Native American diet: 1,000-year-old site reveals clues

Story and Photos By ROGER EMILE STOUFF
A thousand years ago, the Mississippi Valley was home to a thriving civilization of indigenous people.
They had no name for themselves that scholars are aware of. Thoughts do not fossilize, and in Louisiana’s wet environment, hardly anything transforms into a lasting record of how a people lived.
But Jim Delahoussaye, biologist, zooarchaeologist, Atchafalaya Basin historian and a New Iberia native, has pieced together a snapshot of one revealing aspect of the early inhabitants of Bayou Portage off the northwest shore of Lake Dauterive: Their food.
“The people who lived in the Atchafalaya Basin, and they were Native Americans, we don’t know what their affiliations were or is,” Delahoussaye said Wednesday during a presentation at the Franklin branch of the St. Mary Parish Library. “They could have been affiliated with modern Native Americans, we’re not sure.”
The people living in the basin were doing “the same things we go to the basin to do, because it was necessary, not because it was fun or a sport. They had to live, they had to eat. What we can learn from what people have discarded is really interesting.”
There are three earthen mounds and a plaza area at Bayou Portage, on private land. It is unknown what the mounds were used for, but the plaza was probably used for activities.
Delahoussaye, however, is interested in their “middens” or garbage piles. University students had excavated the midden and the material sorted, organized and he studied it.
“Any animal material that survives a thousand years…under the right conditions…survives almost without limit,” he said. Louisiana’s soil is often acidic, but when Native Americans deposited clamshell into their habitats, the soil becomes a base, with little or no acid present.
The excavation was performed within an area six feet long, three feet wide and two feet deep. Material was washed, run through a screen, and collected. Out of that sample area came 134,000 pieces of bone, Delahoussaye said, most of which were very small pieces and broken fragments.
What was revealed was a diet mostly composed of fish, as would be expected in the basin, but also many small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, but little large game such as deer.
“Not as much (deer) as you might think,” Delahoussaye said. “When you did get a deer, it was a big deal, you had meat that would help you survive for quite a while. But how often did you get a deer? Not often. The smaller animals were easier to harvest and you could get them every day, have something to eat every day.”
There were even bison in south Louisiana, Delahoussaye said, though not in the swamps, they inhabited the prairies.
A primary food source was muskrat, which was very abundant 1,000 years ago; raccoons, which Delahoussaye said were probably easy prey due to their curiosity, and a small amount of birds. Birds, he said, “are not all that easy to come by” and he noted that the lightweight and hollow nature of bird bones do not persist as long in the soil record.
“If a site was inhabited in the winter, and you find geese, you can be sure it was inhabited in winter,” Delahoussaye said, along with other migratory waterfowl.
Turtle was also an easy harvest, and the indigenous people also ate alligator, snake and salamander.
Black bear was also on the menu, Delahoussaye said.
The popular local bullfrog was unusually abundant at the Bayou Portage site. Delahoussaye said that by analyzing bones and extrapolating for size, the frogs of that era grew to up to six pounds, as opposed to the average 1½ pounds today.
“The frogs were huge,” he said. “The bones I saw were bigger than I had in my reference collection…they were a lot bigger than I was familiar with. You ever tried to hold a pound-and-half frog in your hand? They kick a lot! Can you imagine holding onto a six pound one?”
Delahoussaye said hunting frogs might have been accomplished with blowguns that were fitted with blunt darts that stunned the frogs on impact, long enough for the hunter to snatch it up. “You could hit a frog from 30 or 40 feet, stun it, and pick it up,” he said.
Among the fishes, bass and sac-a-lait were rare. The most bones discovered were from the choupique, followed by buffalo, gaspergou, garfish and catfish.
The natives used hooks made of bone to catch fish, as well as a sharp spike made of bone, tied at the center with twine made of plant material, that would snag fish when they swallowed it.
Animal bone was sharpened to a point, cut to size, and fitted to the shaft of an arrow, he said.
“So they probably never went hungry,” Delahoussaye summarized, adding that there was so much food readily available in the Atchafalaya Basin, survival was not as difficult as other areas of indigenous occupation.