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170 Cherokee Communities in Southern Appalachia collected during surface surveys and perhaps through conducting excavations at the smaller sites surrounding towns can archaeologists begin to identify how people living in rural areas interacted with people living close to town centers.83 These kinds of archaeological investigations should help determine the range of settlements and other activity areas within any given region. This kind of archaeological knowledge should help place major towns and their public architecture within the contextof the regional landscapes ofwhich they were part. As currently understood, native ceramics and colonial trade beads suggest that the town at Coweeta Creek dates to the seventeenth century and perhaps the very early eighteenth century. It does not date much earlier than the early seventeenth century, if at all. This means that it probably was built well after the mounds at Cowee and Nequassee had become prominent town centers or something akin to great towns. Perhaps the creation of this relatively new town reflects the movement ofpeople to the region from points further south, including refugees from towns along the Keowee and Tugalo rivers. How did native residents recognize boundaries between towns along the upper Little Tennessee River? Perhaps the towns centered at the Cowee and Nequassee mounds were more significant political centers than Coweeta Creek because of longer histories of settlement and mound building at these localities, but it is difficult to assess settlement hierarchies with currently available evidence and understanding of chronology in the region. Perhaps there were major centers along the Cullusaja and Ellijay rivers contemporary with the Coweeta Creek town, but survey collections from these areas are still unanalyzed. Some excavations have been done at the Dillard mound in northern Georgia,84 and this mound seems to date primarily to the century before the tenure of the town center at Coweeta Creek. Considerable excavations have been conducted at the Macon County Industrial Park site in the upper Little Tennessee Valley ,85 and this settlement is roughly seven miles northwest of Coweeta Creek. These sites and survey collections hold valuable clues about how people were spread across the cultural landscape in the upper Little Tennessee Valley at different points in the past. Archaeologists know much about the regional and even continental geopolitics in which native groups in southern Appalachia became enmeshed as early as the late sixteenth century. Meanwhile, archaeolo- Christopher B. Rodning 171 gists have learned much about social dynamics within individual towns.86 However, archaeologists know less about what the cultural landscape between towns looked like.87 Spatial patterns in archaeological evidence from areas around and between towns in southern Appalachia are significant sources of evidence about the composition of individual polities and interactions between them. SOCIAL DYNAMICS IN CHEROKEE COMMUNITIES Compared to earlier Mississippian chiefdoms, historic Cherokee polities seem to have been relatively egalitarian. Hereditary rank distinctions were not communicated through elaborate mortuary ritual as they were in some Mississippian chiefdoms, especially before the fourteenth century.88 Whereas earlier pyramidal mounds created platforms for architecture accessible only to elite echelons of Mississippian societies, communal council houses of the eighteenth century were much less exclusive architectural spaces.89 1would argue that egalitarianism prevailed within Cherokee towns of the eighteenth century as a result of continuous negotiations between leaders with power in different social domains. I would suggest further that native community formation in southern Appalachia took place at different social and spatial scales. Residents of Cherokee towns could claim descent from earlier residents of mountain ranges and valleys in the greater southern Appalachians . Although their traditional language is indeed related to that of northern Iroquois groups of the seventeenth century, their material culture and traditional lifeways nevertheless resemble those of earlier groups in the Southeast in many respects. Ceramics by historic Cherokee potters are part of a long tradition known to archaeologists as Lamar, and architectural forms present at Cherokee towns have antecedents at earlier settlements in the southern Appalachians. People in Cherokee towns probably traced their own ancestry from many different areas in southern Appalachia. Nevertheless the specific label of several groups of towns as Cherokee originated at the point when the deerskin trade and the global economic forces driving it reached remote areas of southern Appalachia. People living in Cherokee towns were culturally related to but independent of other towns and groups of towns clustered along major rivers in the southern Appalachians. Town leaders were spokespersons for residents of their towns, but that authority did not spread to other Cherokee [3.147.42.168] Project...

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