State
Homochitto quartzite formation full of mystery
Enterprise-Journal
When most of us spot a boulder, we just see gray rock.
When Wayne Havard sees one, he spies history — and mystery. Take Hattiesburg quartzite, found in parts
of Franklin County. It’s unusual to find large rocks and boulders of any sort in this part of the world —not
sandstone, not soft clayrock, but hard gray boulders. This particular stone has a glassy smooth face. Havard, who is also a flintknapper, found it to be excellent for making arrowheads. Yet he has never run across
any Native American artifacts made of the stuff. “None of them (experts) have an answer why,” said
Havard. “The best explanation I’ve had is they (Native Americans) traded it. “I’ve walked these creeks I
don’t know how many miles looking for materials to flintknap, and (artifacts) are scarce as hen’s teeth.”
Havard has chunks of the quartzite at his home and his body shop in Gloster, but he wanted to show me the raw material in its native element, so on Tuesday we drove north on Highway 33. After we crossed the Homochitto River and started climbing, Havard pointed out a vein of white chalk that is part of the formation
and extends into Wilkinson County. We turned off on backroads and headed south into an area known as Free
Woods. Once we passed a church and a few houses, the road became even more narrow, crooked and amazingly steep. Tall longleaf pines — once the dominant tree species here — overshadowed the road. I had the spooky feeling we’d entered another dimension and were traveling back in time. “Pull over right up there,”
Havard said, pointing to some big chunks of gray rock. We got out and he brushed aside dirt and moss
to reveal the characteristic glassy smooth surface. Then we turned off down a Forest Service road along a
high ridge. We set off on foot down a spur through coffeeweed, prairie blazing star and rattlesnake fern. Longleaf pines towered all around, their upturned branches like green chandeliers. Boulders littered the
slopes, not a common site in most of southwest Mississippi. We worked our way downhill, pausing to examine
several. Havard is an old-time woodsman, an expert trapper, fisherman and hunter, specializing in turkey and
squirrel. He is also a lay historian whose family has deep roots in the area. He’s deeply familiar with
the story of 19th century Indian fighter Lewis Wetzel, said to have been buried in 1808 at Havard’s Ferry, now
known as Rosetta. He’s also well-versed in the history of Free Woods, a community where whites, blacks and
Native Americans lived together freely prior to the Civil War. Havard also loves oldtimey bluegrass music. His
grandfather was a fiddler and other family members played. In the woods he notices everything from the ground up —including the rocks. Havard recalls speaking with now-retired U.S. Forest Service archaeologist Sam Brooks, who told him Natchez Indians and early settlers used slabs of Hattiesburg quartzite as building
foundations. It’s also been used for burial vaults and tombstones. But if they turned it into arrowheads, there are few to be found. “To me the quarries used by the Indians were a great mystery,” Havard said. “If
they quarried these sites for the quartzite, and the evidence is clear they did, what happened to the material? It
doesn’t show up in the local archaeological history, and if it was traded with other Indian people, hundreds of
miles away —where? Where did this material go? It puzzles me, and the people I've talked with haven’t been
able to give me an answer.” Archaeologists are puzzled as well. “The question of why was
this material ‘avoided’ still begs to be answered today,” according to a report by Frank Gagne, Homochitto
Ranger District archaeologist. “Was the outcrop considered sacred and something to be avoided or was
there a taboo for one or another reason? Was it only traded? The list of questions goes on and on, but the answers are yet to be answered.” James Starnes, director of surface geology for the Mississippi
Department of Environmental Quality Office of Geology, recently published a paper on the quartzite.
“Hattiesburg Quartzite is a Middle Miocene age orthoquartzite known only from a few outcrops along the uplands overlooking the Homochitto River Valley near the Franklin/Amite County line in Mississippi,” he
wrote. “It is characterized as hard, gray-colored, opal-cemented, siltstone to finegrained sandstone that can
contain dissolution vugs (hollowed-out places) that may be opal-filled.” Havard and I found a boulder with an apparent vug, though we didn’t see any opal. When the quartzite breaks, it makes smooth, conchoidal fractures, good for arrowheads. Starnes said Janet Spillman and her son, Wesley Sturdivant, actually
found a few Hattiesburg quartzite artifacts in gravel bars on Dry Creek near Rosetta in Amite County.
