Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Frank T. Schnell, Jr. In the absence of letters and of recorded memories most easily does one wave of human life sweep over another, obliterating all former recollections save such as are lodged in the womb of mounds, or preserved in the generous bosom of mother earth. -C. C. Jones, Jr. In 1906, a young boy visited the Stalling's Island site on the Savannah River just north ofAugusta , Georgia. He had been inspired to visit the site after reading what he called an "eloquent eulogy of the mound" in Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes, by Charles Colcock Jones, Jr. (Claflin 1931:3). The Bostonian Claflin family frequently visited their "winter" home near Stalling's Island and not far from Jones's Augusta home. Over the next twentythree years, he would continue periodic digging there until late 1928, when Mr. and Mrs. C. B. viii INTRODUCTION Cosgrove ofthe Peabody Museum ofHarvard University arrived to conduct slightly more than two months' intensive excavations, funded by Claflin (Stephen Williams, personal communication, December 11,1998). In 1931, the now grown William H. Claflin, Jr., would publish the landmark report The Stalling's Island Mound, Columbia County, Georgia, in the Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology, Harvard University, based upon the Cosgroves', and his own work there. Claflin's publication is, in my opinion, the first "modern" archaeological report produced in Georgia and perhaps the Southeast. By that, I mean that it was the first to clearly demonstrate domestic stratigraphic sequence, an achievement that had eluded his predecessors and many of his contemporaries . Some ten years later, Charles Fairbanks reexamined the significance ofStalling's Island and further clarified the stratigraphic sequence there (Fairbanks 1942). Awareness of the importance of the site continues to grow. It is now a National Historic Landmark held by the Archaeological Conservancy , preserved for its continuing potential to add new knowledge concerning not only the archaeology of Georgia and the Southeast, but as the type site for the oldest ceramic series in NorthAmerica. Charles Colcock Jones, Jr., was born in Savannah on October 28, 1831 (Myers 1972:1568). His J ones ancestors had immigrated from England to Charleston, South Carolina, before the founding of the colony of Georgia. His great-grandfather had died in the defense ofSavannah during the American Revolution. His father, C. C. Jones, Sr., was a INTRODUCTION IX Presbyterian minister until just after his son's birth, when he moved his family to rural Georgia where, according to one biography, he devoted his energies to "the evangelization ofthe Negro" (Myers 1972:1567). Jones, Jr., spent his youth at the family plantations of "Montevideo" and "Maybank" in Liberty County, Georgia, near Savannah. In 1848 he attended South Carolina College at Columbia, spending his freshman and sophomore years there. He moved to Princeton in hisjunior year and graduated with distinction in 1852. He read law in Philadelphia for a year, then entered Dane Law School at Harvard University and graduated with a LL.B. in 1855. After graduation, Jones returned to Georgia and was admitted to the bar in Savannah. In 1858, Jones married Ruth Berrien Whitehead , and in the next year he was selected as an alderman for the city ofSavannah; in the following year he was elected mayor. He was serving as mayor when the Civil War began. Declining re-election, he volunteered for the Chatham (County) Artillery, remaining on leave until a new mayor was elected. By the fall of 1862, he was chief of artillery for the military district of Georgia, which was subsequently enlarged to include the third military district of South Carolina. Preferring artillery, he declined a commission of brigadier-general of infantry . After the death ofhis first wife in 1861, Jones was married a second time to Eva Berrien Eve of Augusta in 1863. Late in 1865 after the war had ended, he moved with his family to NewYork, where he practiced law and where he wrote Antiquities of the Southern Indians. Returning to Georgia in 1877, x INTRODUCTION Jones settled in his home "Montrose" nearAugusta, Georgia, where he continued to reside and practice law until his death on July 19, 1893. Antiquities of the Southern Indians and other works of Jones inspired Claflin and many others, both before and after, to seek to understand Georgia's and the Southeast's prehistoric cultural heritage. For a hundred years afterAntiquities was first published...