Digging After the Hurricanes: An Archaeology Field School in Kisatchie National Forest

Students and Tad Britt at the Kisatchie field school site near DeRidder, Louisiana. NPS, NCPTT

In an episode of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) visited an archaeological field school in Kisatchie National Forest, western Louisiana. She spoke with project director Erlend Johnson of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab and Matt Helmer, the forest's archaeologist.

The episode: "Archaeological Field School at Kisatchie National Forest." National Park Service.

Why this site

The sites were first identified in 2003, when a survey by Pan American Associates turned up dense concentrations of artifacts — as many as 500 stone flakes in a single 50-by-50-centimeter test unit — and a range of projectile points, including San Patrice points and possibly the base of a Clovis point. The remains could span everything from the historic period back to the Paleoindian era, in three large concentrations, across about 100 acres along the Drakes Creek floodplain, a few miles from the Whiskey Chitto River — a good spot for a camp or even a village. People may have used it from around 13,000 years ago, in the Ice Age, to the present.

Storms and looters

Hurricanes Laura and Delta nearly flattened this district of the forest, which holds thousands of archaeological sites. As trees toppled, their root balls tore artifacts out of the ground and destroyed their context. The Forest Service put part of its congressional relief funding toward archaeological salvage and toward testing damaged sites for the National Register of Historic Places.

This site had also been heavily looted — digging on public land is illegal, and a looter was convicted here a few years earlier. Between storm damage and looting, it needed attention fast.

Why post molds matter

The team uncovered post molds — the stains left where wooden posts once stood — possibly from the Late Archaic or Woodland periods, and kept digging below them to see how deep the record goes; nearby tests had already produced a possibly Early Archaic scraper and older points.

Post molds may sound dull, Helmer explained, but this part of Louisiana lies far from the Red River and Mississippi River valleys, where larger, permanent villages are typical. Digs in western Louisiana have found only short-term campsites. Evidence of a permanent structure could point to a hamlet or village — the first of its kind so far from those valleys — and help show how intensively, and for how long, the site was used.

Students screening soil in Kisatchie National Forest. NPS, NCPTT

Training students

Students learned the whole process — laying out units, screening, identifying finds, digging with shovels and trowels — in a rare chance at large horizontal excavations in Louisiana. The university's students have also done survey work with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and an earlier field school worked with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana.

What's next

Less than 1% of the site has been excavated. A second phase will move to a hurricane-damaged area on the forest's east side, where there may be undiscovered mounds and village sites. Most Forest Service archaeology is compliance work — finding sites in order to avoid them — so Helmer welcomed the chance to actually study the sites the agency manages, and the positive response from leadership.

Students will follow the finds into the lab, the university's archaeologists will write a technical report, and the team hopes to share early results at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in New Orleans and the Louisiana Archaeological Society, with later publications — possibly a book — and more public interpretation.

Sources

Based on "Podcast 141: Archaeological Field School at Kisatchie National Forest," Preservation Technology Podcast, National Park Service, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The episode's audio, which the imported page did not carry, is restored from the podcast's feed (2026-09-27).