Book Description

"Our current research on the Widow Harris Project grew out of a need for data on Euro-American settlement on the Ozark border in southeast Missouri. The Eastern Ozark Border Region of southeast Missouri is a major ecotone with the rolling hills of the Ozark Escarpment and the rugged divides of the Eastern Ozark Highlans to the west and the swampy lowlands and low sandy ridges of the western Lowland of the Mississippi Alluvial valley to the east. The 2 zones provide a diverse set of natural resources within the space of a few miles. we have conducted research in this region for well over a decade based on an all inclusive or holistic research design for explaining man's changing use of the ecotone throughout the past 12,000 years. Our research has been regional in scope and cultural-ecological in approach in order to develop anthropologically based models of changing settlement and subsistence patterns in the area from those of the Palio-Indians of 12 millenia ago to those of the moonshining industry of the 1920's and 1930's. From out perspective as archaeologists who have until recently dealt with data from the prehistoric past there is an obvious bias in the literature dealing with archaeological data from the historic past. The Widow Harris Project was conceived in order to fill the void in the data base on nuclear family farmsteads on the western frontier during the early nineteenth century. The Widow Harris Project centers around the excavation of the Widow Harris Cabin site which is located in Ripley County on the Eastern Ozark Escarpment in southeast Missouri and situated on the Natchitoches Trace, a major overland travel route across Missouri, Arkansas and Texas during the first half of the nineteenth century (Wood 1934). The cabin site, occupied from ca. 1815 to 1870, was the home of the Harris family headed by Micajah Harris"--Page 2-3.