Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836

3. History of Archaeological Investigations

There has not been a major summary of the archaeology of post–Yamassee War (circa 1715) Lower Creek Indians since Huscher’s unpublished Lower Creek summary (1959). The archaeological classi¤cation of post–Yamassee War Indian sites is called the Lawson Field phase (Foster 2004d; Knight 1994b:189; Knight and Mistovich 1984; Schnell 1990, 1998; Willey and Sears 1952), which spans 1715–1836. The history of the de¤nition of that phase will be described in detail below. Recently John Worth provided the most thorough synthesis since Huscher, but his chapter was focused on early Creek settlements (pre1715 ) and particularly on ethnohistoric sources (Worth 2000:266). Marvin Smith (1992) and Chad Braley (1995) summarized the number of sites and history of excavation on Historic Indian sites of the Piedmont and Coastal Plain regions of Georgia for a cultural resources management synthesis for the Georgia Historic Preservation Of¤ce. The majority of recent archaeological work has been on post–Yamassee War sites as a result of cultural resource management in and around Columbus, Georgia, and Fort Benning, Georgia, and Alabama. Figure 3.1 shows the relative position of the Lower Creek region and the surveys that are discussed here. Since most Creek Indian settlement was along the major rivers, almost all of the Lower Creek Indian residential habitat has been surveyed . This summary will be a comprehensive description of the archaeological surveys of Lower Creek settlements occupied after the Yamassee War as currently described in published and unpublished reports. This chapter serves multiple purposes. A survey of the archaeological investigations places the investigations in context and helps to explain the historicaldevelopmentof theLawsonFieldphase,which is the archaeological manifestation of the Lower Creek Indians as it is currently de¤ned. This phase has become known as the archaeological signature of a group of people (Knight 1994b). As the phase is currently de¤ned, it represents multiple linguistic groups and vast economic and social changes as described in Chapter 1. I feel that it is timely to reassess the archaeological manifestation of the Lower Creek Indians 3 History of Archaeological Investigations Figure 3.1. Region of the Chattahoochee River showing the Walter F. George Reservoir, the Fort Benning Military Reservation, and the Oliver Basin archaeological surveys. from a direct historic approach since we know so much about the composition of the people and archaeological sites. In addition, there are a number of advances in our knowledge of the Maskókalkî owing to historic and archaeological research in the last few decades. We can begin to systematically address these hypotheses and ideas about culture change (Braund 1993; Ethridge 2003; Foster 2000b, 2003b, 2004d; Foster and Cohen 2005; Hahn 2004; Hudson and Tesser 1994; Knight 1994a, b; Piker 2004; Wickman 1999). Our current de¤nition of the Lawson Field phase is limited in its ability to distinguish linguistic variation, temporal changes, spatial variation, and known economic and social changes (Foster 2004d). We need to understand why we de¤ne the Lower Creek assemblages the way we do and to understand the utility of that archaeological phase. In other words, we need to measure the reliability and validity of the metric in order to use it effectively, where the metric is an archaeological assemblage identi¤ed as the Lawson Field phase. Another function of this chapter is to provide a synthesis of all known documentary and archaeological evidence for the location of the Lower Creek towns. This approach will serve to de¤ne the archaeological signature of the different towns since each town was politically and economically unique and should be studied as an independent entity (Hally 1971; Piker 2003, 2004). It will also help to identify patterns of migration and temporal changes within talwa populations. Ethnohistoric documents reference various towns by name, but we need to understand the relationship between the events in the ethnohistoric documents at a given time and the archaeological manifestation of the people at the town. The archaeological manifestation can sometimes represent single sites continuously occupied or multiple sites occupied in various degrees if the people migrated or the population changed. Understanding the causes of migration and population dispersal among the Southeastern Indians is important to a number of researchers (Anderson 1994; Blitz 1999; Foster 2001, 2003b, 2004d; Hally 1971; Williams and Shapiro 1990) because human population movement contributes to such a wide range of anthropological and ecological processes.In the second part of this chapter, I spend a signi...