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10Tribes and Traders on the North Carolina Piedmont, A.D. 1000-1710 H. TRAWICK WARD AND R. P. STEPHEN DAVIS JR. Because of their small sizes and their location, the "Siouanspeaking " tribes that dotted the North Carolina piedmont managed to avoid the first waves of disease and disruption ushered in by the Spaniards during the sixteenth century. Even the creation in 1607 of a permanent English colony at Jamestown had no immediate impact upon these piedmont Siouans. Although word of the light-skinned foreigners and occasional trinkets almost certainly made their way to the interior through Indian intermediaries, it was not until 1646, following two Indian wars and the establishment of Fort Henry at the falls of the Appomattox River, that Virginia was in a position to develop a trade with tribes to the southwest (Merrell 1989: 28). Interest in exploiting the newly opened frontier was almost immediate (see Bland 1651), and during the last half of the seventeenth century numerous traders and explorers turned their attention to the Carolina "backcountry" and began to venture into the heart of the North Carolina piedmont . Some, like John Lederer in 1671 (Cumming 1958), searched for the "Indian Sea," while others looked for the quickest passage through the Appalachian Mountains. Most, however, sought new suppliers of deerskins and pelts, and markets for their "edged tools" and ornaments. Unlike their European rivals in the New World, these early Englishmen did not come to conquer or to proselytize the natives but to establish commercial relationships. Their motives seemed harmless enough. Yet the arrival of foreign traders presaged a tidal wave of cultural and biological devastation . By the end of the seventeenth century, the piedmont tribes had felt the full sting of disease, depopulation, and social upheaval. In this chapter, we review some of the consequences of this clash of cultures in light of recent archaeological studies conducted as part of the University of North Carolina's Siouan project. History of Siouan Project Research Although a North Carolina Siouan project was organized in 1938 by Joffre Coe (Coe and Lewis 1952; Lewis 1951) and reported on in 1945 by James B. Griffin (Griffin 1945), the current project traces its roots back only to 1972. InJanuary of that year, Bennie Keel and Keith Egloff, both of the university 's Research Laboratories of Archaeology, made a routine visit to the purported site of Upper Saratown, a seventeenth -century Siouan village on the Dan River in North Carolina (Fig. 10.1). They happened upon a relic collector who had just dug into one of the few undisturbed burials among the many that had been looted there since the early 1960s. With some persuasion, they convinced the pothunter to leave, salvaged the exposed grave, and returned to Chapel Hill to report to Coe, the Research Laboratories' director (Keel 1972). Because of the extensive looting, it was decided to begin full-scale excavations at Upper Saratown the follOwing summer. Archaeological investigations 125 126 H. TRAWICK WARD AND R. P. STEPHEN DAVIS JR. at the site continued every summer until 1981 (Ward 1980; Wilson 1983). While excavations were being conducted at Upper Saratown , many of the staff and students associated with the Research Laboratories developed a strong interest in culture change on the piedmont during the contact period. When Coe retired as director in 1982, he was replaced by Roy Dickens, who also was very interested in contact period archaeology. Soon after his arrival, a long-term program of research was formally organized as the "Siouan project" (Dickens, Ward, and Davis 1987). The first phase of the project involved reviewing the Upper Saratown materials and other collections thought to date to the contact period. One of these was from the Wall site near Hillsborough, North Carolina, which was extensively excavated by Coe and Robert Wauchope between 1938 and 1941 (Fig. 10.2). This site was thought to represent the remains of the Occaneechi village that the English surveyor John Lawson visited in 1701 (Coe 1952, 1964; Lefler 1967). After a casual appraisal of the pottery and historic artifacts, the archaeologists raised questions regarding the date of the Wall site occupation. A comparison of the site's pottery with pottery from Upper Saratown suggested that Ky. \., i Ga. \ \ .,.,\ \. the Wall site predated the contact period. Furthermore, the few historic artifacts recovered by Coe and Wauchope were primarily from the plow zone and appeared to date to the late eighteenth century, the period follOwing the settlement of nearby Hillsborough. To clarify the timing of...

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