Peoples of the Piedmont

Adapted from Intrigue of the Past by the UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology,LEARN NC web edition, page 3.5 (see http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/intrigue/3.5).

Figure 1. At Town Creek Indian Mound, recreations of the town's originalstructures stand in the town center. The major temple, shown here, sits atopan earthen mound.

In the years between 1000 and 1200 CE, Native life in the north and central Piedmonthadn’t changed much from prior Woodland times. People still lived in small hamletswhose houses strung out along river and stream banks. At times, the hamlets sat emptywhen people left to hunt and gather wild foods. But times were about to change. Around900 CE, corn agriculture began. As a result, population began to grow, people begangathering in larger villages, and conflicts erupted.

Copyright ©2001 UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology and LEARN NC. All Rights Reserved. The originalweb-based version, with enhanced functionality and related resources, can be found at http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/2643.

Figure 2. An ancient storage pitbeing excavated by

archaeologists. The tray in thebackground contains deer

bones, broken pottery, andother village “sweepings” found

in the pit.

The Hogue site

On a bend in the Eno River near present-day Hillsborough are the remains of a smallhamlet that was occupied between 1000 and 1200 CE. Archaegologists call this site Hogue.From the remains, it seems that Hogue had only a few houses, and archaeologists aren’tsure how people built them. Dark stains (called postmolds or postholes) show where someof the structures’ wooden support posts decayed. But the traces don’t make clear housepatterns. The best guess is that the Hogue homes were round.

LEARNING FROM GARBAGE

Throughout the hamlet, people dug round pits, each about two feet deep. When first made,each pit was apparently used as an underground food cupboard. It was safe and hidden,not just from animals, but from any humans from outside the village who might pokeabout the hamlet when everyone was off on hunts and collecting trips.

However, as happens, pits eventually fell out of use. People then used them asreceptacles for trash. They swept in litter from cooking hearths and sweepings from villageand house floors. Archaeologists find pieces of broken pottery, animal bones, nut hulls,broken stone tools, charcoal from fires, and any odd stone caught up in the sweepings.

Enough maize kernels and sunflower seeds turn up in the trash that archaeologiststhink Hogue’s people were farmers. Probably, their fields weren’t big. The quantities ofcharred acorns and hickory nuts and remains of deer, squirrel, and rabbits thatarchaeologists found in the pits suggest people relied heavily on wild foods. Archaeologistscall this blend of grown and wild foods for subsistence a mixed economy.

DEALING WITH DEATH

Hogue gives archaeologists a glimpse at how Piedmont people living then dealt with death.Hogue’s cemetery was small. Eight people lay buried there in round or oval graves. Hoguevillagers arranged each body for burial by drawing the person’s knees up to the chest. Theyput no offerings in the graves. But in some, large rocks were placed at the feet of thedeceased. Why? Archaeologists don’t know.

Small hamlets like Hogue were sprinkled through the north-central Piedmontbetween AD 1000 and 1200. Most sat on ridges bordering the narrow floodplains of smallrivers and streams. But a few exceptions, like Hogue, sat along major rivers. Because allthese hamlets have only scant traces of houses, artifacts, or other hints of daily life,archaeologists think that few people lived in them. What’s more, people seemed to changevillage locations every few years.

The Wall site

Throughout the Mississippian period, many peoples of the central Piedmont continued tolive in small hamlets like the one at Hogue. But in the northern Piedmont, by 1400, mostpeoples lived in compact villages. One village that archaeologists have found is the Wall

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Figure 3. Archaeological tracesof a round house at the Wall

site. Small stakes marklocations where posts once

stood.

site, located on the same bend in the Eno River as the Hogue site. It was occupied about1600 CE.

Wall spread over more than an acre. Archaeologists have found remains of sevenround houses, each about 25 feet in diameter. They have also found outlines of a couple ofsmaller buildings that may have been cribs or sheds for storing food. Wide, shallow pits aresprinkled among the houses and cribs. From the pits’ design and because they containcharcoal, ash, and remains of plant and animal matter used for food, we can guess that thepits were hearths used to prepare feasts for community ceremonies. Surrounding theentire village was a stockade, a wall made of upright posts. Whether people constructed itfor protection from enemies or to keep animals from stealing food is unknown.

