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. 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. Images courtesy of Frank McMains. On the adjacent page, pictured are uniform loess deposits (far left), banded with gravel. “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 year sof dust, then another flood, etc.”—McMains Pictured in the middle: the 1100-1800 year old shard of pottery found on the author’s trek thorugh the Natchez streambeds (depicted in photo on far right, taken by Brandon Morgan).
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J U N E 2 0 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
