Ancient bronze pot found 15 feet under the Nacoochee Valley

What this strongly suggests is that these mines were also worked during the Bronze Age along with Lake superior and any number of other Copper deposits in both North And south America.  We have had such confirmation elsewhere so this is no surprise.  It will still be hard to prove.

What we do have is a trade anchor at New Potosi for the Atlantean Great Circle route and the Inca Mayan Cuba Florida Trade System or the Caribbean Great Circle route as well.

What can now be mapped out is an extensive SE American civilization lacking centralization, yet carrying out extensive commercial activities for thousands of years... .

Ancient bronze pot found 15 feet under the Nacoochee Valley

Posted by Richard Thornton | Dec 20, 2017 | Appalachian Mountains, Archaeology, Chattahoochee River, Mysteries, Spanish History | 2 |

https://peopleofonefire.com/ancient-bronze-pot-found-15-feet-under-the-nacoochee-valley.html


We have discovered the location of a Spanish mining village near Dahlonega! It was first mentioned by U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun.

For the past five years, the People of One Fire has repeatedly pleaded for some government agency or private foundation to sponsor a comprehensive, long term archaeological study of the Nacoochee Valley in Northeast Georgia. We are convinced that it will change the history of North America. Operating with a skeleton Works Progress Administration (WPA) budget in 1939, archaeologist Robert Wauchope found substantial evidence of a continuous human occupation of the Nacoochee Valley from the Ice Age to the present. What is particularly interesting were the chain of village sites on the Chattahoochee and Soque Rivers, which were occupied almost continuously from at least 1000 BC to around 1696 . . . the year of a catastrophic smallpox plague.

Another research question that has been generally ignored by institutions and governmental agencies is the presence of many thousand Sephardic Jewish and Iberian descendants in North Georgia, Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. My article about a former Cherokee princess, now a Sephardic princess, coming up to me at the Dahlonega Walmart cheese counter has garnered 73, 732 readers! You can read that article again at: A Sephardic Princess in Dahlonega, Georgia

People of One Fire founding member, Michael Jacobs, always sends me the coolest Christmas presents. One year he sent me eyewitness accounts of the Track Rock Terrace Complex by Spanish traders (The Cherokees were not even mentioned). Another year, he sent me a letter written by Edward Graeves, a director of the Melilot Colony in Northeast Georgia . . . written on January 6, 1660. Last night came another Christmastide historical bombshell.

 


It was an official government map of the mineral deposits of the Southern Appalachians, published in 1833. First all, it contains the most accurate description of the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation at that time. Note that in 1828 . . . prior to the public announcement of gold deposits . . . Georgia persuaded the Cherokees to sell most of their territory, which contained gold deposits. The Creeks had already been pressured into selling the section of the Georgia Gold Belt in their territory in 1827. The Cherokee gold belt had been thinly populated by long time Creek and Uchee residents, under the recent domain of the Cherokees, so Cherokee leaders thought it no great loss . . . until the gold deposits were announced.

What immediately caught my eye, though, was the drawing of a bronze tripod flagon in the lower center section of the map. A flagon was used by ancient chemists to heat substances until they separated into heavier and lighter liquid components. The spout was mounted so the heavier component could be poured off. A quick Google Image Search revealed that the artifact that most closely matched the form of the flagon found in the Nacoochee Valley dated from the Middle Bronze Age and was unearthed in Cyprus . . . an island in the eastern Mediterranean noted for its copper, gold and iron deposits since 4,000 BC.

This flagon could have been used by 16th and 17th century miners in the Nacoochee Valley. However, its 15 feet depth at the time of discovery suggests that it was dropped at that location many centuries before then.
Michael Jacobs was Historic Preservation Planner for the Southeast Georgia Regional Commission, when he helped create the People of One Fire. He is now Senior Regional Planner at the South Georgia Regional Commission, so he does not have time to write articles for us anymore. However, his contributions to the increase in knowledge about the Southeast’s past are extraordinary. All his research is done in his minimal spare time. It is my hope that some day, he gets credit for those discoveries.





The long lost 16th/17th century Spanish village was near Dahlonega on the Chestatee River, not on the Chattahoochee River in the Nacoochee Valley.

Nuevo Potosi

A smaller detail on this map eventually caught my attention. The only community in the Northeast Georgia Mountains was named New Potosi. Now that is NOT a name that Anglo-Americans would have named a town in the 1700s and early 1800s. In fact, it is definite that by 1833, Anglo-American gold miners had established the village of Auraria, a couple of miles west of New Potosi. A few miles to the northeast, the country seat of Dahlonega had been founded. New Potosi or Potosi does not appear on any 18th or 19th century official map of Georgia. Dahlonega and Auraria do appear . . . and still do.

The name is highly significant. Silver mines at Potosi, Bolivia supplied most of the silver bullion, which funded the Spanish Empire until the 1820s, when Bolivia won independence. In 1592, gold and silver deposits were discovered in northeastern Mexico. The region soon became known as San Luis Potosi . . . to give it the image of another mining boom town.

