Matthew Rooney, Arkansas Archeological Survey Station Archeologist
Matthew Rooney of the Arkansas Archeological Survey will present “Return to Sarassa Lake: A Menard Complex Site near Pine Bluff” at the September meeting of the Ouachita Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society.
This talk will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025, at 7 p.m. in the Rainey Room in the new CIC Building at Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, 200 Whittington Ave., Hot Springs. The event is free and open to the public.
Rooney, an Arkansas Archeological Survey Station Archeologist, undertook a new long-term research project in 2024 to better understand the movements of Indigenous groups along the Lower Arkansas River between the 1500s and 1700s. Rooney chose the Sarassa Lake site in Lincoln County as a starting point. The site was documented by the Smithsonian Institute in 1883 as having 27 small house mounds, all of which have since been leveled for agriculture and used for fill in the Arkansas River levee.
The site was partially investigated by Survey archeologists in the early 1990s, who recovered artifacts associated with the Menard Complex—blue glass trade beads, shell and bone tempered ceramics, and Nodena and Madison stone projectile points. The site sits on the route that Hernando de Soto’s entrada took down the river in 1542, so Rooney returned to the site in 2025 to use metal-detecting techniques to recover 16th-century Spanish metal trade items. Rooney also sent off plant remains to be analyzed and has some initial radiocarbon dates that suggest there is indeed a 16th-century domestic context surviving at the site.
Rooney is a station archeologist and assistant professor of anthropology for the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s research station in Monticello. He has conducted fieldwork in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. His research focuses on colonialism in the southeastern United States with great emphasis on collaborating with descendants and other affiliated communities. Dr. Rooney is currently the board president for Preserve Arkansas, a trustee for the Arkansas Historical Association, and an associate editor for the Southeastern Archaeological Conference.
The Arkansas Archeological Survey’s research station at Henderson State University holds regular Archeology Lab Days. Students and members of the public are invited to come by the research station in Proctor Hall on Thursdays between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. to learn more about archeology in Arkansas. For more information, contact Clay Newton (870-230-5463).