Word: tunica
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This is the tale that surrounds the so-called "Tunica Treasure," perhaps the most important archeological find made in recent times...
...your face and pretend it would go away," says Jeffrey P. Brain, a curator at the Peabody Museum, recalling his experiences with the relics. The find spurred a court battle about legal ownership of the Indian artifacts that has already lasted nine years. For most of that time, the Tunica collection was stored at Harvard's Peabody Museum...
...Tunica find is the largest collection of 18th-century Indian relics ever discovered. The artifacts include musket parts, iron tools, jewelry, French and tribal pottery, and over 200,000 European trade beads--more than all the beads ever found in the southeastern United States put together...
...collection has allowed archeologists to study how the Tunica Indians survived--and even profited from--their contact with the French, a good fortune which Brain says was shared by few other tribes. Before the discovery, researchers did not even know the exact location of the Tunica tribe. Now they have a wealth of information about the aboriginal Indians, including clues showing that the Tunica were trade intermediaries between the French and other Indian tribes...
...team of Harvard scholars of any other professional archeologists who unearthed this academic treasure, but a Louisiana state penitentiary guard with little more than a high school education. Leonard J. Charrier, a Cajun from Avoyelles Parish, La. says he figured out the location of the Tunica settlement by checking historical documents and taking into account changes in the meander of the Mississippi River...