Place and the Big Mound. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. Eaker site (3 Ms 105) - A site on Eaker Air Force Base near Blytheville, Arkansas that is the largest and most intact Late Mississippian Nodena phase village site within the Central Mississippi Valley. It also shows evidence of later Quapaw occupation. Like many Mississippian settlements, it is located on the bank of a river, the Pemiscot Bayou in the St. Francis Basin. The Eaker site is large but has no known mound, although it is rumored to have once had one. Culture Pottery Most pottery found at the Nodena sites is of the Mississippian Bell Plain variety. It was buff colored, contains large fragments of ground mussel shell as a tempering agent, and is not as smooth and polished as other varieties. Other examples found there are much finer, with a finer ground shell as a temper, some instances being so finely ground as to look untempered. Shapes and decoration were varied in the mortuary pottery, from brightly colored abstract spiral designs, to elaborate effigy vessels depicting human heads, animals, and hunters and their prey. Pottery made by the Nodena people was built up from strips of clay, and then smoothed out by the potter, much like other pottery in the Eastern America area where the potters wheel was unknown. Slips using galena for white, hematite for red, and sometimes graphite for black were used to paint the pottery, with a red on white swastika design being particularly popular. Sometimes incising was used (an example is the incised raptor image on the effigy head pot pictured), although it is rare in Nodena pottery. Women were probably the makers of pottery, as in most other Native American cultures. The grave of a woman at the Nodena site contained 11 polishing pebbles and a mushroom shaped pottery anvil. Lithic industry Nodena phase peoples traded with other groups to the west and northwest in the Crowley's Ridge and Ozark Highlands areas for usable stone to make tools. Because of the conditions of the floodplain geography where they lived, no stone was available locally. Chert, basalt, and sandstone were turned into a variety of tools such as celts, chisels, adzes, abraders, hammerstones, hoes, drillbits, mortar and pestles, spear points, and arrow heads. A popular arrow head style is known as the Nodena point, a delicate leaf like shape.