G. D. Pope

“ It is not unlikely that the irregular ditches formed by these pits served also as a protection against raids on the village; for otherwise, why would their course have outlined the village area so closely?
All the evidence, then, points to the existence here at Ocmulgee of a town of Indians who lived in a state of culture as advanced in some respects as any to be found north of Mexico. We see a prosperous community devoted chiefly to the yearly round of activities designed to cement its relationship with the powerful unseen forces on which its well-being depended. ”

“ The temple priests and their assistants and 39 retainers would have formed a rather numerous class with high status in a society so clearly impressed with the importance of the physical expression of its religious ideas. Wealth and power may likewise have rested with a specialized warrior class which controlled the governing function of the group, or it may be that these were combined with the religious duties of the priestly class. Whatever the system employed, several hundred unusually important individuals given special burial in the Funeral Mound attest to the distinctions which existed. ”

“ In the Old World, human history has been traced to its beginnings through fossil remains suggesting a stage of development earlier than man. In the Western Hemisphere, however, no such remains have been found, which indicates that the American Indian must have immigrated here from another continent. In searching for his closest relatives, therefore, scientists are now agreed that certain physical peculiarities show the modern as well as the prehistoric Indian to be most closely linked to the peoples of eastern Asia. ”

“ Through the provision of increased leisure and stability, an assured food supply may well have been one of the factors permitting an enrichment of Indian life at this time. Since this cannot yet be demonstrated, however, we must turn to what we do know. Perhaps the reader will not be too surprised to learn that we shall again be talking about pottery, since we have already mentioned it as one of the archeologist’s most unfailing sources of information. ”

“ Since they must move with the game on which they depended, group size had to be limited; for large bodies of people could not move easily from place to place. Moreover, the population was not large, and there was plenty of room to spread out. For all these reasons the hunting band was probably made up of a few related families, numbering on the average perhaps 50 people who habitually camped together. Leadership in such a small group would not be a matter of too great importance; and the chief might be chosen for skill in hunting or for an outstanding personality. ”

“ Man Comes to Georgia
The roving existence led by these Wandering Hunters brought them into the region which is now Georgia at a relatively early date. We do not know by what route they came here, for it is easier to seek out the geographic limitations which restricted the first migrants to the New World to a single point of entry than it is to trace the wanderings of their descendants over some 8,000,000 square miles of North America. ”

“ Returning, now, to the Early Creeks, we left them sharing in the development of a distinctive material culture which characterized, with minor differences, a large portion of the Southeast. When we encounter their descendants on the site of Ocmulgee Old Fields, however, we find a mixture of old elements and new; and it is often difficult to say what part of the changes we observe was due to European contacts and what a normal continuation of the development which had gone before. ”

“ The National Park System, of which Ocmulgee National Monument is a unit, is dedicated to conserving the scenic, scientific, and historic heritage of the United States for the benefit and enjoyment of its people. ”

“ In the final pages we can study the effects of the increasing impact of European civilization on the alien culture of a self-sufficient people.
The American Indian
Every school boy knows that at the time of its discovery North America was the Red Man’s continent. He knows that white people, equipped with the weapons and knowledge of an advanced civilization, took this land by persuasion or by force. For most of us our knowledge of the American Indian begins and ends with the brief interval in time where these two races were involved in a bitter struggle. ”

“ The artistic skills of the older culture, too, might possibly have passed into the hands of a new school of artists who sought to express with them the religious ideas or mythology of their own people. The techniques of the two art styles are basically similar, and the Southern Cult closely approaches both the technical proficiency and the facility of expression which are so characteristic of Hopewell. ”

“ Pottery, too, marks a big change in the work of the archeologist when it appears in the cultures which he is studying. Types of projectile points and other stone artifacts have a way of continuing in use for long periods without change. Clay vessels, however, seem to have been constantly changing in form or decoration or construction, possibly because the potter’s clay is so plastic and 17 responsive to any fancy it is desired to express, and there are many different ways of producing similar results. ”

“ Later potters learned that a temper of sand, crushed shell, or, better still, crushed rock or crumbled bits of old pottery made stronger and better pottery; and therefore “fiber-tempered” wares usually represent the oldest type of pottery we find in any region where they occur. While this pottery was undecorated at first, its makers in the Georgia area later developed a type of decoration composed most often of lines of indentations, or punctates, made with the point of a stick or a bone tool. ”

“ Since the question of race determination, however, is one of extreme complexity, it should also be pointed out that while the majority of modern Indians as well as prehistoric skeletal remains in America share enough of these features in common to be regarded as predominantly Mongoloid, they as well as the east Asians themselves, possess other physical traits like stature and head form which vary widely from group to group. ”

“ The eagle effigy platform of the ceremonial earthlodge seems to portray the spotted 48 eagle of the Southern Cult and, in any case, a distinct representation of the forked eye, probably the earliest use of this symbol on record. A ceremonial ax from the vicinity of the Funeral Mound is also typical, while the more Hopewellian traits such as undecorated shell cups and gorgets and cut animal jaws (unique, however, in their copper-plating) may be thought to argue for origins from this direction. ”

“ One of them, built of stones, contained a burial displaying such typical Hopewell features as a covering of mica plates and a breast plate and celt of copper.
During the Early Farmer period, then, we feel that the Indians in middle Georgia must have become more settled. Fragile pottery is not easily carried in any quantity by wandering bands of hunters. On the other hand, the technique of gathering wild foods is not likely to have become suddenly so efficient that this alone could account for the large increase in population which must be reflected in the more numerous sites. ”

