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9 Where Bartram Sat Historic Creek Indian Architecture in the Eighteenth Century Craig T. Sheldon Jr. Introduction In the last half of the eighteenth century, William Bartram, the noted naturalist from Philadelphia, traveled throughout the southern English colonies, observing and recording local flora, fauna, geography, and the culture of the indigenous Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and other Indian groups. He was impressed with the architecture of the indigenous groups, particularly their elaborate public structures. None of the structures or other parts of the built environment survived the humid southeastern climate or the Indian removal in the nineteenth century. For over 150 years, his accounts, together with those of James Adair, David Taitt, Benjamin Hawkins, Bernard Romans, Henry Timberlake, and other European visitors have been used by scholars in reconstructing eighteenth-century Southeastern Indian culture and architecture . Until recently, the accuracy of any particular architectural observations or descriptions could only be measured by comparison with similar contemporary accounts. Now, archaeological investigations of historic Indian sites in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee have added data that can correct and augment historic accounts. Hopefully, by combining subsurface dimensional and feature information from archaeology with the above-ground riches of historical descriptions, a fuller understanding of Southeastern historic Indian architecture will emerge.1 In this chapter, Bartram’s written descriptions and drawings of the structures and towns of the Creeks of central Alabama and Georgia are compared to structures and community features revealed in archaeological investigations of historical Indian sites in the Chattahoochee valley and the lower Tallapoosa and Coosa river valleys of central Alabama and Georgia.2 Many sites with historic Creek occupations have been recorded in this region, but few have been tested and still fewer have been excavated to the extent necessary to reveal 138 Sheldon architectural and community features. Investigations in the lower Tallapoosa and Coosa river valleys at Cussita and Yuchi (visited by Bartram in 1775) near Columbus, Georgia, and atTuckabatchee, Otassee (visited by Bartram in 1775– 1776), Hickory Ground, Hoithlewaulee, and Fusihatchee have produced copious data on indigenous and imported material, diet, architecture, and community plans (Figure 9.1).3 Presently, historic Creek architecture is exposed in archaeological excavations as patterns of postholes, sunken house floors, raised clay hearths, burned clay daub or wall plaster, borrow pits for clay, and subfloor pits and graves. Features on the floors of the houses, such as clay hearths, were destroyed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century plowing. For most of their structures, the Creeks relied upon an earthfast construction technique in which wall and support posts were erected in postholes spaced at intervals. Common structural elements in both domestic houses and large public structures were unhewn logs and saplings, often selected for convenient forks and natural shapes, split river cane woven between into wall sections, local red or yellow clays used for wall plaster and hearths, and large sections of bark used for roofs. Most historic Creek structures are best understood in terms of two crosscutting persistent architectural divisions: winter-summer and public-domestic. The existence of distinctive house types for summer or winter occupancy was first noted by Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth century. Archaeological investigations have uncovered large semisubterranean circular or rounded “winter ” houses adjacent to rectangular or “summer” houses at protohistoric Creek sites in Georgia and Alabama. By the end of the seventeenth century,“winter” style houses were no longer built, leaving only variations of the rectangular “summer” houses, which persisted as the year-round dwellings of the historic Creeks until removal in the 1830s. Public buildings and ceremonial areas at the center of each Creek town or talwa stood in contrast to the surrounding zone of domestic houses. Also built in “winter” and “summer” forms, the public structures were elaborations of the domestic houses. The large eighteenth-century winter council houses or “rotundas ,” so carefully described by Bartram at the Upper Creek town of Otassee , were enlarged versions of the former domestic “winter” structures. The four structures enclosing the ceremonial square grounds used during warmer months were modifications of the common rectangular “summer” houses.4 Bartram spent about twenty-four days in the territory of the Upper and Lower Creeks, traveling from near Augusta, Georgia, to Mobile in July 1775 and returning from Mobile to the Georgia coast in December 1775 and January 1776. Leaving the Savannah River near Augusta in June 1775, Bartram traveled with two companies of traders across central Georgia. By mid-July, they arrived at the Chattahoochee River and the beginning of occupied...

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