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Swift Creek Research History and Observations Mark Williams and Daniel T. Elliott The Swift Creek period in Georgia and the surrounding states is recognized almost exclusively by the distinct pottery associated with the period from approximately a.d. 100 to a.d. 750. The earliest recorded illustrations of what we now know as Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery were presented almost 70 years before the type was formally recognized, however. In 1873 Charles C. Jones illustrated at least one sherd of this type in his classic volume Antiquities of the Southern Indians (Jones 1873:21, plate XXIX). He did not recognize them as distinct from the other stamped sherds he illustrated, most of which were much more recent in date. Additional Swift Creek sherds were illustrated in 1903 by William Holmes in his summary volume of the Indian ceramics of the eastern United States (Holmes 1903). Again, he had no idea how old they were and did not recognize them as distinct from other paddle-stamped ceramics from the Deep South. Both of these studies were conducted before the value of ceramics as a dating tool was recognized. Further, relatively little was made of Swift Creek ceramics before this century because they were virtually absent from the multitude of mounds that were opened in the nineteenth century: Swift Creek pottery is not burial pottery. The peripatetic Clarence B. Moore found and illustrated a few sherds of Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery from Florida burial mounds in two of his northwestern Florida publications (Moore 1902a:470, 472, 1918:525, 565). Although Margaret Ashley presented a credible analysis of Mississippian period stamped pottery from the northwestern Georgia Etowah site in her 1932 paper, there were no Swift Creek sherds in her collections from there, 1 nor have any been found at Etowah since then (Ashley 1932). Indeed, this particular stamped pottery was unrecognized as a separate type by all researchers until the landmark study of Arthur R. Kelly of the excavations at Macon, Georgia, published in 1938. For the ¤rst time systematic excavations on a large scale included a site that had this material in profusion. This site was the Swift Creek mound (Kelly 1938). The chapter by Alan Marsh in the present collection (Chapter 2) discusses some of the logistical aspects of its excavation in 1936 and 1937. This mound was approximately 3 meters high when excavated and had been plowed for many years. Kelly and his wife, Rowena, were reportedly fascinated by the beautiful complicated stamped ceramics found there in abundance. Although he devoted fewer than two pages of his sixty-eightpage report to the description of the excavations, he spent nearly twenty pages discussing the pottery found there. In fact, he devoted more effort to discussing Swift Creek than any other aspect of the Macon Works Progress Administration project, including even the main Macon Plateau site. Further , the Swift Creek site was the only piece of the eight-year massive excavations at Macon that he completed as a site report in his later life. Clearly, it is with Kelly’s excavations at Swift Creek that the substance of this book really begins. Although Kelly presented one small photographic plate of the remarkable Swift Creek pottery in his 1938 report, it was not until the following year that a formal type de¤nition was written and presented by Jesse Jennings and Charles Fairbanks (1939b). Their description was the lead de¤nition in the second newsletter (March 1939) of the then newly constituted Southeastern Archaeological Conference. In addition to the formal description of the type, two plates of sherd drawings by James Jackson, illustrator with the Macon project, were included. As Jennings and Fairbanks noted in their description , the Swift Creek material was similar to material from the Tennessee River valley in northeastern Alabama described by William Haag in the ¤rst newsletter (February 1939) that Haag had named Pickwick Complicated Stamped (Haag 1939b). The Pickwick material was tempered with crushed limestone rather than sand and had a more restricted range of designs. The similarity is undeniable, however, and Pickwick still represents the northwestern limit of what is now universally called Swift Creek pottery. On the Georgia coast, Joseph Caldwell and Antonio Waring recognized 2 Mark Williams and Daniel T. Elliott the presence of Swift Creek–like pottery there and named this relatively rare variant Brewton Hill Complicated Stamped in the ¤fth newsletter of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, published in August 1939 (Caldwell and Waring 1939). In the report of the excavations...

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