There is something almost atavistic in the appeal of an archeological dig. For most people, to hold in the hands a pottery sherd, a flint arrowhead, a piece of bone, or any other artifact of known prehistoric origin is to feel for one quick moment both the excitement and the melancholy suggested by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s phrase, “So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.” Such remnants are all we have and all we will ever know of those shadowy people who came before us; yet, knowing that, we also know that they are as much a part of us as the genes which determine the color of our skin.

However appealing, the experience of digging in and finding such splinters of the past is not, for most of us, easily come by, a fact which makes all the more intriguing a program instituted in the state of Arkansas thirteen years ago. It is called the Arkansas Archeological Survey, and its goal is not merely to locate and examine as many of the state’s archeological sites as possible, but to do so with the cooperation and, whenever feasible, the participation of the citizenry.

And there is work to be done. Arkansas, like the other states of the Mississippi River valley, supported a rich abundance of prehistoric human life—from the ice-age nomads of twelve to thirty thousand years ago to the more sedentary Adena, Hopewellian, and Mississippian cultures that flourished shortly before and for fifteen hundred years after the birth of Christ. These latter were mound builders for both religious and burial purposes, and their legacy of great, rounded, manmade hills became part of the essential geography of the Mississippi River valley and a source of great fascination to those who supplanted the people who had built them— as the illustration on the opposite page dmonstrates.

That fascination has spilled over to our own time, in Arkansas quite as intensely as in any other state. In 1960 the Arkansas Archeological Society was formed and immediately began lobbying for the creation of a state-supported archeological survey with sufficient funding and manpower to do justice to the state’s wealth of archeological sites. Seven years later, the survey was a reality, financed by the state and placed under the administrative aegis of the University of Arkansas. It since has set up a program that cooperates closely with educational intitutions around the state, the State Highway Commission, and the Division of State Parks, as well as various federal agencies; has established nine research stations; has acquired a sizable staff, including state archeologists; has recorded more than thirteen thousand sites across the state; and perhaps most important, has publicized iths efforts broadly and created an on-site archeological training program from which anyone with an interest in the past (and a registration fee) can hope to emerge as a certified archeological technician or field archeologist.

What all this can mean in practical terms is perhaps best illustrated by the discovery and excavation