Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
The Marksville site lies about a mile to the east of the small town of that name, in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Its earthworks, which were first described by Gerard Fowke (1928: 405–34), belong to several distinct components: the Nick site, the Greenhouse site, and the Marksville site proper (Ford 1951: 13–14). The latter component — the oldest of the three — consists of Fowke's “Enclosure A” (Fig. 1), a group of 5 mounds situated on the edge of a steep, eastward-facing bluff and enclosed on the west by a semicircular earthen rampart 4 to 7 feet high and more than half a mile long. Just to the south of this enclosure lies a circular embankment which may be of comparable age. Further south lies the Nick site (Fowke's “Mound 1“) which is known to be younger than the structures of Enclosure A.
This report is based upon fieldwork undertaken in 1939 as a part of the State-Wide Archeological Project of the Louisiana Works Progress Administration, sponsored by the Louisiana State University and directed by James Ford. The fieldwork itself was supervised by R. Stewart Neitzel, and the specimens were analyzed in the Project's New Orleans laboratory, under the supervision of Gordon R. Willey.