<P> Human habitation in the Baton Rouge area has been dated to 12000--6500 BC, based on evidence found along the Mississippi, Comite, and Amite rivers . Earthwork mounds were built by hunter - gatherer societies in the Middle Archaic period, from roughly the 4th millennium BC . The Proto - Muskogean language divided into its descendant languages by about 1000 BC; a cultural boundary between either side of Mobile Bay and the Black Warrior River began to appear between about 1200 BC and 500 BC, a period called the Middle "Gulf Formational Stage". The Eastern Muskogean language began to diversify internally in the first half of the 1st millennium AD . </P> <P> The early Muskogean societies were the bearers of the Mississippian culture, which formed around AD 800 and extended in a vast network across the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, with numerous chiefdoms in the Southeast as well . By the time the Spanish made their first forays inland from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico in the early 16th century, by some evidence many political centers of the Mississippians were already in decline, or abandoned . At the time, the region appeared to be occupied by a collection of moderately - sized native chiefdoms interspersed with autonomous villages and tribal groups . There is, however, also evidence that these societies were thriving at the time of the first Spanish contact, and that later Spanish expeditions encountered the aftermath of the diseases spread unknowingly by the first expedition . </P> <P> French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville led an exploration party up the Mississippi River in 1699 . The explorers saw a red pole marking the boundary between the Houma and Bayogoula tribal hunting grounds . The French name le bâton rouge ("the red stick") is the translation of a native term rendered as Istrouma, possibly a corruption of the Choctaw iti humma ("red pole"); André - Joseph Pénicaut, a carpenter traveling with d'Iberville, published the first full - length account of the expedition in 1723 . According to Pénicaut, </P> <P> From there (Manchacq) we went five leagues higher and found very high banks called écorts in that region, and in savage called Istrouma which means red stick (bâton rouge), as at this place there is a post painted red that the savages have sunk there to mark the land line between the two nations, namely: the land of the Bayagoulas which they were leaving and the land of another nation--thirty leagues upstream from the baton rouge--named the Oumas . </P>

Where does the name baton rouge come from
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