![]() It is glorious and a tiny bit ominous, like a walk during plague-time should be. The wind moves through the tree canopy of the surrounding forest, making it sound like something gigantic is shuffling around in the middle distance. When I stop for a moment mid-stream, I am awake to the contrast between the sweat on my face and the cold water around my feet. Groups of minnows flicker through the opalescent, blue-green water. Walking down the gravel mounds, the slipping stones make a wet, rattling sound, like chain poured from a bucket. The gravel collects in shoals, in places where the water slows down and the biggest solids in it fall out. Time and water flows have carried the ancient evidence here, to Natchez, in the form of agates, quartz, and fossil remnants of several extinct species of coral.Īll of this history gives the act of standing, bent at the waist, and rummaging through gravel a sense of importance. Volcanic activity and plate movement gradually lifted the area out of the water and the former sea bed and volcanic rock that laid underneath it eroded away. Much, much further back in geological time, between three hundred and four hundred million years ago, before dinosaurs, the area around present-day Nashville was beneath the sea. From these dry sea beds, the wind picked up fine silt and silica particles, then deposited them in what would become the southeastern United States, through which my friends and I now tromp. The loess soil that makes up these hills was deposited by wind that blew across the dry shallow seas that developed seasonally on the edges of these glaciers. Between about 100,000 and 15,000 years ago, the planet was much cooler glaciers extended deep into North America. The Mississippi River might appear to be the prime geological force acting on the Natchez hills, but that is incorrect. The forces that formed this area are complex, maybe best understood as the recent work of ancient processes. “What you are seeing is tens of thousands of years of deposited dust, a massive cataclysm wherein a volume of water the size of the Great Lakes burst out of glacial dams, and carried the mid-continent rocks down here all in a rush, then another 30K years of dust, then another flood, etc.”-McMains Uniform loess deposits, banded with gravel. These enticements ended up being unnecessary because, like the rest of the quarantined world, we three were content to take a long walk outside. Accompanied by two friends with whom I have shared the occasional previous adventure, on this outing, I had suggested that we would find giant sloth teeth, or maybe giant sloth claws, or even an intact giant sloth. However, one could mistake all that for the slurry of small, brown, grey, and off-white rocks I crunch through on a cool spring morning. Those ravines collect the jumbled history of all that’s come before: the distant time on our planet when most life was still confined to the seas, the more recent time when giant sloths and mastodons foraged through the cool, fern-filled forests that covered this area during the last glacial maximum, and then the complex, semi-urbanized civilization that thrived here before the arrival of Europeans. The water carves the hills around Natchez into deep ravines. Warm, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico fuels intense rainstorms, the rainstorms release impressive amounts of water. The streambeds south of Natchez, Mississippi are full of history. Le Page du Pratz, who lived in Natchez, Mississippi for a period in the early 18th century, studied the ways of life of Native Americans in the area and published the landmark publication Histoire de la Louisiane in 1758. Like the glimpses of the past offered by fragments found in streambeds, the engravings of French ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz offer precious insights into the every day practices of ancient civilizations.
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