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5 Recent Excavations at Papanow, Pond Trail, and Riegelwood Papanow (31NH690), Pond Trail (31NH465), and Riegelwood (31CB114) are sites that provide critical data for developing a Woodland ceramic sequence for the lower Cape Fear River valley. Papanow and Pond Trail are short-term habitation sites, in no way remarkable in terms of site structure, representative of the thousands of such sites that are scattered up and down the Cape Fear Valley. Riegelwood is somewhat more complex, with features and burials suggesting longer term habitation. The value of these sites for the current study, however, lies not in site structure or function but in the fact that thermoluminescence-dated pottery and 14 C-dated contexts were recovered at each of them, thus providing a unique opportunity to explore the sequence of stylistic traditions expressed in the Woodland period pottery of North Carolina’s southern coast. Papanow and Pond Trail The vertical distribution of ceramics in the soil column at the Papanow site provided some clues about sequential patterning, but in order to strengthen chronological estimates of the variation observed in the Papanow and Pond Trail assemblages , thermoluminescence (TL) dating was used (Herbert 1997). The pottery samples submitted for TL dating were part of a pilot study of the efficacy and utility of TL dating on North Carolina’s Coastal Plain. The method was found to be both effective and useful, and the study results are the focus of the following discussion. The Papanow and PondTrail sites, located adjacent to one another in the floodplain of the Northeast Cape Fear River, in New Hanover County (Figure 4.1), were discovered during an archaeological survey of the proposed Wilmington bypass (Klein et al. 1994). The Papanow site is situated on a slight rise or hammock surrounded by dense pocosin vegetation and longleaf pine forest. The Pond Trail site is about 1 km east of the Papanow site, lying on the shoulder of the terrace overlooking the floodplain escarpment. 68 Chapter 5 Clusters of positive shovel tests (those yielding artifacts) concentrated on the terrace edge overlooking the floodplain or on raised hammocks within the floodplain identified the location of these sites. Six 1-×-1-m units were excavated in order to acquire pottery and soil samples suitable for analysis and TL dating. Five of these (four adjacent units in one 2-×-2-m block and one additional 1-×-1-m unit) were excavated at the Papanow site, and a single 1-×-1-m unit was excavated at the Pond Trail site. Vertical provenience was maintained in 10-cm arbitrary levels. The location of larger sherds, potentially classifiable to series, was mapped in situ and soil samples were collected for measuring radiation. Although the Papanow and Pond Trail sites are about a kilometer apart, TLdated pottery from the two sites was found to be contemporaneous. Therefore, their assemblages are combined in this study to increase the sample size. Five temper classes were defined for the 290 sherds recovered from excavations at the Papanow and Pond Trail sites. The largest group (68 percent) was composed of specimens tempered with medium and coarse quartz sand with occasional granule-sized particles. This assortment of grain sizes is referred to as sand/grit for shorthand and it is characteristic of both the Cape Fear and New River series. Judging from the surface treatments, at least four vessels are represented in this temper class. Grogtempered sherds from at least two Hanover vessels make up the next most populous series (27 percent). Seven sherds from at least four vessels were found to be tempered with medium sand, and seven sherds from a single simple-stamped vessel were tempered with marl (Table 5.1). The vertical distribution of sherds of various temper classes appears to be patterned (Table 5.2). The majority of the grog-tempered sherds were found in Level 2 (10–20 cm below the surface [cmbs]). The majority of the sand/grit-tempered sherds were found in Level 3 (20–30 cmbs), and the marl-tempered sherds were found only in Levels 3 and 4 (20–40 cmbs). Medium sand–tempered sherds were recovered in Levels 2–4 (10–40 cmbs). Judging from these data, the sequence of temper types appears, from youngest to oldest, to be grog, sand/grit, and marl, with medium sand occurring somewhere in the middle of the sequence. Although the sample size is quite small and the potential for mixing is considerable, these patterns do suggest a sequence that...

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