A COMPACT VILLAGE

About 100 to 150 people probably lived at Wall, and archaeologists think that they livedthere for only twenty years. While they were there, they planted fields of corn, beans, andprobably squash in the rich soil along the Eno River. They gathered the wild fruits andberries that rooted and grew in the areas they churned up around the plots. Seasonalsupplies of acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts came from nearby forests. So, too, did theirmain source of meat, the white-tailed deer. Other small mammals, turtles, fish, wildturkeys, and passenger pigeons added variety. The trash they left behind provides evidenceof all these foods.

In earlier Piedmont villages, people buried their dead in cemeteries, but at Wall,graves were placed within or just outside homes. People sealed the graves with timbers orlarge stones and made funeral offerings. They used shell beads to decorate burialgarments; sometimes, they strung the beads and put them on the deceased as jewelry. Theyalso put small clay pots of food in graves, perhaps to sustain the person’s journey to theother world. And because food remains are found in the dirt used to fill some graves,archaeologists think that feasting might have been part of their burial ceremony.

Wall villagers also had a distinct style of pottery. They decorated vessels with a designarchaeologists call simple stamped. This design consists of a series of parallel lines runningin one direction that people etched on a wooden paddle; the design was transferred on thewet clay by striking the paddle against it.

Other villages

Was Wall typical of Piedmont villages in 1600? In some ways it was typical. Across thePiedmont, people relied on agriculture as well as hunting and gathering for their food.Houses were all about the same size, and burial sites were all similar, suggesting that thissociety was fairly egalitarian — no one lived more grandly than anyone else.

In other ways, Wall was unique. Most Piedmont peoples still lived in smaller villagesthat were more spread-out and less fortified. But over time, Piedmont villages werebecoming larger and more compact. Archaeologists can suggest two reasons for thischange. First, as small villages grew and spread out, people found themselves living fartherfrom the fields they farmed. Small family groups may have split off and formed compactvillages near their fields. Second, as farming became more important, larger villages may

Peoples of the Piedmont | 3

Figure 4. The burial house was around, thatch-roof hut in which

the Indians of Town Creekburied their dead.

have made agricultural work more efficient — people could better organize themselves.They may also have found safety in numbers.

Town Creek Indian Mound and Pee Dee culture

In one site in the southern Piedmont, something different appears. Town Creek IndianMound, near Mt. Gilead in Montgomery County, is North Carolina’s most visible, andmost visited, archaeological site. Framed by a backdrop of tall pines, a reconstructedstockade daubed with red clay surrounds grounds dominated by a flat-topped earthenmound—what archaeologists call a platform mound. A square, thatched building whosesides also glint with red clay sits on top of it. Steps carved in the mound’s eastern side leadto the building. Where they begin, a rectangular area once flanked by open-sided, coveredbuildings spreads out from the mound’s base. A tall pole is planted on one end, with a bearskull resting on top. Nearby sit two other clay-sided and thatched buildings.

Town Creek is reconstructed from archaeological evidence. It sits on the west bank ofthe Little River, upstream from where the river joins with Town Creek. A few milesdownstream, the Little River flows into the Pee Dee, which itself becomes the Great PeeDee River cutting south to empty into the Atlantic. With these river names, it’s no surprisearchaeologists called the culture of the people who lived in that Montgomery County spotfrom 950 to 1500 CE the Pee Dee, and the site at which they gathered Town Creek.

WHO BUILT TOWN CREEK?

The name Pee Dee sometimes causes confusion. The archaeological Pee Dee culture wasnamed after the Great Pee Dee River. That river, in turn, was named after an Indian tribethat lived there in the Colonial period (and still lives in South Carolina today). Althoughthey have the same name, the archaeological culture and the modern-day tribe are not thesame. The modern Pee Dee may or may not be descendants of the people who lived atTown Creek.

Exactly who built Town Creek is something archaeologists have been trying to sort outsince the mound was saved from plowing by archaeologist Joffre Coe in the 1930s. It’s anunsettled and sometimes controversial topic. Was it people or ideas moving in that sparkedthe Pee Dee culture? Some combination of the two? However the evidence finally answersthe questions, archaeologists agree on one thing. The Pee Dee culture was a local version ofthe Mississippian tradition that shows up across the Southeast, from Georgia to easternOklahoma.

