Robert H. Lafferty III

BETWEEN 1989 AND 1993, Mid-Continental Research Associates, Inc., of Spring-
dale, Arkansas, under contract with the Memphis District of the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, conducted surveys and limited excavation of archaeological
sites in the New Madrid Floodway of southeastern Missouri ( Figure 6-1 ). The
floodway is located in the Cairo Lowland, a region bounded on the east by the
Mississippi River and on the west by Pleistocene-age terrace deposits of the an-
cestral Mississippi and Ohio river systems. The floodway, which includes por-
tions of Mississippi and New Madrid counties, occupies more or less the eastern
half of the Cairo Lowland and is bounded by the Birds Point-New Madrid Set
Back Levee, which abuts a levee of the Mississippi River on the north and Pleis-
tocene-age Sikeston Ridge on the south.

Established in 1929, the floodway was designed to relieve flooding in Cairo,
Illinois, and cities downriver. When the Mississippi River reached a critical level
in 1936, roughly 600 meters of the frontline levee opposite Cairo was dynamited,
and floodwaters from the Mississippi inundated the basin, in the process creat-
ing an enormous scoured area near the blown section known as Tom Bird Blue
Hole ( Figure 6-1 ). The diversion fulfilled its intended purpose; floodwaters
around Cairo receded by an estimated half meter. Current operating plans
are more drastic, calling for dynamiting some 3.7 kilometers of levee if needed.
The higher water velocity that would result from this breach, which would be
roughly six times as great as that in 1936, is projected not only to create enor-
mous blue holes but also to remove the plow zone from most, if not all, of the
land throughout the floodway. Such an event would have catastrophic effects on
archaeological resources. It is safe to say that if the floodway is ever used, the
results of the fieldwork discussed here will be the only information available
for a sizable portion of the archaeological record of Mississippi County.

The floodway survey focused primarily on areas of projected high water ve-
locity following a levee breach. The survey covered 2900 hectares of the 100,000-
hectare floodway, and 250 sites were located. Presented here is a summary of
some of the significant results of the project, which are detailed elsewhere ( Lafferty
et al. 1995). For present purposes, I concentrate on two areas: (1) the north-
ernmost section of the floodway, from Birds Point to O'Bryan Ridge, and (2) a

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