Prehistoric Inhabitants Of Bayou Sauvage
Human occupation and settlement of the fertile marshes and estuaries that now include Bayou Sauvage Refuge began before 500 BC. Two local archaeological sites, Big Oak and Little Oak Islands, represent human adaptation to the Lake Pontchartrain Basin from about 520 B.C. to 495 AD The Tchefuncte and, later, the Marksville cultures represented here show a people that had begun to adapt to marsh- estuarine environments associated with new lands. The Tchefuncte were the first people in the Pontchartrain Basin to widely use ceramics (pottery), which included decorated and non-decorated varieties. Housing structures are evident, as well as a wide range of tools including spears, atlatls, bolas, blades, and scrapers. The small related groups that inhabited these sites were hunter-gatherers, with a diet based largely on the brackish-water rangia cuneata clam, along with other fish and shellfish, turtles and deer. The shells of these clams accumulated in what are known as shell middens or shell mounds, which also contain the debris of human activity. What is known about the inhabitants comes from archeological digs on these middens, beginning on Big Oak Island in 1935.
As the delta of the Mississippi River continued to grow and evolve, the river's Bayou Sauvage distributary grew to the east until it closed off Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. The lake waters became fresher, and the Rangia cuneata clam became less available. The Marksville people living there by that time abandoned the area around 90 B.C. to follow the brackish-water food sources they had become adapted to. The area was again utilized circa 495 A.D. by a later culture, the Troyville/Coles Creek peoples, as a mass burial ground. 2 Big Oak Island contains four layers of cultural occupation. The basal layer is an earthen midden reported to be a small Tchefuncte village dated at 520 B.C. It is overlain by a thick Rangia clam midden that functioned as a fishing/shell-processing center, dated to 235 B.C. Artifacts coming from the third layer prove it an early Marksville camp with low population, at 90 B.C. The upper most layer consists of a burial ground for the peoples of the Troyville/Coles Creek culture. The date obtained from this layer is much later, at 495 A.D. (Cummins 1977).