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CHAPTER 6 A Leap
Forward Hunger, always a powerful motivation, perhaps played a role in some of the changes in prehistoric cultures. After people perfected hunting and gathering techniques and learned to preserve food, they were still faced with the problem of inadequate cooking methods. Roasting meat over campfires was only one of their preferences. They were particularly fond of stews, which could not be cooked in the same way. Boiling liquid meals in animal skins stretched over pits sufficed as a solution for a time, but the repeated heating of boiling stones was inefficient and tedious. There had to be a better way. |
Maybe the solution, like so many steps in human progress, came by accident. Consider the possibility, suggests Dean Wood, that a family built one of their cooking fires over a shallow pit lined with clay that was slightly damp from rain. Perhaps after the fire had burned out, someone happened to notice that the dirt texture in the pit was different than before. Heat from the fire had baked the clay solid, and because of the pit curve, the residue was slightly rounded and could be lifted out.
The discoverer would have marveled at the misshapened bowl, and no doubt experimented with it, carrying it to the river to test, and inviting others to witness the revelation when the vessel somehow held water. They would have passed the object around, taking turns drinking from its uneven sides, until somehow the treasure slipped to the ground and smashed into pieces. But if such a wonder could happen once, it must be possible again, and the creative spark was ignited.
In truth, scientists can only speculate about how the momentous invention of pottery came about, but they can say with fairly dependable accuracy that ceramics first appeared along the Savannah River about 4,500 years ago.
A small patch of land in the river near Augusta, Georgia, called Stallings Island was first excavated in the late 1800t5. There, amid an enormous heap of discarded freshwater mussel shells, archeologists found broken pottery pieces, called potsherds or sherds. Research showed that prehistoric people feasted on mollusks at Stallings Island in great numbers, throwing the shells into a pile that reached 12 feet tall, 500 feet wide, and 1,500 feet long.
Mussels, easily retrieved from their shallow burials in riverbeds, were possibly the incentive for scattered groups, who normally lived miles apart, to gather regularly on the island. Maybe among them were people from the Russell area, some of whom would have traveled more than 50 miles for the occasion.
Harvesting shellfish was only one of the rewards of the journey. Renewal of ties with distant relatives and friends was accomplished, and new alliances and improved relations resulted that helped prevent territorial disputes and possible bloodshed. Probably there were ceremonies and the choosing of mates. Perhaps among the story swapping and sharing of knowledge that would have marked such events, the one who discovered pottery demonstrated how to make containers. Soon people who gathered at the island were making and using a great deal of pottery.
As they used and broke the ceramics, people tossed the fragments on the shell piles, which over the centuries acted as preservative shields for many ancient items. When archeologists examined the shell heap thousands of years later, they located an exceptional collection of artifacts, including fragile bone tools of awls and fish hooks. There were also decorative pins, shell beads, and bone and stone pendants of such diversity and in such quantities that great multitudes of prehistoric visitors are indicated. But the bits of pottery were most remarkable of all because none had been found from so long ago elsewhere in the United States.
The potters, whose work survived only in fragments, had learned to improve on the original mix of clay and water by adding strands of grass, roots, and other plant fibers. These strengthening or tempering additions burned away in the firing, leaving tiny holes where they had fortified the vessels.
Years
after the breakthrough appearance of ceramics at Stallings Island, archeologists
in the Russell studies discovered that early pottery made its way farther
north in the Piedmont than anyone had previously thought. Two-hundred-seven
sherds of fiber-tempered pottery were unearthed in
the reservoir area. Almost 70 percent of the sherds came from one site,
McCalla Bottoms, in the middle of the study area on the South Carolina
side of the Savannah River. Another 20 percent was uncovered nearby at
Rucker's Bottom in Elbert County, Georgia, while the rest came from small
clusters at seven other locations.
Organic material associated with some of the pottery was subjected to radiocarbon dating to determine its age. Results date the samples found at McCalla Bottoms to around 1500 B.C. Radiocarbon dating for two other sites examined with the same type of pottery produced readings earlier than that, but for various reasons those findings are less certain. So while pottery making may have taken place in the reservoir area before 1500 B.C., there was no substantial evidence found to indicate that was the case. Nevertheless, only a small portion of the 52,000 acres was excavated, and even with the best technology, scientists' luck played a part in targeting sites rich in archeological material.
Even after people learned to mold clay into useful shapes, they continued for a time to use a much less efficient method for making containers-gouging them out of solid rock. Fragments of such bowls formed from soapstone appeared at McCalla Bottoms mixed in with potsherds.
Novice potters working with clay likely copied the shapes of their creations from the rock bowls, which were the result of a laborious effort that began with carving a crude toadstool outline in a boulder. The relatively soft soapstone was the preferred rock, but even so, freeing the contour of a container required persistent, forceful assault with a mallet. Soapstone boulders with the unfinished bowl still imprisoned in the rock divulge the technique, as well as the difficulty some had with the process. The final step was to chisel out the center of the detached hunk until a hollow was formed, resulting in a serviceable, but cumbersome and heavy vessel.
