Hampson Archeological Museum State Park

The Hampson Archeological Museum State Park, on the town square in Wilson, holds the collection from the Nodena site, a village of about fifteen acres inside a palisade on a bend of the Mississippi River. People lived there from A.D. 1400 to 1650. A plaza for ceremonies lay between two mounds, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas estimates that 1,100 to 1,650 people could have lived in the village. They grew corn, beans and squash, hunted and fished, and made pottery from backswamp clay, including the Nodena Red and White ware. Stone came from the north, shells from the Gulf of Mexico and salt from Missouri. The same source names the Quapaw (Ogáxpa) as the historical tribe that most likely descended from them, and many archaeologists think Upper Nodena is the Pacaha that the de Soto expedition described in 1541.

Dr. James K. Hampson (1877-1956) inherited the Nodena plantation and went back to practice medicine in the 1920s. From 1927 he, his wife and his children excavated and documented the site, and the work drew the University of Arkansas and the Alabama Museum of Natural History. About 800 burials were investigated there. His collection passed 40,000 artifacts, and after a fire next door the family offered it to the state; the park was approved in 1957 and dedicated in 1961. The first museum was named for his son Henry Clay Hampson, killed flying over Burma in the Second World War. The old museum closed in 2017 for a new complex on the square.

The museum is at 33 Park Avenue, a few miles off I-55.