Spillman posted photos on the Mississippi Gem and Mineral Society’s Facebook page. Starnes said the quartzite was extremely valuable for Native Americans in a region that was otherwise rock-poor. The main arrowhead material around here is chert gravel, which is poor quality. “Having a rare bedrock outcrop in the area proved to be unbelievably fruitful,” he said. “But there’s a really, really deep mystery behind this.” Namely, why so few arrowheads made of the material? Spillman and Sturdivant found the only known points
made from the stone. Otherwise they were either traded to other tribes, or they rotted over time, Starnes speculated. To quarry the rock, Native Americans used Sioux Quartzite, which comes from up north. It’s a smooth, hard stone that has a purplish hue when wet. Not surprisingly, Havard has some of that, too.
Where the wild things were
Enterprise-Journal
Call him Bubba Gomp. The proper name is Gomphotherium, but that’s hard to pronounce, let alone remember. And since the mastodon-like creature roamed the woods of rural Southwest Mississippi, “Bubba” seems an apt nickname. Bubba Gomp it is. Gloster outdoorsman Wayne Havard ran across Bubba’s fossilized remains back in 2014, to the delight of scientists. “It looks like we’re dealing with something that we’ve never encountered
before in Mississippi,” said George Phillips, paleontology curator for the Mississippi Museum of Natural
Science. “Wayne is the only one who has found a pre-Ice Age Gomphotherium.” The Ice Age, or Pleistocene
Epoch, lasted from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. The Pliocene Epoch was earlier, dating back 5.3 million years. Before that was the Miocene, which goes back 23 million years. “Wayne’s is the oldest
Gomphotherium found yet,” Phillips said. Havard found a complete set of molars and good portions of the tusks in 2014. Citing the landowner’s wishes, he would only say the site is in Amite County. Havard invited Phillips and state geologist James Starnes to his house to take a look in 2017. “They came to look at
this and identify it,” Havard said. “They were all excited because nothing like this had been found in
Southwest Mississippi.” Phillips consulted with Richard Hulbert of the University of Florida, who said the fossils appeared to come from a Gomphotherium Simplicidens. “The Gomphotherium had four tusks,” Havard
said. “It had an extended lower jaw, with two shovellike tusks and two upper tusks similar to elephants.
It lived in a swamp and marsh environment. The lower tusks scooped up vegetation from the marshes and swamps.” This particular Bubba Gomp was one of the smaller varieties, standing about six feet tall. Larger
Gomps reached nine feet in height. Havard’s fossils aren’t the only such remains found in Amite County. In
June of this year, a hog hunter found a tooth (partial crown of the third molar) from a mastodon, which is one of Bubba’s younger relatives. However, citing the landowner’s request, the hog hunter declined to be interviewed — though Phillips did see and identify the photos.
Phillips said Southwest Mississippi is part of a “broad, ancient coastal plain younger than 90 million years. It’s very fossilrich.” Bubba Gomp and the mastodon are two of three prehistoric elephant-like creatures, the third being the mammoth. “Neither one is a true elephant, whereas mammoths are true elephants,” Phillips said.
“Mastodons are Ice Age — Pleistocene Epoch.” Starnes points out that Amite County would have been a coastal swamp in the Pliocene Epoch, with palm trees instead of pines and oaks. Bubba Gomp and his kin were right at home in that environment. “They’re really, really funny- looking animals,” Starnes said. “They’ve got
shovel-shaped tusks on the top and bottom. They were more browsers, like a deer.” Mastodons, too, were
browsers, while mammoths were grazers, Starnes said. Even though Bubba Gomp was vegetarian, he
could be a tough customer when challenged, Phillips said. “It’s got swinging tusks,” Phillips said. “It
would probably defend itself. There are smaller things that I’m more afraid of than these things, like
feral cats.” Folks like Havard and the unnamed hog hunter provide valuable information to the world of science, Phillips said. “People in south Mississippi are making incredible discoveries,” he said. “South Mississippi is a poorly explored part of Mississippi as far as fossils. “There are a few people down there like Wayne who are finding things. They are helping us document the fossil history of south Mississippi, because
we just don’t have time to cover south Mississippi.” Phillips cited an interesting find from southeast
Mississippi, the fossils of a three-toed horse. “We’ve run across all kinds of people living in the backwoods, from Waynesboro to Natchez, that are finding these incredible things that have never been documented before,” Phillips said. Add Bubba Gomp to that list.
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