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Report from the Director Long-Lost Archaeological Collection Reclaimed by MDAH
The reemergence of the Chambers Collection is tremendously significant to the archaeological community in Mississippi. These artifacts were gathered during the state's first archaeological program, and no one has had a chance to study them in more than seven decades. MDAH is now working to catalog and inventory the collection and to determine which of these materials will be returned to Native American groups in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Once this process is complete, museum staff will draw heavily on the Chambers collection in planning the exhibits for the new Museum of Mississippi History. |
An invaluable collection of artifacts gathered by the Department's first archaeologists, Moreau B. C. Chambers and James A. Ford, during the 1920s and 1930s has been reclaimed by MDAH after more than a 70-year absence from the state. Chambers and Ford were the first to excavate such nationally significant sites as Fatherland in Adams County, which is now the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians. In the early 1930s, Chambers loaned a collection of potsherds, projectile points, and gunflints to Ford, who was then at LSU, and then evidently neglected to retrieve the materials before leaving Mississippi in 1942. For the next 50 years, archaeologists at MDAH gave little thought to the Chambers Collection, assuming that it had been lost in a fire at a rented storage facility at Whitfield. Then in the early 1990s, MDAH archaeologists came across information suggesting that the Chambers collection remained at LSU. Contact was made with LSU, and in April 2005, MDAH archaeologists traveled to Baton Rouge to retrieve, in two full van loads, the long-lost collection of Moreau B. C. Chambers. 