The Eaker Site — Lost City of the Nodena People
Arkansas
Beneath the flat farmland near Blytheville, Arkansas lies one of the most important and least-known archaeological sites in the American South: a palisaded city that may have housed hundreds of families, built by a people who flourished on the Mississippi floodplain for generations and then vanished from the written record before Europeans arrived in force.
The Eaker Site is the largest and most intact Late Mississippian Nodena phase village known to exist in the Central Mississippi Valley. The Nodena people were part of the broader Mississippian cultural tradition, the same world that built Cahokia across the river in Illinois and the great mound centers of the Southeast. Their particular phase began around thirteen fifty, with the village most heavily occupied between about thirteen fifty and fourteen fifty, though sources differ on when the phase ended.
Magnetometer surveys of the Eaker Site have identified the traces of four hundred or more individual structures beneath the surface. The palisade wall that once enclosed the village covered roughly fifty acres. Inside, the Nodena people organized their community around a plaza, built their homes in consistent patterns, and maintained trade connections that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes: sea shells, copper, chert from distant quarries, and ceremonial objects made of materials that had traveled hundreds of miles.
The site's preservation is partly accidental. It lay on an active military installation, Eaker Air Force Base, which kept the land from being plowed into farmland. When the base closed in the nineteen nineties, the archaeological treasure on the former base suddenly became a preservation question rather than a military one.
The Nodena people are believed to be ancestral to some of the Mississippian tribes encountered by Hernando de Soto's expedition in the fifteen forties, but the connections are still being worked out. Whoever they were, they built a city here, and most of it is still underground, waiting.
