and we believe it likely 
that the mounds contain the burials of persons of note and that the cemeteries 
filled with burials of the commoner people have gone in the same manner as, pre- 
sumably, aboriginal cemeteries disappeared in the Red river region of Louisiana. 
This would account for the small number of burials found in the Red river region 
! Pénicaut speaks of another “nation” of Indians which numbered only about two hundred men, 
so it is hardly likely that the Tassenogoula were very numerous, ^ Ils avoient avec eux une nation 
sauvage de leurs amis, d’environ deux cents hommes, sans leurs femmes et enfans.”—Pierre Margry. 
“ Découvertes,” etc., Part 5, p. 498. ; 
As to the name Tassenogoula see John R. Swanton, *Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi 
Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico."— Bulletin 48, Bur. Am. Ethn., p. 24 ей seq 
? There is also a river of this name in Arkansas. 
