Last month Rufus Adair, OSHM docent and board member, wrote a delightful story about a childhood experience that led to his life-long fascination with Native American pottery. His article captured the imagination of many readers, and the museum team asked if he would follow up his Archaeology Day promotion with what he learned that day. His observations were so interesting that we just had to share them with our readers! Here are some of Rufus’ notes:

What I learned at Archaeology Day on August 7, 2021

by Rufus Adair

Even quite small shards of Native American pottery are more useful than arrowheads in dating a particular settlement. One, the styles changed, but slowly and over time. Two, any charred pieces – inside or outside the pot – can be dated within a couple of decades by Carbon-14 tests.

Native Americans moved around a good bit -- sometimes just a few miles, for better farming or hunting grounds, but also sometimes hundreds of miles, perhaps to get away from the Spanish, then the French and British, and then the Americans and Georgians. One Florida group had some distinctive touches in their pottery, and a couple of hundred years later those distinctive touches appeared in pottery from the upper Chattahoochee valley -- but not (yet) in middle Georgia or northern Florida. These moves would have all been on foot and carrying whatever they needed for the trip.

Despite the movements and the distances and the pressures -- once dubbed "a cultural roller derby" by the late University of Georgia anthropologist, Charles Hudson -- pottery shards found over a large area of the Southeast show remarkable similarities during various time periods. In other words, despite differences and distances, the Native Americans maintained a common culture of shared beliefs, values, traditions, and, yes, new techniques. Perhaps we today could learn something.

On Archaeology Day, the archaeologists had a children’s table for making pottery the Native American way. After molding balls of clay into small pots, young participants could then decorate them using the simple tools the Indians probably used. The tools included antler tines, corncobs, and an ingenious two-pronged stick that allowed parallel lines in curves and swirls. Although the activity was intended for children, the chatter and giggles coming from the table proved that a number of grandpas and grandmas had fun as well!

Cemeteries for the early European settlers typically show how precarious life was during the 19th century, where death could come when a person was in their 30s and 40s and where grave markers stand in evidence that a young family could be wiped in half within a month by diphtheria, typhus, scarlet fever, or some other disease. A tour of Eatonton's antebellum Union Church cemetery next to the Plaza proved no exception. Still, it is a bit startling to read the several grave markers for 2-year-olds.

Eatonton's antebellum cemetery is full, although only the wealthiest families were able to put up stone markers (several now heavily eroded). One unusual gravesite was that for James Meriwether, which was marked by not one, but two, 6- or 7-foot obelisks. One was put up by the family and the other -- for the first and perhaps only time in the state's history -- by the state legislature. Meriwether was a lawyer and state legislator here, and it is not entirely clear what the legislature's rationale was. However, one suspects that Meriwether's role as one of the commissioners negotiating the Treaty of Indian Springs may have been a factor. In that treaty, a select band of Creek chiefs signed away any claims to lands between the Ocmulgee and Chattahoochee rivers -- about 20 percent of Georgia's land area today.

Contributed by: Rufus Adair

Board Member and Docent of Old School History Museum

Retired Newspaper Reporter and Teacher

More photos from our August Adventure - Archaeology Day. Click on the photos below to enlarge. For more information on this event, please visit our event page here.