siOBX; - Smithsonian Institution

8 BUREAU OF AMEEICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 103
cutting the bluff of Nunib Waya creek. Many places in the wall were still
eight feet in height. The two gaps in the wall had never been filled up.'
Prof. Calvin S. Brown has published a brief but very interesting
account of the Nanih Waiya earthworks, arranged from the manu-
script notes of B. L. C. Wailes, who visited them on the 5th of
December, 1854.
I visited the Indian mounds and entrenchment in the fork of Nanawaya
and Tallahaya, identified by tradition as the place of origin or the birth-place
of the Choctaws, who held it in superstitious reverence as their mother. The
height of the principal mound is at least 50 feet; it is a parallelogram with
corners rounded by plowing; dimensions ISO or 200 feet east and west by
perhaps 100 or 105 [150?] feet north and south.
Some 200 yards to the north of the high mound is a cone covering more
extent, but only about 10 feet high. Some small mounds nearly obliterated are
between the two large ones.
The wall or entrenchment goes around three sides of the mound and in
many places in the woods has trees of 4 feet diameter growing upon it. The
height in the most elevated places is near 10 feet, the width 30 or 40 feet ; in
other places it dwindles away to a slight embankment ; in the clear land east
of the mounds it can scarcely be traced owing to the constant plowing. Many
gaps or gate-ways have been left in the wall, some of them 100 feet wide. The
enclosure embraces about a section or square mile. *
More detailed is the description by Halbert
Nanih Waiya is situated on the west side of Nanih Waiya Creek, about 50
yards from it, in the southern part of Winston County, and about four hundred
yards from the Neshoba County line. The mound is oblong in shape, lying
northwest and southeast, and about forty feet in height. Its base covers
about an acre. The mound stands on the southeastern edge of a circular
rampart, which is about a mile and a half in circumference. In using the
word " circular " reference is made to the original form of the rampart, about
one-half of which is utterly obliterated by the plow, leaving only a semi-
circle. This rampart is not, or rather was not, a continuous circle, so to
speak, as it has along at intervals a number of vacant places or gaps, ranging
from fifty to one hundred and fifty yards in length. All the sections near
the mound have long since been levelled by the plow, and in other places
some of the sections have been much reduced. But on the north, where the
lampart traverses a primeval forest it is still five feet high and twenty feet
broad at the base. The process of obliteration has been very great since 1877,
when the writer first saw Nanih Waiya. Some of the sections that could
then be clearly traced in the fields on the west have now (1899) utterly
disappeared. About two hundred and fifty yards north of Nanih Waiya is
a small mound, evidently a burial mound, as can be safely stated from the
numerous fragments of human bones that have been exhumed from it by the
plow and the hoe. The great number of stone relics, mostly broken, scat-
tered for hundreds of yards around Nanih Waiya, shows that it was the
site of prehistoric habitations. In addition to this, the bullets and other relics
of European manufacture evidence the continuity of occupancy down within
the historic period. The magnitude of these ancient works—the mound and
'' Pubs. Miss. Hist. Soc, vni, pp. 530. 542, footnotes.
« Brown, Calvin S. Archeology of Mississippi, Mississippi Geological Survey. Printed
by the University of Mississippi, 1926. Pages 24-26.