Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836

Preface

The purpose of this book is to investigate the diversity of the people referred to as the Muskogee (Maskókî) Creek Indians who lived along the Lower Chattahoochee and Flint River watersheds of southeastern North America during the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries as revealed through archaeological remains. This investigation will synthesize all known archaeological research at Lower Muskogee Creek sites. The Muskogee Indians were and continue to be a diverse people. During the Historic Period (circa 1540–1836), they and other Indians of the southeastern United States had a profound in®uence on the development of that region. Our knowledge of those cultures is limited to what we can learn from their descendants and from archaeological and historical sources. This book is about what we can learn from archaeological data. This is the ¤rst published comprehensive archaeological summary of the Lower Creek Indians. While its intended audience is archaeologists, I expect that the readership will be more widespread than just professionals, and I hope that the synthesis described here is useful for a wider audience, including the modern descendants of the historic tribes that I discuss. Given the potential for a larger readership, I will brie®y discuss the limitations of the methods and perspectives used in this book. I have worked for many years to collaborate with the descendants of the people described here and know from their advice that I cannot hope to “summarize ” their past or culture (Mihesuah 1998; Wickman 1999:5–6). Since this book focuses on the realm of information that can be identi¤ed from archaeological data, I want to point out that the view of the Muskogee Creek Indians as revealed from those data is limited. Studying archaeological remains provides a biased view of the lives and cultural heritage of a group of people, and the results in this book are no exception. This book leaves out signi¤cant portions of culture because it is limited to what we can learn from the preserved Preface remains of behaviors. Archaeological data are limited to material remains. Consequently, archaeological knowledge is narrowly focused. For example, the review here does not cover the religious beliefs of the Indians or what kinds of traditional beliefs were held about life events. I don’t want to claim that it is impossible for archaeologists to deal with these subjects, but nonemperical subjects have not been traditionally the subject of archaeological inquiry. Therefore , there is little for me to say in this book, which is a synthesis of existing work. Archaeological data, however, have signi¤cant advantages over other types of data such as interviews, oral histories, and historic documents. Archaeological data are systematic and can be indiscriminately represented for large portions of the population. In other words, archaeological data can be relatively comprehensive and unbiased toward diverse sections of the society. For example, historic documents are biased, as they are written by individuals and represent the perspective, interpretation, and agenda of a single individual. Similarly , oral histories are told, remembered, and interpreted by individuals (Saunt 1999:31–34) and vary by clan and town (talwa) (Wickman 1999:61). The Muskogee Creek Indians have a rich tradition of oral histories, but I have not drawn signi¤cantly upon that source for this book because doing so would incorporate a new set of biases (Jackson 2003:30–32). Other researchers (Grantham 2002; Jackson 2003; Swanton 1928a, b; Wickman 1999) have addressed oral histories ; therefore, my focus is on what can be learned from archaeological data. Archaeological artifacts such as food remains may be preserved for all members of a given household. In this way archaeological data complement oral histories and historic documents. Archaeological data are unique in that they provide information about daily life that was not preserved in oral histories. Other than oral histories, archaeological data are, possibly, the only source of information that is directly from the people themselves. Archaeological remains are not necessarily biased by an “other” perspective (Mihesuah 1998; Watkins 2000; Wickman 1999); however, their interpretation may be biased. This book provides a synthesis of the archaeological perspective and is an attempt to describe the variation of that perspective over time and space. By quantifying the variation of the material culture over space and time, archaeologists will be able to better identify causes for change among the Indians. It is only after we understand the geographic and temporal variation that we can understand the causes of material change and adaptation through time and can distinguish the...