College of Liberal Arts, Education & Human Development
Spanish Fort continued . . .
It sits on a spit of land nestled between Bayou St. John and the leafy Lake Vista subdivision. Constructed in the 1770s by the Spanish, the fort was designed to guard the then-strategic approach to the city at the lake.
Today, some of the U-shaped fort’s brick ramparts, placed by masons before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, are still visible under a canopy of live oaks. Battered by time and the elements, a shadow of its former self, Spanish Fort is unquestionably old.

But below the surface, under the fort itself, are remnants of a structure that is even older — ancient, in fact. It was created in the same era that Rome was ruled by guys named Caesar.

That structure is a shell mound, or midden — a refuse pile typically comprised of animal bones, pottery shards and, of course, shells from the Rangia Cuneata, or Gulf wedge clam. Its creators were members of the Marksville Culture, an Indigenous people who inhabited the lower Mississippi River valley and the Gulf Coast from roughly 100 BCE to 400 CE.
Yes, Spanish Fort sits atop their landfill.

To archaeologists like Ryan Gray, of the University of New Orleans, the midden is “so much more than a dump.” That’s because in academic terms, the Marksville people who built it are referred to as an “archeological culture,” meaning all that is known about them comes from the artifacts and structures they left behind — structures like the shell mound under Spanish Fort and the items deposited within. 

With that term, Gray said, “We're just talking about a shared way of doing things that results in some broad similarities in material culture. But within that, there can be considerable variation, and there may be little evidence that the people of what we call an archaeological culture thought of themselves as a unified group.
"Archaeological cultures become ways that we try to make sense of variation in material culture (manifested as pottery styles, house types, ways of subsisting, spiritual beliefs), but we try not to give it an agency so it doesn't become confused with the peoples who are part of it."
With that understanding, archaeology reveals the Marksville Culture as being one that also constructed burial mounds and other earthworks, had complex funeral rituals, made music, smoked pipes, and crafted figurines and decorative pottery. Its people lived primarily by foraging but also engaged in trade.

In the 15 centuries following the demise of the Marksville Culture, later Indigenous people and ultimately colonizers utilized the mound.
To Gray, the location offers a “3,000-year history of people using and adapting the site and altering the environment.” People living in one era might have used the site as a gathering place or point of geography, he said, while it may have been a sacred place to those living in others.

The artifacts that have come from the grounds around Spanish Fort bear this out.

As recently as 2020, a city repair project at Killdeer Street near the fort revealed deposits that included 1,500-year-old stamped ceramic artifacts created by the later Woodland and Mississippian cultures. The deposit also yielded glass shards from the Colonial and early American eras mixed in with trinkets from Spanish Fort’s iteration as an amusement park in the early 20th century.
To Gray’s point, time does not stand still.

A visit to Spanish Fort is a worthwhile and convenient outing. But do not look for the fort at the current confluence of the lake and the bayou — a 1930s land reclamation project moved the lakeshore 1,200 feet beyond the fort, allowing the construction of Lake Vista subdivision and the hurricane protection levee. You can find Spanish Fort at Beauregard Avenue and Jay Street.

One can walk around the walls on both sides and stand on the ramparts overlooking the bayou. The tree-covered spot offers solitude and perhaps a quiet moment to ponder what this place and its people might have looked like in the old days two centuries ago. Or two millennia.

Article reprinted from Nola.com. Article & Photos By JOHN McCLUSKER, Contributing Writer, Staff Photographer