“If you canoe out of Mobile Bay, out into the Gulf, I think you’d be taking your life in your hands. “Traffic would have been aided immensely by this canal,” Waselkov says. The Native Americans living in this area at the time did not use agriculture, so access to subsistence resources like fish and foraged plants was crucial. Rather than circumnavigating the 19-mile peninsula through high surf, individuals from this village could have taken the canal to get to camps closer to the Gulf, where they processed, smoked, and dried fish and shellfish for better preservation. Archaeologists of the Southeast have used the term Woodland period to describe a cultural phase in which pottery came into widespread use and societies were organized in small hamlets that sometimes built mounds.Įvidence shows a small Middle Woodland village, Plash Island, stood about 1.5 miles north of one end of the canal and was likely responsible for the waterway’s construction. Through radiocarbon dating, they were able to place the construction between 576 and 650 C.E., at the end of the Middle Woodland period. The team dug two cross sections of the canal. But when the canal was dry, it still would have made a good footpath through a heavily forested area, Waselkov says. The researchers also think the canal was only navigable in the winter, when seasonal factors typically create wetter conditions and a higher water table. With a shallow draft, dugout canoes would have only needed a few inches of water to pass through the three-foot-deep canal. The solution in this case may have been two dams at either end of the passageway that canoe travelers would have had to carry their boats around. That means anyone digging a trench across the peninsula would risk draining the water table into those sea-level outlets. Both bodies of water are at sea level, but the land between reaches up to six feet in elevation. Though much of the canal has been lost to development today, in its heyday it would have stretched a little less than a mile across most of Fort Morgan Peninsula, from Oyster Bay in the north to Little Lagoon in the south. The canal ran between Oyster Bay and Little Lagoon in Alabama. “The archaeology is so fantastic in this region, it has such an interesting history, and it speaks to the sophistication and ingenuity of Indigenous societies in the Southeast who have contemporary descendant communities." “They were able to engineer these landscapes that allowed them to flourish for millennia,” he adds. “I think one of the things that underscores is the incredibly engineered landscape that exists among the Native peoples of the Gulf Coast,” says Victor Thompson, director of the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia, who was not involved in the study but reviewed it. In a report published online in June in the Journal of Field Archaeology, the researchers described how the canal would have connected the Gulf of Mexico with more protected bays, allowing better access between coastal fishing areas and trade routes to the rest of the Southeast. They confirmed that this long-overlooked trench is a feat of engineering and a rare archaeological find: a canal, nearly a mile long, built for canoe travel 1,400 years ago by the Native Americans who navigated the region’s waterways. Thanks to King’s urging, Waselkov finally began an investigation of the site in 2017 with a team of volunteer archaeologists. But when I saw it, I realized it’s something different.” “There are lots of features like that in the swampy areas around Mobile, from logging, and from rice cultivation-there are all kinds of reasons you might have big ditches. “It took me forever to go out there and take a look,” says Waselkov. Gregory Waselkov, a now-retired anthropologist at the university, figured the ditch was probably an antebellum construction built by enslaved laborers. On visits to the archaeology museum at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, King would encourage researchers to examine it. One resident, Harry King, who had been exploring the back bays of the region, became fascinated with the remnants of this large trench, about 30 feet wide and 3 feet deep. In the beachside resort town of Gulf Shores, Alabama, locals had often referred to an odd feature in the landscape as “Indian ditch.” As far back as the 1820s, a handful of antiquarians and United States Army engineers recognized it as a feature that predated white settlers, but it hadn’t received enough scholarly attention to explain its history and function.
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