Fourche Maline culture

In the late 1930s archeologists with the federal Work Projects Administration excavated a series of sites in the Wister Valley of southeastern Oklahoma.

[citation needed] Trade with the Marksville culture and other Hopewellian peoples brought exotic goods from the Gulf Coast such as fresh water pearls, sea shells, sharks' teeth, and copper from northern areas.

An increase in the hierarchical structuring of the Fourche Maline society also began during this period; researchers have not determined if it arose independently or was influenced by Hopewell culture.

[3] Archeological excavations at McCutcheon-McLaughlin site in Latimer County, Oklahoma in the mid 1970s revealed many details about the lives and deaths of the Fourche Maline people.

They were more healthy when eating the nuts, seeds, tubers, fish and game of their hunting-gathering period than were their descendants, who depended on maize cultivation, and degenerative diseases such as arthritis were less frequent.

[5] It is uncertain whether the people who occupied these sites were permanent or temporary residents, but they definitely influenced later inhabitants of the Arkansas and Red River Valleys and throughout present-day Eastern Oklahoma.