Anna,
 
    The painting is in the collections of the Saint Louis Museum of Art.  It
depicts an excavation carried out in Mississippi by Montroville Wilson
Dickeson in the late 1830s.  Dickeson himself shows up at least twice in the
painting.  He was a pioneering American archaeologist, and a bit of a
showman.  The painting itself was done after the fact by John Egan, an Irish
artist in Philadelphia.  He employed Dickeson's field sketches to make the
painting, and he too appears in it.  The last issue of Archaeology of Eastern
North America featured the painting on the cover and contains an article I
wrote examining Dickeson and his interesting though checkered archaeological
career.
 
Rich Veit