Gradually, use of the rock containers declined and pottery began to dominate. Use of supposed boiling stones also faded, although some continued to emerge at excavations dated to the period.
Most prehistoric potters were probably women, if contemporary analogies of preliterate people are accurate. Men, experts assume, were the primary meat hunters, while women gathered mostly plant foods and prepared much of what was eaten. Exceptions to the role-playing were likely, considering how imperative cooperation and versatility were to mutual survival.
Assuming, however, that generalities about male and female behavior are fairly accurate, a woman just starting to make pots would have started by gathering clay from the river banks. Next she collected water to add to the clay until it became malleable like paste. Then she used her fingers to mold the desired shape, and perhaps also smoothed away rough spots with a flat stone. (Soon potters learned to roll clay into skinny coils and to pile them on top of each other to form pots.)
Once the potter finished shaping the form to her satisfaction, she set the pot in the sun to dry thoroughly. Then came the last, and most precarious step. If her handiwork was to be strong and useful, it had to be subjected to a test of fire.
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...scientists can estimate the age of a specimen up to about 50,000 years...
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The potter closely arranged kindling and logs around the pot, then set them ablaze. She kept the fire roaring hot for a long while until only embers were left, then she finally learned if all her efforts had been worthwhile or futile.
Sometimes the intense heat cracked a pot, rendering it useless, but if it remained intact, the jeopardy was worth the resulting creation, a durable vessel which eased life a little.
Eventually, the potter learned, perhaps from another woman some distance away, how to enhance the beauty of her clay wares. Using a sharp stick or piece of river cane, she fashioned a design near the rim of the wet pot before setting it out to dry. To do this, she pushed the stick point into the clay, leaving a small indention called a punctation, then she briefly dragged the stick across the clay, etching a thin line between the first punctation and the one she made next. She repeated the pattern until the entire rim was decorated.
At McCalla Bottoms, ceramics displaying this punch-and-drag style were common, while nearby at Rucker's Bottom, potters preferred rows of punctations. Archeologists are unsure why the difference developed. Possibly one style preceded the other, just as certain spearpoint designs were used earlier than others. Or, maybe the two embellishments simply reflect the originality of individual artists.
Among
the earliest ceramics found in the reservoir boundaries, 84 are undecorated
and 123 have punctations. In comparison, pottery fragments discovered
at Stallings Island have more complex geometric patterns. Perhaps, as
David Anderson suggests, the gathering of different populations there
stirred a need to exhibit ownership or group affiliation.
The manner and the direction in which pottery-making spread interests archeologists. Most think down-the-line trade was the norm. Under this theory, one band of people traded ceramics and shared the method for making it with neighbors in an adjoining territory. The neighbors, in turn, bartered the knowledge with people living on their other border, and so on, until the technique saturated the area.
People were making pots along the St. John's River in northern Florida soon after ceramic use began, and within about a thousand years, the innovation had reached the Poverty Point culture in Louisiana, and spread into Alabama and Tennessee. With the unexpected find of fiber-tempered sherds in the Russell area, authorities began to consider the possibility that the use of pottery originally moved northward along the Savannah River into Tennessee and into the country's interior. But Kenneth Sassaman proposes instead a path spreading west from the Savannah River along the fall line to the Chattahoochee River, then south to the Gulf of Mexico coast, then west again, and eventually north into the interior. Yet another theory suggests that pottery disseminated from the mouth of the Savannah along the coast. All three routes are potentially accurate.
It's also possible that people carried knowledge of pottery themselves into distant territories as they explored on long trips. Just how far Late Archaic people roamed is uncertain; nor do we know how big their territories were. Two conflicting views exist. The predominant opinion is that territories shrank; the other is that they enlarged, and that groups traveled extensively in different seasons, perhaps all the way from the mountains into the Coastal Plain.
Certainly, ideas and trade items traveled great distances. Red jasper beads from Louisiana show up in Tennessee and in Florida's northern panhandle, and soapstone artifacts have surfaced in Louisiana far from any source of the mineral.
Within the reservoir area, some stone artifacts were made from chert from distant sources 100 to 150 miles away, in extreme northwest Georgia and eastern Tennessee. Most chert tools, however, were formed from rock sources near the area. Archeologist Jerald Ledbetter discovered that there was chert available nearby in a thin zone running across the Piedmont from south of Athens, Georgia to near the Savannah River.
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Spearpoints had many other uses besides hunting during the late Archaic years, and toolmakers became more selective in picking the best rock for a particular task...
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The diversity of materials used in reservoir area artifacts is a strong argument for the idea that trade was conducted with outsiders. At McCalla Bottoms, for example, about 63 percent of the spearpoints were made from metavolcanic, slate-like rocks, ten percent from quartz, and about 26 percent from chert.
