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6. Swift Creek Design Investigations: The Hartford Case
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Swift Creek Design Investigations The Hartford Case Frankie Snow Analysis of Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery designs might make it possible to understand better than any other prehistoric culture in Georgia the culture of the Swift Creek people of the ¤rst millennium a.d. During the past twenty-¤ve years I have attempted to unveil some of their secrets by reconstructing some of these designs and applying this information to archaeological problems. Hundreds of Swift Creek pottery designs recovered from sites over a broad area of south-central Georgia have been reconstructed and studied. It is now possible to (1) improve the method for reconstructing pottery designs, (2) gain a better understanding of fundamental elements of the Swift Creek world view through this art, and (3) recognize signatures in these designs that permit the reconstruction of contemporaneous settlement patterns and social interaction over a very large area. Potentially, this prehistoric artwork could tell us much about the people who made Swift Creek pottery; it could yield information about these people’s world view, magic, religion, and folktales not accessible by other archaeological analyses. This chapter will examine the data from the Hartford site, 9PU1 (Snow and Stephenson 1990), as a case study in the reconstruction and analysis of Swift Creek art in an attempt to gain insight into what these people were thinking. The use of these designs to reconstruct the social relationships between Hartford and other Swift Creek sites will be explored in Chapter 7 in this volume. It will be shown that Swift Creek design studies can also provide a data6 base for comparing Swift Creek art with other styles such as the art of the contemporary and closely related Weeden Island people and the art of the spatially distant Hopewell and the temporally distant Southern Cult cultures. Archaeological excavations were conducted at the Hartford site from the fall of 1988 to the spring of 1989. Investigations focused on a Swift Creek structure uncovered in a submound midden that dates from about a.d. 350 to 400. Adjacent to this submound midden was an arcuate distribution of shell middens that related to a slightly later Middle Swift Creek village dating to about a.d. 400 to 450 (Snow and Stephenson 1990). Swift Creek Art In contrast to earlier Woodland cultural groups, who used carved wooden paddle stamps bearing simple straight lines (simple stamped) or crosshatched (check stamped) markings, Swift Creek groups created paddles that often bore very complex motifs. Through a tradition of stamping their un¤red pottery with these elaborately carved wooden paddles, people of the Swift Creek culture left us with many clues to the wealth of their complex curvilinear art (Broyles 1968; Snow 1975). These clues remain preserved today on durable ¤re-hardened fragments of their paddle-stamped pottery. Because a rich artistic tradition of working in wood is suggested by impressions of wooden stamps on their pottery, even more of their wooden artwork has likely suffered total decay brought about by moisture and the acidic soils that are prevalent in the Southeast. It is unfortunate that the abundant fragmentary art that remains on Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, even after considerable effort at reconstruction, results in so few complete images of what these people once carved into the original wooden paddle faces. The Hartford site study adds 103 designs or fragments of designs to the Swift Creek paddle design inventory: sixty-six are from the submound midden and the remainder are from the village. Carefully piecing together the scraps of design information on Swift Creek potsherds that have been recovered from many sites in the lower Ocmulgee Valley has revealed that these prehistoric people had an inclination toward naturalistic representations. A sample of design variety recovered from these sites is illustrated in Figure 6-1. Some of the most abstract designs 62 Frankie Snow seem to be cosmological in nature, but many less abstract depictions are recognized as ®owers, serpents, birds, insects, and wolf-like and other animal heads, plus human mask-like designs. These designs seem to record a shamanistic belief. In contrast to the position offered by Knight (1989:206), at least one design combines traits of animals, such as a coiled serpent with a bird-like crest suggestive of a mythological creature. Figure 6-1, k, illustrates a Swift Creek Uktena-like motif that has been recovered in south-central Georgia at 9CF28, 9CF3, and 9CF80; it was also recorded more than 160 kilometers away in southwestern Georgia by Bettye Broyles...