Little Figure has a Long History

When you log onto the website of the Vermilion Historical Society you will see a sketch of what appears to be a primitive doll or perhaps an ancient finger puppet.
It is the logo of the society and comes from one of several sketches drawn by archaeologist Diane Silvia Fuller of an old, old artifact known as the Morgan Effigy. It was uncovered when a landowner who wanted a wider driveway smoothed part of an old Indian mound on Pecan Island.
The earliest European settlers of the chenier located about six miles from the Gulf in lower Vermilion Parish found arrowheads, bits of pottery, and other ancient artifacts, including pieces of bone, that indicated that Native Americans hunted there and perhaps lived at least part-time on its sandy ridges. But until modern times nobody had ever found anything like this little human figure carved from deer antler, and nobody’s found anything like it since.
Henry B. Collins, Jr., of the Smithsonian Institution, was one of the first to do a scientific study of 22 old Indian mounds that were still on the island. He visited in the spring of 1926, and wrote a letter to Abbeville Postmaster P.O. Broussard describing his work.
In the letter, which was published in the Abbeville Meridional, Collins wrote, “As you know, the whole Gulf region from Vermilion Bay to Galveston Bay was formerly the territory of the Attakapas Indians, one of the least advanced of the tribes of North America. These people were cannibals, did not have permanent settlements such as many other southern tribes had, and on the whole possessed a very low culture.”
Even though the name Attakapas is supposed to mean “man-eater,” modern scientists have pretty much discarded the idea that they were cannibals. Imaginative descriptions from early settlers claimed nonetheless that the Attakapas took their prisoners to Pecan Island where they “cooked them up with clams and other products of the sea, and feasted to their hearts’… content.”
Collins at first “supposed that whatever Indian remains [left on the chenier] would have been left by the Attakapas,” but wrote that he instead found evidence “that there were two distinct cultures represented on Pecan Island.”
Four large mounds on Morgan family land belonged to a more sophisticated group than most of the other mounds on the island, in Collins’s view. “We can say that the material obtained [from the Morgan mounds] was left by some unknown tribes, but certainly not the Attakapas and certainly much earlier than the Attakapas,” he said.
In 1979, Ian Brown and Richard Fuller Jr. of the Lower Mississippi Survey studied the area and concluded that the Morgan site was one of the most important mound sites along the southwest Louisiana coast. They said the mounds were occupied by one or more groups of Native Americans during what is known as the Coles Creek period, which dates from about 1,000 to 1,300 years ago.
A team led by Richard and Diane Silvia Fuller did more excavation of a Morgan site mound in 1987 and found many interesting things, but noted in their extensive report, “Excavations at Morgan,” that “the most fabulous artifact discovered so far at Morgan did not come from any of our excavations. It is an exquisite human effigy carved from a piece of deer antler. The artifact was found by a local resident of Pecan Island in a load of fill . … The effigy has come to symbolize the significance of Morgan. It is stylistically unique for the region and, to our knowledge, is the only piece of non-ceramic Coles Creek art of its kind ever found.”
They said the little figure was “expertly crafted following the natural contours of the antler.” There is a socket on its base that indicates it may have been mounted on some sort of staff. Human bone was found with the little man, suggesting not that the Indians were cannibals, but that the figurine was buried with an important person.
“The carving … may be a representation of the deceased or of death in general,” the Fullers reported.
Whatever it represents, the experts are as certain as archaeologists ever admit to being that it is a sign that some fairly sophisticated people were on Pecan Island and probably in all of south Louisiana more than a thousand years ago.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.