Rubbish dig casts new light on pre-Columbian village by bat400 on Friday, 21 November 2014

Tony Boudreaux, an archaeologist who teaches at East Carolina University, along with a student team, was on a job last summer excavating near Town Creek Indian Mound in Montgomery County. They had just shoveled 2 feet of top soil from a series of 10 foot-by-10 foot squares. Suddenly the soil color changed. The team members abandoned their spades, picked up masons’ trowels and got down on their hands and knees to slowly scrape away slivers of soil. Right away, this new layer of undisturbed soil gave up its secrets: Dozens of dark, circular stains. The archaeologist and his students realized they were seeing the remains of buildings. The stained soil circles were post holes from long-gone buildings, and from disposal pits. An ancient person’s trash is an archaeologist’s treasure. Boudreaux and his team found shards of pottery, pressed with designs. A broken stone from an ancient game called “chunkey.” Stone tools. And a tiny, blackened corncob, the remains of someone’s dinner about 800 years ago. Town Creek Indian Mound site has been excavated countless times, revealing tools, building foundations and human remains. The mound was built, one basketful of earth at a time, sometime around AD 1250 by people whose name for themselves is lost to time. Archaeologists call them the Pee Dee, after the nearby river. Like their mound-building counterparts in other southeastern states during what’s known as the Mississippian Period, the Pee Dee operated in complex societies. But new evidence shows Town Creek isn’t the place scientists once imagined it to be. “Early on, the interpretation of the site was strictly as a ceremonial center, inhabited by maybe two or three priests year-round,” said Rich Thompson, Town Creek site manager. “Then once a year during … a green corn celebration, people from around would be invited in. Tony’s work has shown there was just way too much activity out there for it to be a cut-off-from-the-rest-of-the-world type of place. It was difficult to break away from that early story because that’s the story it’s been for decades.” What Boudreaux discovered is that the land at Town Creek State Historic Site has been occupied, on and off, since the Ice Age, and that for a long time, the site wasn’t a set-apart, sacred center – it was a busy, thriving community. Boudreaux’s mapping of the soil stains shows too many buildings for the site to have been mostly vacant. And items like the charred corncob show the site was full of everyday life. “Early on, when the Mississippian community was first founded, there seemed to be a village of at least 10 houses, maybe more,” Boudreaux said. “There was no mound yet. There were public buildings in the area where the mound would be built.” In the homes at Town Creek, when people died, they were buried in the floor of the house. But then, after the mound was constructed, something changed. “Parts of the place appear to become a full-time graveyard,” Boudreaux said. “At least four of these houses were kind of transformed into four cemeteries.” All told, more than 500 people were buried at Town Creek. As the area filled with the bodies of the dead, the mound appears to have become a place visited on ceremonial occasions. “Mounds were kind of symbols in a cosmic sense,” Boudreaux said. Mounds “were associated most often with community leaders, and mounds were … like a county seat. That’s the place where the ancestors live, where the chief is on the mound performing ceremonial activities that will help keep the universe spinning.” Understanding the way the community at Town Creek shifted from active village to a place of ceremony and status with a temple-topped mound will take time and more research, Boudreaux said. There’s much more to excavate, and the newly cleaned artifacts will need to be cataloged. Boudreaux hopes to entice an expert in ancient plant material to study the plant remains the team found. And he’ll plot out post holes using a GIS computer system to determine the locations of the long-gone buildings. The new discoveries about Town Creek’s dynamic nature are important, and not just to better explain the mysteries of the mound, said Stephen Davis, associate director of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at UNC Chapel Hill, which has archived most of the thousands of Town Creek artifacts. “For North Carolina, history as it’s taught goes back to Roanoke, but the bulk of human history in North Carolina relates to Native Americans,” Davis said. The archaeological work at Town Creek, he said, is “giving a voice to a segment of the population that’s been under-represented in the narrative of our past.” Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com

[ Reply to This | Go Back up a level ]