Day 5 - Cherokee, North Carolina

By Project Director, Dr. Kathryn Sampeck

We ended our week of learning about the landscape by traveling to Cherokee, North Carolina to meet with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (ECBI) Tribal Historic Preservation officers and to explore different museums in Cherokee. Our project has strong ties with the ECBI and benefits from active collaboration and participation of members of the ECBI.

The route from Greeneville, Tennessee to Cherokee features has stunning scenery in the Appalachian Mountains, passing through the Cherokee National Forest and the Pisgah National Forest. Even today’s highways have to negotiate steep twists and bends before descending into the Asheville Basin. Nevertheless, the early historic material culture from Washington and Greene Counties show strong similarities to these parts of today’s North Carolina, so these mountains were not an impassable barrier in the past.

We started our visit with a tour of the sacred site of Kituwah. ECBI archaeologist Russ Townsend explained that all Cherokee regard Kituwah as the mother place, where the first Cherokee council fire burned and that Kituwah has always been important in Cherokee life. ECBI historian Tyler Howe and archaeologist Yolanda Saunooke showed field school students different parts of the site, including the medicine place near the Tuckasegee River.

We next visited the living history museum of the Oconaluftee village. There we saw craftworkers producing traditional Cherokee material culture, including projectile points, wood carvings, baskets, and belts. Guides explained Cherokee political and social organization in detail as part of their tour. In the mid-afternoon, we attended a demonstration of several social dances in the village dance grounds. Ocunaluftee has model homes typical of different time periods, allowing us to see changes in architecture from the 1540s to the nineteenth century. Being able to step inside a sweat lodge or an 1830s house gives us a better sense of archaeological traces of the past.

Potter's tools from Oconauftee include a paddle for decorative marking and shells for incising and scraping.

After the village, we ended our visiting day in the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. Exhibits cover each major period of Cherokee history, from the earliest Paleoindians and their stone tools to Cherokee soldiers in World War II. The museum is notable for its detailed presentation of the historic period, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This week the students have been studying Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, and a number of narratives collected in that work were vividly depicted and recounted at the museum. Regarding material culture, whole ceramic vessels. much like the small fragments we are studying in the project lab, were on display, as well as more recent pieces. The whole day gave us many perspectives on the place, history, and peoples we are studying.

Early spear points

Printed in the Cherokee script

We returned to Tennessee on a different route, this time through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Rain soon drenched the roads and forests, but after a short while the sky brightened and a shimmering rainbow shone before us, the perfect end to our day.

Day 2 - Survey of Greene County

The overwhelming popular conception of archaeology is excavation: the archaeological dig. But much of archaeology, including much of archaeological field work, involves other investigatory techniques. One of the most important of these is survey.

Dr. Sampeck confers with the students on map locations for some sites to be reviewed during today's survey.

Today the field school students learned about this research method. After a misty morning following a night of rain showers, we undertook a focus site survey of Greene County, Tennessee. A focus survey is one common form of archaeological survey, in which orally-transmitted stories, written documents, or other evidence suggests that archaeological remains might be found at a particular location, either through description of such remains, or discussion of previous human habitation or activity at that place.

Much of the morning was shrouded by mist and clouds, eventually burning off by mid-day.

Students noting the landforms, and surrounding countryside near a potential archaeological site

The distribution of human settlement from the period of contact between Native Americans and Europeans was compared with that during later centuries of English and post-Revolutionary colonization and settlement.

Investigating the area near a known contact-era site

Social, economic, ecological, and geological differences between the societies of these periods produced different cultural landscapes. Amongst settlement evidence examined today were the remains of old roads, difficult to discern through trees and undergrowth. Roads are a vital part of human geography, and an important indicator of political and economic ties and situations.

A roadway sunken into the landscape by years of travelers and their vehicles and animals. The slight concave shape of the land between the trees framing this image shows the road.

On the other hand, we received permission to investigate and explore the Earnest Fort House, a well-preserved structure first built in the late 18th century.

The Earnest Fort House, built about 230 years ago.

This structure, one of the oldest in Tennessee, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Earnest Farms Historic District. The architecture of the house is very clearly derived from the Georgian style, but examination of wallpaper, including newspaper from the end of the 19th century used as wallpaper base as well as mid-20th century wallpaper, demonstrates how a site, a building, or an artifact can have a complex life history.

The students documented some of the newspapers built into the walls of the house about a century ago.

This paper was printed on May 6, 1899. The oldest date we could discern was from 1895.

Some appropriate words on past and present, in an old advertisement for pianos

We may not have found ceramics, but at least we found an advertisement for sets of ceramics.

Graffiti helps us understand when these surfaces were in their current condition.
This inscription dates to 1943.

Project members look concerned about the roof of the attic.

The field school includes a lab component on a daily basis. Today the students examined pottery, and compared specific attributes of surface treatment, paste and body construction, as part of a larger discussion of classification and typology in archaeology.