The 1966 Pharr Dig

In the summer of 1966 the National Park Service excavated four of the eight burial mounds at Pharr Mounds, at milepost 286.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, to learn enough to interpret them for visitors. The archeologist Charles Bohannon dug Mounds A and H in part and Mounds D and E almost completely, first by hand and then, where the fill was deep, with a bulldozer that stripped away all but the bottom two feet. Built about 1–200 AD, the mounds turned out to cover what had been laid on the ground before them: prepared clay floors, fired basins that may have served for cremation, and graves. No intact skeleton survived in any of them; what survived was what had gone into the ground with the dead, some of it carried a great distance.

Beside a fired basin under Mound H lay a greenstone platform pipe, with tiny flakes of mica on the old ground surface. In a grave under Mound A, three thin lenses of burned bone lay near a scrap of wood filmed with copper salts. Under Mound D an oval pavement of sandstone slabs held a broken copper spool, and a burial just beyond the edge of the mound's prepared floor held two more. Mound E, 8 feet high and about 170 feet across, covered a burial platform roughly 80 feet wide, with pottery vessels in several graves and one grave holding a cache of flint blades.

Bohannon's report keeps smaller things too. The excavation grid was meant to run true north and was set 18 degrees off by mistake, found only after bags and photographs had been labelled, so the crew kept it. The site straddles the Prentiss and Itawamba county line on Pharr Flats, above the meeting of Little Brown and Mackeys creeks.