Conversos and Cryptic Sephardic Jews with a background in mining and slave trading flocked to San Luis Potosi in 1610, when the Spanish Inquisition showed up without warning in Cartagena, Colombia. Cartagena was one of three cities in Spanish American colonies, where slave trading was allowed. Several Sephardic families in northern Mexico became wealthy from sponsoring raids into what is now the United States to acquire indigenous slaves to work in the San Luis Potosi mines.

The Cryptic Jews thought that San Luis Potosi was so remote from the Inquisition in Mexico City that they would be not be persecuted. However, the Inquisition got word of a large population of Jews in the north and so many Sephardim were forced to flee again . . . either to New Mexico or to parts unknown. Several prominent accused Cryptic Jews were captured in northern Mexico then burned at the stake in Mexico City. The religious ceremonies that accompanied these excruciatingly torturous executions were no different in context than the Aztecs’ human sacrifices.


The woman, who came up to me at the Walmart cheese counter stated that her family had lived in the Dahlonega area BEFORE the arrival of Anglo-American gold miners in the late 1820s. Therefore, they assumed that their ancestors were Cherokees. I told her that his assumption was not valid. All the Native American place names around Dahlonega are Creek, not Cherokee.

We now know that when the Cherokee Tribe was given North Central and Northwest Georgia in 1785, it was definitely occupied by an independent alliance of 12 villages, whose occupants were Creeks, Uchees and Panoan immigrants from the Georgia Coast. They called themselves the Elate or Elasi, which means “Foothill People in Itsate-Creek. Since the Cherokees were not particularly interested in the remote, mountain lands, the original inhabitants were allowed to remain, but had virtually no political say-so in the Cherokee tribal government.

However, there was another problem. The lovely lady had paid for DNA tests from three commercial labs. All three said that she had NO Native American DNA, but very high levels of Semitic, Iberian, North African and Middle Eastern DNA. In fact, she had just as much Semitic DNA in her as a friend from high school in Dahlonega, whose family were indigenous Christians from Nazareth in Israel. Indigenous Israeli Christians typically are far more “Jewish” than European Jews. The Cherokee princess from Dahlonega was a Sephardic Jewish Princess.

Now this all makes sense

In 1828, employees of South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun’s gold mining operations in Georgia stumbled into the ruins of a 16th or 17th Spanish gold mining village. They found many iron mining tools, plus a Spanish cigar mold. Evidently, the miners were growing tobacco too.

Pioneer Southeastern archaeologist, Charles C. Jones, Jr, reported the discovery in his 1873 book on the Southeastern Indians. He placed the Spanish mining village in the western end of the Nacoochee Valley on Dukes Creek. However, in doing background research for the article on New Potosi, I discovered something that most people don’t seem to know. Calhoun’s tract of gold mining land was not in the Nacoochee Valley, but along Cane Creek and the Chestatee River near Dahlonega! This location is about 24 miles west of the Nacoochee Valley. Calhoun either owned the land where New Potosi was located or else his tract was immediately across the river from it. The descriptions of his employees’ discoveries and the family heritage of “Our Lady of the Dahlonega Walmart Cheese Counter” all make sense now.

Nevertheless, there are eyewitness accounts of large numbers of Spanish-speaking gold miners being in the Nacoochee Valley as late as 1693. South Carolina Royal Governor James Moore saw them. Hundreds, if not thousands of 16th and 17th century European artifacts have been found in the Nacoochee Valley. In contrast, outside of Parris Island, SC relatively few have been found in the Carolinas and eastern Tennessee. While the national media raved about some European artifacts being found inside the wall footprints of a single building in Burke County, NC, the discoveries in the Nacoochee Valley were in a seven mile long corridor.

Then there is the Acosta Trail, which connected St. Augustine with the Apalache Kingdom and the Georgia Mountains. In this situation, it seems not to have been named after a person, but rather from the original meaning of the Spanish word, acosta. It means “away from the coast.” At the site of Nuevo Potosi is the Achasta Golf Club Community. The promoters said that it was named after a Cherokee town at the site. However, no such name appears on any list of Cherokee villages. There are a couple maps from the early 1800s that label the Acosta Trail as being the “Achasta Trail.”

So . . . Georgians have known about the Spanish colonists in the mountains for almost two centuries. Despite this, historians have ignored the existence of early Spanish colonies in the mountains and so don’t mention them in any state history textbooks.

The good news is that (apparently) the site of Nueva Potosi is mostly under a golf course, publicly owned land or undeveloped land. The archaeological zone is located northwest of the termination of the GA 400 expressway and along US 19 Hwy. The Chestatee River Flood Plain, next to US 19, is used to provide access for canoeists, kayakers and inflated rafts. This is an archaeological zone in which archaeologists could easily work incrementally in order to unravel a concealed past.