A Cajun treasure hunter, a righteous Southern lawyer, a group of feuding heirs, a Harvard scholar named Dr. Brain and a tribe of Indians become embroiled in a dispute over relics excavated from a forgotten Indian village. No less than four lawsuits result.

This is the tale that surrounds the so-called "Tunica Treasure," perhaps the most important archeological find made in recent times.

"Sometimes you just wanted to shake your head or cover your face and pretend it would go away," says Jeffrey P. Brain, a curator at the Peabody Museum, recalling his experiences with the relics. The find spurred a court battle about legal ownership of the Indian artifacts that has already lasted nine years. For most of that time, the Tunica collection was stored at Harvard's Peabody Museum.

Despite his misgivings, Brain is thankful for his connection with the discovery. "I wouldn't trade the experience for anything," he says quickly. "It's the sort of archeological find that comes along once a generation." He adds as an afterthought. "Perhaps even once a century or once a country."

The Tunica find is the largest collection of 18th-century Indian relics ever discovered. The artifacts include musket parts, iron tools, jewelry, French and tribal pottery, and over 200,000 European trade beads--more than all the beads ever found in the southeastern United States put together.

The collection has allowed archeologists to study how the Tunica Indians survived--and even profited from--their contact with the French, a good fortune which Brain says was shared by few other tribes. Before the discovery, researchers did not even know the exact location of the Tunica tribe. Now they have a wealth of information about the aboriginal Indians, including clues showing that the Tunica were trade intermediaries between the French and other Indian tribes.

It was not a team of Harvard scholars of any other professional archeologists who unearthed this academic treasure, but a Louisiana state penitentiary guard with little more than a high school education. Leonard J. Charrier, a Cajun from Avoyelles Parish, La. says he figured out the location of the Tunica settlement by checking historical documents and taking into account changes in the meander of the Mississippi River.

Charrier's early "scavenger hunts were sparked by a general interest in early Louisiana history. Why the Tunica settlement? "I guess because I knew it existed," he says simply.

Beginning in 1968, Charrier--who was then only 26 years old--excavated the village and an accompanying burial ground almost single-handedly. Since he had no place to keep the finds, he stored the relics in every available space in his home while he looked for a buyer.

At the same time Charrier was trying to sell his goods, the Peabody Museum's Lower Mississippi Survey Group began a study of the southern part of the Mississippi River Valley. Alerted to Charrier's find by a local archeologist. Brain traveled to Louisiana to examine the collection that describes the scene at Charrier's home in a book he wrote about the artifacts.

It was like Christmas morning. Artifacts were everywhere. On every piece of furniture and covering the floor--except for narrow pathways--under beds, in every nook and cranny, and closets.... I especially remember one large walk-in closet... which was filled to the height of 3 or 4 feet with a vast tangle of metal: dozens of kettles, musket barrels, wire, every conceivable type of iron artifact.

Charrier did not accept Harvard's offer for the collection, but did agree to lease the artifacts to the University while he continued negotiations with Harvard. The talks became complicated when Harvard lawyers asked Charrier for a legal document from the owner of the land he had excavated renouncing any claim to the Tunica collection. First Charrier refused to disclose the excavation site, claiming the landowner did not want it known he had allowed Charrier to open Indian graves. Later he admitted he had no such document.

To make matters worse, the land turned out to be jointly owned by six heirs that had divided into two quarreling camps. The heirs could barely agree to let Brain survey their land, let alone decide what to do with the Tunica collection.

After the heirs squabbled over the ownership of the relics for two years without coming to a solution. Charrier jumped back into the fight. In 1974, he filed suit asking a Louisiana state district court to declare him the owner of the treasure.

Over nine years later, the came has still not been decided and, because of the legal complications, the treasure has never been displayed publicly. The defendants are the longer the heirs, but the state Archeological Survey and Antiquities commission which subsequently bought the land. The state has been joined in its case by the Tunica Biloxi Indian tribe, the modern descendents of the Tunica. If the state Wins the case it has agreed to turn the relics over to the Tunica-Biloxi.