The Story: Part Two
We have a strange relationship with the prehistoric past in this country. Most Americans, like my friends, have no direct cultural identification or emotional tie with North American prehistory, with Mesa Verde, Cahokia, or the many other brilliant achievements of the American Indian. As far as most people are concerned, history (and North American archaeology, for that matter) began with Leif Erikson, Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrim Fathers. Anything that predates European contact is considered somewhat irrelevant, and often ignored in school.
So most Americans of non-Indian descent tend to think of prehistoric Indian sites in impersonal, remote ways. Most would protest vigorously at the destruction of an important, privately owned, historic site from pioneer days, or shudder at the very thought of someone looting their neighbor's great-grandmother's grave. But a long-abandoned prehistoric Indian village and the graves of the people who once lived there are a different matter.
It would be naive to think that Slack Farm is an isolated incident. Looting and pot hunting have been endemic in the South east since the depression days of the 1930s, and were rife in the Southwest in the early years of this century. Reports from elsewhere in Kentucky, and from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, testify to widespread vandalism directed against archaeological sites of every time period over the entire length of the Ohio Valley. 
But there is far more to the Slack Farm tragedy than the material destruction of hundreds of prehistoric graves-or of an entire archaeological site. For days after reading the news stories, I was haunted by the staggering scientific loss at Slack Farm.
To understand the dimensions of that loss one must realize that the Mississippian culture was a brilliant efflorescence of late prehistoric life in the Midwest and the South. Cahokia, Moundville and other great centers testify to that culture's extraordinary elaboration of public constructions and brilliant art traditions in ceramics, copper and shell. The first Mississippian communities appeared after AD 750, at just about the time when maize farming took hold in eastern North America. Mississippian culture was past its apogee in many regions when Europeans first penetrated the Midwest in the seventeenth century.
Many questions about this ancient society remain unanswered. Most excavations have focused, fairly naturally, on a few town sites and their mounds and spectacular monuments. Very few villages or cemeteries have been investigated-especially with the full apparatus of modern, hi-tech archaeology. The well-preserved deposits at Slack Farm offered one of the few chances for such a painstaking investigation.
As in other Mississippian communities, the people who lived at Slack Farm probably enjoyed close and constant economic, political and social relationships with other villages and hamlets up and down the Ohio. But most of these sites also have been destroyed by looters. Until late last year, Slack Farm had been our best chance to study the dynamics of this Mississippian society.
Some of the fine Mississippian pots from Slack Farm so coveted by collectors are identical to vessels made in Arkansas, far from the Ohio valley. Some of the copper and marine shell ornaments prized by looters attest to even more distant trade for copper either with the Great Lakes area or the Appalachians, for marine shells with the Atlantic or Gulf coasts.
It may be news to looters, but the fragmentary bones they cast aside a real treasure trove of potential information on Mississippian diet and disease, of vital genetic data about the biological relationships between prehistoric Americans, of evidence on ancient warfare. We now have the scientific techniques to probe such questions. Unfortunately, most of the vital clues for doing so vanished when the site was destroyed.
Slack Farm straddles the vital centuries of European contact with American Indians. We know this because glass beads, brass tinklers and other European artifacts have come from the surface of the ravaged settlement. These finds testify to some form of indirect, or perhaps even direct, contact between the Slack Farm people and early European traders and explorers. Studying such imports requires a detailed knowledge of their precise archaeological context. The looted holes at Slack Farm remind us that we may never understand the true nature of these early contacts.
We still know little about the complex relationships between Europeans and Native Americans five centuries ago. What changes in culture resulted from European contact? Did exotic diseases decimate Midwestern populations? Were the Late Mississippians in the Ohio Valley the ancestors of one of the historic tribes of the Midwest and Southeast? What goods were traded between whites and Indians, and how did this new trade affect relationships between indigenous societies? The looted burials and village deposits at Slack Farm might have helped find some of the answers to these questions. They cannot help us now.