Archaeological Investigations in the West Point Dam Area: A Preliminary Report

The Chattahoochee Valley, one of the very important areas of Southeastern archaeology, has come only slowly to the attention of Southeastern specialists. The only extensive mound complex known on the Chattahoochee proper is the Rood's Landing group ( 9 SW 1) near Omaha in Stewart County, Georgia. The site was listed by C. B. Moore (1907, p. 448 ), and preliminary excavations were conducted by Joseph Caldwell (1955, pp. 24-47). Still the site is comparatively unknown and uncited except by a few regional specialists. Exploratory work at Rood's and at the Abercrombie or Fitzgerald Site (l RU 61) south of Phenix City in Alabama had given check samples of pottery types permitting the provisional placement of the final manifestations or terminal occupations of the area in the general southeastern scheme (Fairbanks1955; Hurt 1947 ). One extensively explored site has been the Kolomoki Mound complex at Blakely in Early County, Georgia, though not actually within the Chattahoochee Valley proper. It has been variously interpreted and as a result has not been accorded its deserved weighting in general reconstructions of the area (Sears1956). A rather rude awakening to the complexity of the archaeological record came with the work on the large platform mound at the Mandeville Site (9 CLA 1) just above Fort Gaines on the Georgia side of the river (Kellar, et al 1962). This mound was found to have the expected final Mississippian veneer in its outer surfaces and topmost surviving layer, but beneath the veneer was a large accretionary mound of Swift Creek age built in a platform shape rather than the usual conical Woodland shape. Again, at the Walker Street Site (9 ME 60) south of Columbus, a supposed "pure" Deptford type site with predominantly Cartersville Check Stamped pottery, was found actually to be a mixed site with an intrusive Adena-Copena-like component with probable time separation of as much as 650 years. Preliminary cl4 determinations indicated about 240 B. C. for the Deptford and about 400 A. D. for the Adena_Copena. Still again, at the Abercrombie Site (1 RU 61) cited above, testing in eroding terrace edge exposures by David W. Chase of the Fort Benning Infantry Museum showed directly superposed house floors, one level burned, giving separation between a "Rood's Focus," a "Bull Creek Focus", and a recent '"Ocmulgee Fields Focus",with an underlying level transitional from Woodland to Mississippian carrying a ware described elsewhere by Chase under the name of Averett Plain (Chase 1959, p. 7). These developments, all within a comparatively few years, indicated a need for a serious reopening of the question of the larger interpretative frame. Particularly important in our current re-examination of established hypotheses, in view of changing interests, additional lines of inquiry and additional factual (or factional) information, is the problem of the origin or origins of the Creek Indian tribes. Ultimately the problems of Creek origins boil down to questions of cultural process and the validity of two diametrically opposite interpretations of the same evidence: (1) of a single determinable point of origin, or (2) a complex origin of multifactoral, multilinear seriations of (1 ) a single unilinear chain of causality, or rather (2) a continuing process of combination and recombination. It had seemed to the writer that particularly clear-cut problems in continuity could be formulated within the outlines of the direct historical approach of Edward Sapir and William Duncan Strong, utilizing the truly enormous mass of compiled ethnographic information found in the various monographs of Frank Speck and especially of John R. Swanton, particularly Swanton's "Early History of the Creek Indians and their Neighbors (1922) and the final DeSoto Commission Report (1946 ).