Parallels between James Hyland’s struggles to hold onto his land in the late 18th century and what his heirs face on 60 acres of the same land are easily seen.

“He fought governments to defend it,” Dee Hyland said, gazing at seemingly endless trees and wild grasses a few miles off U.S. 61 South in the Yokena community.

Looking at marker stakes tipped with faded pink ribbons, Hyland and her husband, John Leigh Hyland III, struggle to see the reasons for routing a natural gas pipeline near or precisely through what they and a few others believe is an archaeological gold mine that may have treasure — of the historic sort only — to offer.

“How can you put a value on this?” Dee Hyland asked.

John Leigh Hyland, who inherited Loosa Yokena Plantation on Jeff Davis Road from his father, was more succinct.

“This is like the second defense of Vicksburg.”

Along with their daughter and land partner, Jan Daigre, the Hylands say they face a Tuesday deadline to sign a contract or join the ranks of otther residents who faced the same prospect from the Gulf South pipeline project — sell a right-of-way or be taken to federal eminent domain court.

The struggle isn’t against the 270-mile pipeline, which crosses the Mississippi River at LeTourneau and will eventually stretch to Mobile, Ala. “It’s about where they want to come through,” Daigre said. And it’s not about the price. They have an offer of $33,800 for the right-of-way Spectra Energy Corp. needs to route sections of its $200 million Southeast Supply Header and to place a manual shutoff valve on their property.

It’s just that accounting for the history of the land and the artifacts already dug from the soil below it, the Hylands feel its worth can’t be measured — even in dollars. And that the excavation zone 40 yards wide as mapped out might cause artifacts to be lost that could never be recovered.

The land was granted to James Hyland in 1797 by Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, a Portuguese-born brigadier who governed Spanish-controlled Louisiana and West Florida. Known for reforming the way land grants were recorded in Spain’s territories along the Mississippi River — obtained through treaties with local native tribes — de Lemos’ signature can be found on a land grant the Hylands found in the plantation house’s attic some years ago.

Through the years, discoveries of items dating to when the Choctaws populated the Southeast were common. In the late 1990s, archaeologists from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History performed excavations on about 13 acres of brush and found more than 41,000 artifacts, dating from the much earlier — the Early Archaic period of about 8000 B.C. Indications are a major city may have been on the alluvial plain as far back as 1,000 centuries ago.

A prehistoric jewelry box of stone-forged beads, hand tools for basic work and fire-cracked rock — believed to be an early food preparation technique — turned up and anthropologists from the state were successful in placing the site on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. In evaluations, the property fulfilled the National Register’s criteria under the criteria stating it had yielded or is likely to yield information important in prehistory or history.

However, the Hylands contend the site’s boundary lines as delineated by MDAH’s lead archaeologists Sam McGahey and Doug Simms in the application don’t represent the site’s true size.

“We don’t know the true northern part of the site,” Dee Hyland said. It has never been fully explored, and it’s where those route-marking flags were placed.

The state and the Hylands disagree on whether the distance from the pipeline route and the previous excavation sites is sufficient. The state says it is.

The Hylands say it isn’t and blame a lack of state funding for MDAH for halting the digs in 1999 and 2000 that made the Loosa Yokena site one of 66 Warren County sites on the Register. Further, the Hylands say information concerning the location of Loosa Yokena wasn’t made available by the state to Spectra when an environmental review was completed, presumably because of the official boundary being more than 500 meters (about 1,640 feet) south of the pipeline’s path.

“That’s their magic number,” Hyland said. “They told us we fell through the cracks.”

Spectra spokesman Gretchen Krueger said the company works “one-on-one” with landowners for pipeline projects in accordance with federal and state laws.

“We don’t like to talk about eminent domain,” Kreuger said, adding landowners should continue discussions to the fullest extent to avoid litigation. “These things get a pretty thorough vetting before FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) issues a certificate.”

Results of the project’s environmental impact statement do mention five acres of wetlands that it could harm along its route, but didn’t specify its location. FERC deemed the pipeline’s environmental impact “substantive but not significant.”

Recent digs at the site have taken place at the behest of Daigre, who has traded e-mails with state archaeologist Jayur Mehta and University of Alabama anthropologist Dr. Ian W. Brown. Mehta backed up the report of the independent firm hired by Spectra to study the pipeline’s archaeological impact — that its distance from the known boundary essentially made it a non-factor for historic preservation. Brown, who has led teams in the area that also features Indian mounds, backed the Hylands on the site’s significance and potential to produce more artifacts.

Though more was found, the state’s chief archaeologist Pamela Lieb said, it didn’t necessarily mean the ground beneath the tall grasses of Loosa Yokena could have the kinds of artifacts indicating further expansion of its borders.

“We would need a lot more information,” Lieb said, adding the objects found, while indicative of native peoples of the period, were still “extremely common.”

A possible compromise, and one suggested by Mehta, would be to have archaelogical monitors present as the pipeline’s trench is dug, with work halted if accidental discoveries are made. That’s one proposal that may be made to Spectra.

After 10,000 years, however, time is short. The Hylands and Daigre say they will continue to try to negotiate with Spectra. The land has been in their family for “only” eight generations, but they feel they’ve inherited a trust of even greater historic proportions.