I would really like to confirm the time frames for corn and bean culture. Bronze Age communication was in full swing as early as 4500 years ago. That is when copper mining began in Lake superior by the nascent Atlantean culture. Those same miners explored every river basin in reach to the level of maximin possible access in search of copper resources and did this on a global scale. They had to establish agricultural centers in cooperation with local peoples and that meant local agriculture at the least however restricted.
Corn and bean culture was an obvious addition and all sites need to be checked for corn pollen. Thus with this level of need ,i do question just how carefully anyone has actually checked. That it may have been used to support the miners does not suggest the local hunter gatherers suddenly adopted the technology. In most cases they did not, not those already conducting a form of settled agriculture would have quickly adopted the new culture with little encouragement.
It was adopted to amazonian conditions concurrently as well.
Otherwise we discover separate tribal traditions living cheek and jowl and that certainly suggests a working confederacy quite able to deal with natural disputes fairly. It also suggests a plausible mineral export market of blue dye stone been in place from the beginning supporting the need for a large local work force.
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Creek Confederacy mirrored tradition going back at least 2000 years
During
the past three years, People Of One Fire readers have been introduced
to indigenous provinces around the Lower Southeast that were very
different than those in the Mississippi River Basin. Some cultures
have been completely missed by contemporary anthropologists. The
pioneering work of Arthur Kelly on the Ocmulgee and Chattahoochee
Rivers, Antonio Waring around Savannah and Robert Wauchope in North
Georgia identified clusters of similar-sized communities along rivers,
which were two to seven miles long. The entire 40 mile length of the
Apalachee River in NE Georgia appears to have been urbanized. These
provinces couldn’t possibly match the popular concept in anthropology
today of “chiefdoms” and “paramount chiefdoms”.
These
provinces were conurbations composed of semi-autonomous “urban
villages.” It is very clear that around Savannah, along the Oconee
River in Northeast Georgia, in the Nacoochee Valley, on the
Chattahoochee River and along the Little Tennessee River, they were
composed of multiple ethnic groups living in harmony together. They did
not consist of a single, large fortified town surrounded by a few
hamlets. Only Etowah Mounds appears to match this description.
It
is highly questionable, if the term “Mississippian” should even be
applied to the indigenous cultures of Eastern Alabama, Florida, Georgia,
the Carolinas and Eastern Tennessee.
Notes: POOF
takes a brief break from its canoe trip down the Chattahoochee River to
explain the the Lost World discovered by archaeologists Robert Wauchope
and Arthur Kelly. The People of One Fire or “Creek Confederacy” was
composed of multiple ethnic groups that spoke several languages and
organized themselves democratically into a regional political
organization. It was NOT a “paramount chiefdom.”
Savannah Area
In
the late 20th century, archaeologist Antonio Waring identified a
cluster of Deptford Culture mounds in Metropolitan Savannah that were in
walking distance of each other. They were the oldest manifestations of
the Deptford Culture and dated at least to around 800 BC or possibly as
early as 1200 BC. Villages were associated with most of these
mounds. None seemed to be particularly larger than the other. Several
of the mounds contained upper strata containing entirely different
pottery styles.
In 2015, using linguistic analysis, I determined
that the place names around Metropolitan Savannah and nearby Port Royal
Sound, SC came from many parts of the Americas. Tybee Island had an
Itza Maya name (Taube = Salt) but nearby were villages with Uchee,
Muskogean, Panoan (Eastern Peru), Tupi (Amazon) and Southern Arawak
(Amazon) place names. North and south of Savannah, South American place
names predominated.
Ocmulgee National Monument
During
the 1930s, the team working under Arthur Kelly’s supervision found
numerous, closely spaced village sites along a 38 mile long corridor of
the Ocmulgee River. Within these villages, which were often
contemporary, were several distinct styles of residential architecture
and pottery.
The earliest houses on the Macon Plateau were like
those built by Southern Arawaks in the Northern Andes, Colombia and
Venezuela. Yet on Browns Mount, people made owl motif pottery typical
of the Toa River Valley in Cuba and around 990 AD, a people making
“Etowah I” pottery and living in Itza Maya style houses, settled almost
simultaneously at Ichesi (two miles south of the Ocmulgee Acropolis) and
on the Etowah River (Etowah Mounds). Unfortunately, radiocarbon
dating was not available to Kelly so at the time of their excavation,
he did not realize that the distinctly different architecture and
pottery were contemporary.
Robert Wauchope in North Georgia
In
1939, Robert Wauchope was astonished to find that the villages in the
Nacoochee Valley of Northeast Georgia were literally in eyesight of each
other, yet many of them were ancient occupation sites that began as
hamlets making Deptford pottery. However, by the Late Woodland Period
(600-900 AD) there were contemporary villages separated by anywhere
from 100 yards to 1/4 mile, which had different architecture and even
made different styles of pottery. Large mounds were being built by
then.
The best example can be seen above around the Late Woodland
Period villages near the Kenimer Mound. They had completely different
architectural traditions . . . one of them being the oldest know
example of Chickasaw architecture.
Wauchope had only a brief time
available to study the Chattahoochee River Corridor in Metro Atlanta,
but found an identical situation there – densely concentrated villages
that were occupied over at least a 2000 year period. The construction
of platform mounds began during the Deptford Cultural Period, not
“Mississippian”. The lowest levels of many villages contained
Deptford potsherds, but upper levels contained examples of all the
pottery styles later produced in North Georgia.
The arrival of agriculture
The
current orthodoxy in North American anthropology is that large scale
agriculture and concentrations of population did not occur in the
Southeast until the arrival of corn and beans from Mesoamerica and South
America. It is now known that most of the types of squash, grown in
the Southeast, trace their ancestry to an indigenous wild squash.
After
examining the evidence available to him in 1969, Dr. Arthur Kelly
theorized that agriculture came much, much earlier to the Southeast than
the arrival of corn. He was bitterly attacked for this theory by his
peers. This was one of the primary reasons that he lost his job at the
University of Georgia.
The density of Woodland Period villages
around Savannah can be explained by the abundance of seafood. The even
more dense concentration of Woodland Period village sites in the Upper
and Middle Chattahoochee Valley, found by Robert Wauchope is a different
situation. These dense concentrations thrived over many centuries,
plus built modest mounds. There is no way that so many people, living
so close together could have survived that long, purely on hunting and
gathering in the terrain of North Georgia. The wild game populations
would have been exterminated for long distances in all directions. The
only explanation is exactly as Dr. Kelly stated.
Therefore,
it is quite obvious that both the terms “Woodland” and “Mississippian”
are not applicable at all to describe the ancestors of the Uchees,
Alabamas, Chickasaws and Creeks. It is also obvious that the “Creek
Confederacy” was merely the most recent manifestation of an ancient
concept.
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