“ Life on the shell mounds, or in the camps along streams and rivers where this source of food was of minor importance, was hardly different in most of its material aspects from that of the wandering hunters who had gone before. ”

“ Effigy bottles were usually a finer grade of pottery and generally accompanied burials. The hole in the human figure is in the back of the head; the face is painted white, the body red, and the hair the natural brown of clay. Diameter of bottle, 55/16 inches.
In time, other changes began to mark the village of the Master Farmers. The temples, built originally at ground level, were rebuilt occasionally; and with the leveling of the old building to make way for the new the surrounding ground surface was raised at first into a small platform. ”

“ The people most actively interested in the problem are the archeologists. They have been studying it intensively for about 75 years; and, while their work was at first mostly descriptive, the last 25 years have seen tremendous strides in both the techniques of their research and the soundness of their interpretations. Now we know a good deal about the Indian and have traced his career on this continent back to a time when our own past becomes almost equally dim and shadowy. ”

“ Human heads with great goggle eyes, bird and animal heads, boats (?) , and a stylized representation of a hafted celt are common.
DeSoto probably encountered some distant towns of these people when he explored Georgia in 1540, and they were undoubtedly the ancestors of various historic Creek Indian tribes of this State. We have suggested that their culture was a mixture of very old elements in the region, such as complicated stamping, with newer ideas coming in with the Master Farmers or even later, such as temple mounds and incised decoration. ”

“ Our knowledge starts to increase as we come to the period beginning about 5,000 years ago. Here a few of the details of Indian life in the Southeast emerge rather clearly. Curiously enough it was the food habits of these Shellfish Eaters which first led to their identification; and even today our scanty information on them still tends to center around this feature of their lives. ”

“ Important figures of the mythology or the religious pantheon include the eagle, ivory-billed woodpecker, and turkey; various forms of the rattlesnake, the cat or mountain lion; and the human chunkee player. These are depicted most clearly on some of the engraved copper plaques like that of the Eagle Man from the Etowah site, which is reproduced in the Ocmulgee Museum in the colors most likely to have been used in the original costume. They are also engraved on shell cups, masks, and gorgets and on pottery vessels. ”

“ No sizable shell mounds of these Archaic peoples, as they are known to the archeologist, have been found in the central-Georgia area. Numerous sites occur here, however, which contain no pottery but are littered with scraps of worked flint and where large numbers of the heavy Archaic projectile points are plowed up annually. At other sites, including those on the Macon Plateau, these points are found with a considerable quantity of the distinctive fiber-tempered pottery. ”

“ If the earliest wanderers to the Americas were primarily a blend of other racial elements, their influence on the physical type of later American Indians has been largely submerged by the Mongoloid features of the vast majority of later arrivals. ”

“ Furthermore, the broad Mackenzie Valley, leading south along the eastern slopes of the Rockies, was the area latest to be covered by glacial ice and first to open up with the return of warmer conditions. It may even be that the ice failed to cover this region during the last one or more of the minor advances which together make up the latest, or Wisconsin, glacial period.
Taken all together, therefore, the conditions described provided man with a chilly but relatively dry and passable route from the Asiatic mainland to Alaska and thence to the warmer interior sections of North America. ”

“ Small wonder that stone tools and weapons become less frequent, and that flint chipping itself, within a few generations, had become a lost art.
While the Trading Post site has not yet been studied in detail, one gets the impression that stone tools are actually less numerous. Projectile points are mostly of small size, often very narrow triangles less than an inch in length. European materials like gun flints and bottle glass are used for scrapers. ”

“ All primitive peoples today share certain universals of social life. From these we may confidently infer that every man was part of a clearly defined kin group, that the structure and relationships of this group determined into what similar group he might marry, and which were forbidden to him as sources for choosing a mate. We can also be reasonably certain that while antisocial acts like murder, adultery, and theft might not be punished by the community at large, strong measures to hold them in check 12 were generally approved even though they might have to be initiated privately. ”

“ Creek pottery continued some of the more characteristic older shapes, but the decoration was only a rough imitation of earlier designs.
Other artifacts suggest the increasing reliance on European goods supplied by the traders, which we know had already begun to destroy the rude but effective and self-sufficient culture of the Indians. A highly prized musket cost a man 25 deer skins; but once he had it, with bullets at 40 to the skin and powder 1 skin to the pound, he could kill more deer and would have little need to make arrow heads of flint. Another 4 skins would purchase an ax, 4 more a hoe ”

“ Many of the earlier pieces had four small bumps at the point of the base, as a sort of reminder of the feet which were common, also, on earlier pottery in nearby areas; these disappeared in the later examples. The lip of the jar, too, was only crudely finished in the earliest forms, being left rough and irregular or sometimes haphazardly notched or scalloped with pressure from the potter’s finger. In time the edge tended to be pushed out a little; and this gradually developed into a smooth outward fold of the lip and finally a collar of smooth clay about an inch in width about the rim. ”

“ Areas which appear to have been floored with clay and the remains of many hearths indicate that the shell mounds themselves were the actual habitation sites. This is confirmed by the presence of the numerous articles of daily living mixed in with the shells. The dead, too, were buried directly in the mound, most commonly in small round pits which required that the corpse be tightly flexed. ”

“ Knowledge of planting and plant care, too, is likely to have spread piecemeal rather than as a single unit. Hence, as we have already stated, this seems the most likely period for the Indians to have begun learning to raise some of the many plants which not too long afterwards became so important in their existence. ”