The Late Archaic to Early Woodland Transition in Northwest Georgia

The development of a cultural context document related to the period of the time of transition from the Late Archaic to the Early Woodland in northwestern Georgia was inspired by recent testing projects conducted in Murray County (Gresham 2002) and Gordon County (Patton and Gresham 2003). These projects produced site data that provide evidence of occupations dating to a time period that immediately preceded the introduction, or at least the widespread use, of Early Woodland fabric-marked pottery in the region. While sites of this time period are relatively well studied elsewhere in the Southeast, they have generally gone unrecognized in northwestern Georgia.

Interest in understanding the transition from the Archaic to the Woodland periods in northwestern Georgia may be traced back to Joseph Caldwell's work in Allatoona Reservoir more than half a century ago. Caldwell recognized a " discontinuity" within the material culture of the earliest pottery-producing people of the region (Kellog focus) and their Archaic predecessors (Caldwell 1957, 1958). Caldwellstated that no culturally intermediate sites bad been located, and there has been sufficient survey of the area to suggest that should any such sites be found, they will be rare. Caldwell seemed to be referring to sites with fiber-tempered pottery (his Stalling 's period) which were "hardly represented at all in the Allatoona Reservoir" (Caldwell 1950:6). Caldwell also referred to this discontinuity as "a hiatus of unknown duration" with respect to bis investigations in Buford Reservoir (Caldwell 1953:l0). More recently, researchers have argued that Caldwell's idea of a "temporal and cultural hiatus" cannot be supported based on current archaeological data (Bowen 1989:215, Crook 1984:55, Rotenstein n.d.:7). However, others have maintained that the data used to refute Caldwell's assertion is flawed (Wood and Ledbetter 1990: 19).

Caldwell's work, while frequently considered representative of most of northwestern Georgia, was restricted to site data from the Piedmont Physiographic Province. Still, in view of the widespread distribution of Early Woodland sites with similar pottery types known to be located northward, Caldwell suggested that the people of the Kellog Focus moved south into Piedmont Georgia and the Carolinas, possibly from eastern Tennessee (Caldwell 1958 :23). Bowen (1989) has since revised some of Caldwell's ideas and developed the concept of a "Kellogg heartland" that extended only a relatively short distance from the Allatoona Reservoir area.

To date, most of the work relating to the Early Woodland period in northwestern Georgia bas been conducted in areas along the outer edge of the Piedmont province. Relatively little information is available from most of the Ridge and Valley province, an area that might be expected to share characteristics with cultural traditions defined for regions to the north and west. This lack of data for the Rid.ge and Valley province also applies to the Late Archaic period (Stan yard 2003).

Our study examines the Late Archaic/Early Woodland transition within the context of previous investigations of Late Archaic and Early Woodland sites in northwestern Georgia and relevant areas of the Southeast. Previous investigations in northwestern Georgia have been conducted by archaeologists of varied backgrounds who have perceived and interpreted the Late Archaic and Early Woodland cultures of the region in an equally varied fashion. In some cases, these researchers have interpreted aspects of these sites with respect to transitional or intermediate periods of occupation, thus providing data that pertains directly to this study. Most frequently these occupations are defined by an absence of pottery and projectile point types that have been defined elsewhere in the Southeast as dating to the very end of the Late Archaic or very early part of the Early Woodland period. These components have been discussed as terminal Late Archaic, terminal Archaic, or transitional Late Archaic/Early Woodland. These admittedly vague designations result from the fact that fiber tempered pottery is essentially absent from northwestern Georgia and Early Woodland pottery types do not appear until relatively late (ca. 700 B.C.). In parts of the lower Southeast and in the lower Tennessee valley, where fiber-tempered pottery is found, occupations of this time period are interpreted within traditions or phases related to these very early pottery types.

The transition from the Late Archaic to Early Woodland will also be examined with respect to a more formally defined "aceramic" Terminal Archaic period as originally defined in southeastern Tennessee (Faulkner and Graham l 966). Comparable assemblages consisting of barbed and expanded stemmed projectile points and soapstone vessels have been referred to as Terminal Archaic in eastern Tennessee (Faulkner and Graham 1966a; Childress 1999), but have also been more formally defined as Wade phase in Middle Tennessee (Keel 1978:160), and Cogswell phase in Kentucky (Ison 1986:212).

Very similar projectile points also appear in the Terminal Archaic Prairie Lake phase as far away as the American Bottom in Illinois (Emerson 1980). Each of these phases have been well dated within the interval of approximately 1100 to 600 B.C. (uncalibrated date range). Our review of previous research shows that similar point types seem to occur most frequently on sites in the northwestern corner of Georgia. This suggests a relationship to cultures living in the Cumberland Plateau region and areas to the north and northwest. The Terminal Archaic component at the Lick Creek site in Gordon County is dated at 760 B.C. (Benson et al. 2008) and falls within the range of these phases.

Because so few potential transitional sites have been previously recognized in northwestern Georgia, data from a number of sites with Late Archaic and Early Woodland occupations have been assessed in an effort to better understand this period of transition. The available data procured from these sources suggest northwestern Georgia was an area of cultural and ethnic diversity during the latter part of the Late Archaic period through the Early Woodland period. This may be explained in large measure by the unique geographic position of northwestern Georgia with respect to the Ridge and Valley province and specifically to the Great Valley (Coosa Valley). It does appear that this period of transition in northwestern Georgia was a time of cultural constriction that is visible in the distinctive appearance of the material culture of sites within relatively small geographical areas in the region.

Many of the cultural traits that distinguish this transition, and the material culture of these sites in the Southeast are related to changes in subsistence (i .e. the culmination of generations of incipient plant husbandry that stabilized the plant resource base and allowed for increased sedentism and more geographically constricted ethnic identities that are reflected in the innovative technologies that accompanied these changes.