CENTRAL TOWNS

Mississippian cultures included several traits found at Town Creek, including:

• temples and civic buildings set atop earthen platform mounds• social and political hierarchies, with priests and chiefs• religious symbolism artistically represented in jewelry and ritual items• corn agriculture and a variety of ceremonies surrounding it

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On the web

"Native Carolinians" additional activities

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-twoworlds-lessons/2.10

Figure 5. Large urns were usedfor burial after cremation.

These kinds of binding habits tended to focus towns on ceremonial and political centers.Town Creek was one such center. Apparently, Town Creek was the hub for a number

of Pee Dee villages in the southern Piedmont. Some are distant. Many are accessible bywater. One village, called the Payne site, is about 30 miles northeast of Town Creek.Others, which archaeologists call Leak and Teal, are in Richmond and Anson counties.From what they’ve learned through excavating the villages, some archaeologists think PeeDee culture people built Town Creek after some of the towns had been established.

PEE DEE CULTURE

Right now, the best guess is that the Pee Dee culture surfaced in North Carolina around950 CE. People first started making distinctive pottery, decorating vessels with a uniquegroup of geometric stamped designs. Some were large urns used for burial — people of thePee Dee culture cremated some adults and infants and put their ashes in the large clayurns.

The Pee Dee culture also had a distinctive architecture and intensive agriculture.Houses and public structures were rectangular, a shape that sets them apart from theround buildings used by other, contemporary Piedmont peoples. And, although theyhunted, fished, and collected wild foods like everybody else, Pee Dee culture villagers weremainly farmers of corn.

Presumably, the Town Creek ceremonial center was built only after a large enoughpopulation had accepted and settled into Pee Dee culture life. Regularly, people fromsurrounding villages congregated there for ceremonies.

On a lighter note, people from different towns and clans may have played competitivegames on the field near the mound’s base. Each summer, people celebrated the harvest ofearly corn. Called the Busk, the ceremony signaled hope for a winter of filled granaries; itwas also a time of renewal when people swept out their homes to discard old clothes, pots,and foods.

A FADING CULTURE

By 1400 CE, Town Creek’s importance as a ritual and ceremonial center for the Pee Deeculture was fading. By 1600, Town Creek was a memory. During those 200 years, somehabits held. Cremations and urn burials were still done. The large, fertile fieldssurrounding the old Pee Dee villages were still planted in corn, beans, and squash. The PeeDee River gave up its harvest of fish and mussels and the forests its fruits, deer, and othergame. But people stopped making rectangular houses, constructing instead oval-shapedbuildings. And they quit building mounds.

Peoples of the Piedmont | 5

These lessons from the UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology's Intrigue of the Past can beused as additional activities for the digital history textbook module "Two Worlds: Prehistory,Contact, and the Lost Colony."

Excavating Occaneechi Town: An archaeology primer

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/occaneechi-archaeology-primer/

Republished with permission from the Research Laboratories of Archaeology, the ArchaeologyPrimer uses photographs of the excavations at Occaneechi Town to introduce fundamentalconcepts of archaeology. The primer provides an introduction to the methods of archaeology andto some common types of artifacts, and prepares students to participate in an electronicarchaeological dig.

Piedmont cultures graphic organizer

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-twoworlds-lessons/2.3

This activity will assist students in understanding Piedmont cultures as they read the article"Peoples of the Piedmont."

Teaching about the early peoples of the Piedmont

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/7388

Suggested fourth-grade activities for use with the article "Peoples of the Piedmont," whichdiscusses different historic sites of the Native Americans in North Carolina.

Clays of the Piedmont

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/cede_piedclay/235

Images of pottery and pottery fragments found at Town Creek

More from LEARN NC

Visit us on the web at www.learnnc.org to learn more about topics related to this article,including American Indians, Eno River, Mississippian Period, North Carolina, Pee Dee,Piedmont, Town Creek Indian Mound, archaeology, corn, crops, farming, and platform mounds.

Image credits

More information about these images and higher-resolution files are linked from the original webversion of this document.

Figure 1 (page 1)

Photograph by David Walbert. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/.

Figure 2 (page 2)

. Copyright ©2001. All Rights Reserved.

Figure 3 (page 3)

. Copyright ©2001. All Rights Reserved.

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Figure 4 (page 4)

David Walbert. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/.

Figure 5 (page 5)

Dirk Frankenberg. Copyright ©1999. All Rights Reserved.

Peoples of the Piedmont | 7