Town Creek Indian Mound

Figure 3. Pottery recovered from Town Creek Indian Mound. (Photograph by the author. More about the photograph)

The Town Creek Indian Mound has been one of the longest and most thoroughly investigated archeological sites in the state. Its owner, L. D. Frutchey, recognized it as a significant Indian construction in the early 1930s and showed the site to the head of the State Museum and an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Joffre Coe, who directed the initial excavations of the site in 1937.

Between 1937 and 1982, more than 500,000 pottery fragments were recovered from that site. Archeological analyses of this collection have shown pottery of three different types. The first, Badin ware, was made a few centuries BCE. It is not as old as South Carolina examples, which date to about 1000 BCE. Badin ware has an undecorated surface such as that shown in the upper left of Figure 3. The outside surfaces of later pots found at Town Creek began to be decorated by being rubbed with paddles that were wrapped with string or fabric to produce simple designs on the exterior surface, as will be shown in Figure 4.

Later styles became even more elaborate as wooden stamps were used to press designs into the surface. An example of this stamp-decorated ware is the sort shown in the pot on the upper right of Figure 3.

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