But reaching any conclusions about life within the study boundaries was difficult because of the absence of heavy garbage staining. The lack of such midden staining implies that McCalla Bottoms and other Late Archaic sites nearby, where pottery was present, were not occupied for long.
The heavy artifact concentration found at McCalla Bottoms, then, could signal that this was a temporary gathering place for separate groups who normally lived apart in the Piedmont. Or, McCalla Bottoms could have served as a camp for visitors who moved into the area from lands closer to the coast. Maybe all the pottery unearthed at McCalla Bottoms and throughout the Russell area was left by such visitors from the Coastal Plain.
Whatever its genesis, once the idea of pottery took root, enhancing the invention was inevitable. The next improvement developed in South Carolina, south and east of the reservoir. A potter, again perhaps by accident, mixed some sand with the clay and water, resulting in a strengthened vessel. Sand-tempered pottery eventually moved into the reservoir area. Local artists, however, continued to cling to their old designs, decorating with punctations, aligned in rows and randomly placed, and with punch-and-drag motifs.
Before the discovery of sand-tempered pottery, ceramic dishes were quite fragile. Fiber-tempered wares, after their own firing, could be heated only by placing them on red-hot rocks. Otherwise they would crack. The reinforced sand-tempered pottery, called the Thom's Creek Series, could be placed directly into the fire.
Archeologist Albert Goodyear conjectures that the transition from roasting foods, to using boiling stones, to cooking in pots placed on hot rocks, to cooking in pots directly over fire, resulted from growing population and diminishing territories. The concomitant decline in resources, he theorizes, forced improvements in cooking efficiency. With stews and other foods cooked in pots, calories and nutrients were stretched and enhanced. The resulting better diet improved chances of survival for the young.
Longer stays at one location also fueled the birth rate, a phenomenon long documented by anthropologists and archeologists, who have learned that when wandering people settle down their population soars. But population growth was possibly not as dramatic in the Piedmont during the Late Archaic period as it was in the Coastal Plain. Therefore, there was probably less pressure on resources in the Piedmont, which may help explain why so few reservoir sites contained significant amounts of early pottery.
Spearpoints
for the Late Archaic period show a great deal of variety in size and shape
in the Russell area. Some are less than an inch long; others surpass three
inches. There were also many other Late Archaic artifacts discovered including
a full-grooved ax found at Harper's Ferry in Elbert County, Georgia. The
groove was chiseled towards the rear of the stone ax to help hold the
wooden handle in place.
At Rucker's Bottom, repeatedly
occupied for short stays, Late Archaic inhabitants used much bigger, boulder-sized,
pitted rocks than before. They continued to grind plant foods on small,
pitted 
cobbles
that they discarded when they moved. But they also used the bigger, pitted
tools, which became site furniture of a sort that they left behind and
reused on successive visits. The boulders' size provided more room for
grinding the increasingly important plant foods. Another interesting Late
Archaic discovery came in the form of teeth
detected at Gregg Shoals, which turned out to be canine, the first proof
that dogs were part of local prehistoric people's lives. Scientists estimate
the animal weighed between 25 and 30 pounds. The only sign of possible
shellfish use for the period in the Russell area was also found at Gregg
Shoals. But the evidence was scant-only one mussel shell. There were no
mounds of discarded shells like those found further to the south.
By 1000 B.C., the huge assemblies at places like Stallings Island for feasting on freshwater mollusks were becoming a thing of the past. Possibly a change in the climate led to their end. Some scientists say this was a time when glaciers advanced slightly and sea levels fell a few feet, not as far as during the Ice Age, but enough, perhaps, to alter the availability of shellfish along inland rivers and to diminish the run of migratory fish.
Some
estimate that only several thousand people lived in Georgia at the time.
While their numbers perhaps weren't huge, they apparently spent much of
their time near big rivers, depending on ten percent of the land. Archeologist
Glen Hanson suggests that population expansion put too much pressure on
resources, causing the Late Archaic system to collapse. In some parts
of the East, famine, increased territorial friction, and warfare possibly
dominated existence. Clearly there was unrest in some places because period
human burials in Indiana and Kentucky have revealed spearpoints inside
skeletons.
The beginnings for the next cultural tradition, the Woodland period, actually started before the decline of the Late Archaic era with the growing dependence on plant foods. People were eating more and more seeds from wild plants, and couldn't leave such a vital foodstuff to chance alone. Late Archaic people learned to save some seeds, plant them, then protect the resulting vegetation until it also yielded something good to eat. The concept of domesticating corn, beans, and possibly other plants eventually filtered into eastern North America from Mexico.
Tending plants became widespread by the Woodland period, and there were also other significant changes. Potters, for instance, grew markedly in their talents. But especially fascinating was the emergence of a mysterious, sometimes eerie ceremonialism that left inexplicable marks on the landscape that last to this day.
Chapter 7: Grains of Pollen, Mounds of Earth
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