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Today in Mississippi
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October 2018
Digging up the
By Debbie Stringer One of Jeff McCraw’s hobbies is collecting seashells— but not at the seashore. Instead, McCraw finds plenty in Mississippi’s rivers, creeks and streams. “Right down the road here,” the Smith County resident said, “if you drive over a bridge, you can look down at the bottom of the creek and just see seashells by the thousands.” Seashells in an inland creek? Not only that, but McCraw sometimes finds shark teeth or other ancient marine fossils amongst the shells. These are all that remain of the creatures that inhabited the shallow prehistoric sea that once covered most of Mississippi and the midwestern US. When the saltwaters receded millions of years ago, huge mammals—mastodons, giant bisons and the like—came to dominate the Mississippi landscape. McCraw collects their fossils too. McCraw is equally passionate when it comes to hunting and researching prehistoric Native American artifacts, from points to pottery. He is a scrupulous hunter who avoids Native American mound sites, which remain sacred to the
past
Jeff McCraw searches Mississippi’s rivers and creeks for insight into our state’s prehistoric life. descendants of the builders and protected by federal law. “I am pretty much an out-of-context artifact hunter,” he said. “I do hunt a field or site occasionally but I leave digging to the archaeologists. Just picking up an arrowhead is one thing, but if you go and start digging and messing with [a site], then you’re taking away valuable information to the scientific community.” Nor does he sell artifacts or fossils, trespass on private land or hunt for them on public lands, where removing such items is restricted by law. McCraw, a member of Southern Pine Electric, has no formal education in paleontology or archaeology; his knowledge stems from some 12 years of hunting and researching fossils and artifacts. Experience has taught him where to look for them, how to recognize them and where to get help in identifying them. (McCraw will tell you that finding artifacts is the easy part; figuring out what they were used for is more difficult, if not impossible.) McCraw’s most fertile hunting grounds are river, creek and stream beds, where collecting is legal in Mississippi. There the combined forces of erosion and time wash away ancient sediments,
eventually exposing long-buried fossils and artifacts. Often they settle into holes in hard surfaces beneath the water, McCraw has found. “I spent two or three years, maybe four, digging
McCraw has carefully crafted stories of prehistoric Mississippi through the tangible evidence he has spent so many enjoyable hours collecting. out every hole on about a mile-long strip of Tallahala Creek, and in just about every hole there was an arrowhead or shark teeth,” he said. “I’ve found things that were 2 feet deep with a machete, just by the sound of the metal hitting something different in that creek or river.” One day while paddling down a creek, McCraw came upon a mound of clay protruding from the water. His hunch turned out to be correct: Ancient whale bones embedded in the mound had saved it from eroding into oblivion. In 2007 McCraw made the first significant find of