Matthew Moore: Joining me across the desk at the Bruce and Anne Applegate News Studio Two is Jared Phillips to talk more Ozarks history.
Jared, hello. How are you?
Jared Phillips: I’m well. How are you?
Moore: I am doing good. We heard some really good responses from our last conversation talking about what is and is not the Ozarks. And so we decided to have another one of these segments, and I said dealer’s choice on this. So I’m very curious and interested to see what you’ve brought to the table here to talk more about Ozarks history.
Phillips: We could have brought anything in, but I decided to bring in mythology today.
Moore: OK.
Phillips: And so what I want to talk about is actually not any kind of historical work I’ve done, but the work that a now-deceased former colleague and friend of mine, a guy named Jamie Brandon, and his partner, Lydia Reese — who, just as a side note, her dad was my history teacher in high school — that they did on Ozark bluff dwellers.
And so did you know that apparently the Ozarks had a bluff-dwelling population?
Moore: I did not.
Phillips: Yeah. And one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this story in is because it helps us think about how the Ozarks, aside from questioning what is and is not the Ozarks, the Ozarks has a lot of mythology around who is an Ozarker and what we are as a people.
And the bluff dwellers are a really interesting way to start that conversation.
And so the story goes like this. At the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, people started to dig around as white settlement kind of settles down after Reconstruction, and some of the chaos of the post-Civil War era has calmed down.
We see people, as we were doing elsewhere in the country, sort of self-appointed naturalists and archaeologists going around rooting around and finding what they can find.
And if you’ve ever been around the cliff lines and the bluff lines in the Ozarks, you know we’ve got a lot of incuts and caves and stuff like that.
And so different people started to find all kinds of artifacts.
And one guy in particular, by the name of W.C. Barnard from Missouri, started accumulating this massive collection of Indigenous artifacts. He put it all in his house in Seneca, Missouri, and it became kind of famous.
And so an anthropologist from New York came down — because Ozarks need help apparently figuring out who we are — and over the next several years, he started to do different site visits and digs.
He published some articles in The American Anthropologist, still one of the preeminent anthropological journals of the day.
And they came up with this thesis that way back in the Woodland Period, around about 1,000 years ago or so, there was this group of people that lived in the Ozarks, and they were called the bluff dwellers.
Moore: Very weird.
Phillips: Yeah. Right. Mysterious kind of thing.
And the idea is that they are somehow a primitive holdover, a community of people that escaped the evolution that had occurred throughout the remainder of earlier periods of time.
And so it helps start this mythology that the Ozarks is a place that preserves old things, that we are the last, best place in America if you want to go find what’s really, truly American or really, truly kind of primitive human being.
Moore: And so when we’re using the term cave dweller, should the image in my head be borderline caveman?
Phillips: Yeah. In the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, in part from this guy from New York, but also the head of the University of Arkansas museum at the time, they published several different books describing what they thought the Ozark bluff dweller looked like.
And it’s sort of a combination of really terrible drawings of Indigenous communities on the Plains at the time, but also Neanderthals — short statured, sloping forehead — all that stuff that’s really problematic when we think about how we describe the evolution of ethnic communities. And really, it’s all founded on a mistake. They didn’t have the tools, they didn’t have the knowledge, they didn’t have the cultural capacity to ask detailed questions at the time.
And that’s where my friend Dr. Brandon comes in. Beginning in the ’60s and ’70s, people started to push back on this narrative and say, wait a minute, the Ozarks are way more complicated than just preserving stuff.
And actually, your case study of the bluff dweller isn’t even a good example, because as we did better archaeology, we started to realize these people were not disconnected. They had access to tools and trade goods and all kinds of knowledge.
Moore: Technology.
Phillips: Right. And so they linked the Ozarks in. This is another reason why I like to talk about the mythology of the dwellers. The assumption is that we are always isolated here in the Ozarks. But as early as the Woodland Period, we have evidence of the Ozarks being part of great continental trade networks.
We’re finding trade goods, pottery, architectural styles, seeds linking us to Mexico, the Rockies and the American Southeast. So we’re connected. Maybe not Manhattan, but we’re not unconnected.
Moore: So the idea that this area was behind the times or more primitive than the rest of the contiguous United States, data shows that’s false.
Phillips: That’s false. And some of this is accidental storytelling. I don’t think Barnard or the archaeology survey meant to create this narrative, but these things pile on over time. What the work of people like Dr. Brandon and Ms. Reese did was show us that the storytelling collapsed layers of history.
Instead of looking at layers of connection, they collapsed the story. And really, we’re just as exciting and dynamic of a place, especially when you think about geography, as anywhere else in the country.
Moore: When we think about the mythology of the bluff dwellers, what does that tell us about who we are now as Ozarkers?
Phillips: Accidental stories have power. This mythology didn’t create the isolated Ozarks idea, but it lent credibility to it. It gave power to hillbilly stereotypes, the Jed Clampetts, the idea that we’re ignorant and behind the times.
And the lesson is that it took away our ability to ask good questions about ourselves. Instead of saying, what’s actually cool and unique about this place? So maybe that story is over now. It’s time to use data and create new mythologies, new stories of place.
Moore: Anything I missed?
Phillips: If you’re interested in learning more about the bluff dwellers, the Arkansas Archaeological Survey has a great website that Dr. Brandon and Ms. Reese put together.
It’s full of data, citations, archaeological reports. You can go to the museum or the website and take a look.
Moore: Jared Phillips, thank you so much for your time this morning.
Phillips: You bet.
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