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tures as the presence of identical incised designs, the occurrence of the cazuela form, and the presence of brushing as a surface treatment. Plain ware of the McKee Island series is also shell tempered and, according to both Heimlich (1952) and Dejarnette and Hansen (1960), is reminiscent in paste and surface ¤nish of prehistoric wares from the same area. McKee Island Plain is characterized by ®attened globular jars with paired strap handles as well as by a number of other vessel forms: shallow wide-mouthed jars, ®attened jars with high necks and narrow ori¤ces, and several kinds of bowls with incurving rims (apparently only seldom with what can be described as a sharp cazuela shoulder).Many of the plain vessels have an “incised, beaded, or notched” rim strip (Heimlich 1952: 27) encircling the exterior of the vessel just below the lip. Like some of [300]the pottery of the Ocmulgee Fields series,many of these plain bowls have horizontal lugs, sometimes as many as six, af¤xed to them. One of the McKee Island types, McKee Island Cord Marked (Heimlich 1952: 27–28), was not represented at all at the Childersburg site, but it can be de¤nitely associated with the McKee Island ceramic complex on the basis of instances of cord-marking in combination with the typical McKee Island incising on the same vessel (p. 27). Unknown as yet for the McKee Island series are any types corresponding to Kasita Red Filmed or the minority ware Ocmulgee Check Stamped. The Childersburg series includes as yet only two named types, Childersburg Plain and Childersburg Incised. Both of these types are similar to the corresponding McKee Island types except for a change to sand temper in place of the shell temper of the McKee Island series. This separation of types on the basis of the single attribute of change in temper may be justi-¤ed by a comment of David Taitt’s when he visited Coosa Old Town in 1772. He remarked then that the old ¤elds were being settled by some people from Tallassiehatchie, pointing to a second and apparently minor reoccupation of the site in the last quarter of the eighteenth century (Mereness 1916: 534). These later occupants may have been the makers of the Childersburg ceramic series. In addition to the Childersburg site, the McKee Island pottery series is represented by ¤ve sites in the Guntersville Basin (Webb and Wilder 1951). These sites [301]provided the basis for the original type descriptions (Heimlich 1952), but little in the way of identi¤cation of town or even of people has been made to date.Webb and Wilder placed all these sites within “Gunterlands V” (Webb and Wilder 1951:269),which is a period beginning with the ¤rst introduction of trade goods and ending with the ¤nal removal of the Indians from the area. Unfortunately, none of the trade materials that are illustrated from these ¤ve sites is particularly diagnostic nor is it known 192 / Part Two. Archaeological and Historical Implications whether or not all of the trade goods are even English. Presumably, most of the sites are Upper Creek, but nothing really can be said as yet about their historic identi¤cation. If the small sample of published Upper Creek pottery truly represents the whole ceramic complex, then what can be said about the closeness of relationship between the pottery of the Upper Creeks and that of the Lower Creeks is less than would be expected on the basis of their common culture and language. Instead of sharing a common pottery with this common culture,the two divisions of the Creeks seem to have separable pottery traditions,which,although certainly closely related,are suf¤ciently different to require some explanation. The Upper Creek ceramic series is thought to have clear ties to the prehistoric pottery in its own area (Heimlich 1952:27) but shares with Ocmulgee Fields a lack of any known prehistoric ancestor for its brushed ware. If Upper Creek pottery is in fact an in situ development from indigenous Alabama precursors, then it is dif¤cult to consider other Creeks, of the same [302]culture and the same language, sharing for any length of time in what is a long tradition of complicated stamping within the entirely separate South Appalachian province, a tradition that seems to have gone much its own way for many centuries. It is important in this context, however, to note that besides brushing, the major shared traits in the pottery of the...

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