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quences whose changes in time are actually observable over very short spans of known duration. The Ennis site (Fairbanks 1940), located near Rock Landing in the vicinity of Milledgeville, Georgia, was the site of Oconee between 1690 and 1715. Like Ocmulgee, Oconee is a multi-component site, the historic occupation being only one of many.Gordon R.Willey’s collection from the site, now in the collections of [294]Ocmulgee National Monument,included no historic trade materials, but there is no question, judging from Benjamin Hawkins’s exact location of the site (Hawkins 1916), that it was the place where Oconee was situated until the Yamassee War. The historic pottery from the site is closer to that from Ocmulgee than it is to the Kasita material as would be expected from a town of a 1690–1715 time range. The Big Sandy site (1 Bt 1) in Butts County, Georgia, was one of the Lower Creek towns located on the Ocmulgee-Oconee drainage between 1690 and 1715 although it has not as yet been positively identi¤ed as to town name. The pottery from the site is similar to that from Ocmulgee and Oconee with only a few special characteristics to distinguish it. As a whole, the Ocmulgee Fields Incised series is similar to the collection at Macon with many of the same design elements employed. Some unique ones, chie®y linear designs, include the paired parallel lines more often associated with Walnut Roughened at Ocmulgee. Incised cazuelas tend to have sandier, more granular pastes with thicker rims than their Ocmulgee Town counterparts. Plain cazuelas and plain ®at-bottomed bowls occur as do European-in®uenced forms (cups?);plain bowls with the familiar added pinched rim strip are also present. Interestingly enough, the Big Sandy site has both Walnut Roughened and Chattahoochee Brushed pottery on it with the former appreciably more plentiful than the latter. The predominant surface treatment for both of these types is [295]not brushing but cob-marking or “¤nger-nail” punctating or a combination of both. An occasional sherd of this material seems to be limestone tempered rather than shell or ordinary grit. The Lower Creek town at the Abercrombie Mound, Russell County, Alabama, was located directly across the Chattahoochee River from the Kasita site near Columbus,Georgia (Fairbanks 1955).This site has no known town identi¤cation at present, but it could have been Coweta, which was at one time located directly across the Chattahoochee River from Kasita (Swanton 1922: Pl. 2). No dates are available for the occupation at the Abercrombie Mound since the trade goods from the historic component are as yet undated. An identi¤cation of this site as Coweta, of course, can be valid only if the site is proved to be late enough in time. Fairbanks, on stylistic grounds,places Abercrombie as ancestral to the 1690–1715 Ocmulgee Town materials and hence datable from the period just prior to the movement of Origins of Lower Creek Ceramics / 189 the Lower Creeks east to the Ocmulgee and Oconee Rivers. The fact that the pottery,or at least a good portion of it,is shell tempered (including most of the Ocmulgee Fields Plain and the Ocmulgee Fields Incised) tends to support this early dating of the site as does the presence of Walnut Roughened sherds. Chattahoochee Brushed pottery is, however, also represented in the collection from the site.Fairbanks’s major basis for considering the Abercrombie Mound site so early, the quality of the incising on [296]Ocmulgee Fields Incised vessels ,is not entirely convincing since the sherds of this type that he illustrates can easily be duplicated in the collections at Macon. If this is indeed an early Lower Creek site, then it must be only a few years prior to the Ocmulgee movement because of the presence of trade goods. English trade materials were not generally available to these people until after the opening of the trade with the Lower Creeks in 1677. It is dif¤cult to see a site so close in time to Ocmulgee Town so much closer to a possible Lamar antecedent as far as pottery is concerned unless, as Fairbanks has suggested, the development of the Ocmulgee Fields ceramic culture was a very rapid one hard on the heels of the English trade. If, on the other hand, the historic component at the Abercrombie Mound does prove to be a later site, post– Yamassee War, then the progressive loss of shell temper through time, as...

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