LEARN NC

North Carolina History Digital Textbook Project

Two worlds: Prehistory, contact, and the Lost Colony

2.4 Peoples of the Piedmont

Adapted from Intrigue of the Past by the UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology, LEARN NC web edition, page 3.5.

Photograph of the Town Creek Indian Mound major temple.

At Town Creek Indian Mound, recreations of the town's original structures stand in the town center. The major temple, shown here, sits atop an earthen mound. (Photograph by David Walbert. More about the photograph)

In the years between 1000 and 1200 CE, Native life in the north and central Piedmont hadn’t changed much from prior Woodland times. People still lived in small hamlets whose houses strung out along river and stream banks. At times, the hamlets sat empty when people left to hunt and gather wild foods. But times were about to change. Around 900 CE, corn agriculture began. As a result, population began to grow, people began gathering in larger villages, and conflicts erupted.

The Hogue site

On a bend in the Eno River near present-day Hillsborough are the remains of a small hamlet that was occupied between 1000 and 1200 CE. Archaegologists call this site Hogue. From the remains, it seems that Hogue had only a few houses, and archaeologists aren’t sure how people built them. Dark stains (called postmolds or postholes) show where some of the structures’ wooden support posts decayed. But the traces don’t make clear house patterns. The best guess is that the Hogue homes were round.

Learning from garbage

Throughout the hamlet, people dug round pits, each about two feet deep. When first made, each pit was apparently used as an underground food cupboard. It was safe and hidden, not just from animals, but from any humans from outside the village who might poke about the hamlet when everyone was off on hunts and collecting trips.

However, as happens, pits eventually fell out of use. People then used them as receptacles for trash. They swept in litter from cooking hearths and sweepings from village and house floors. Archaeologists find pieces of broken pottery, animal bones, nut hulls, broken stone tools, charcoal from fires, and any odd stone caught up in the sweepings.

An ancient storage pit being excavated by archaeologists. The tray in the background contains deer bones, broken pottery, and other village

An ancient storage pit being excavated by archaeologists. The tray in the background contains deer bones, broken pottery, and other village “sweepings” found in the pit.

Enough maize kernels and sunflower seeds turn up in the trash that archaeologists think Hogue’s people were farmers. Probably, their fields weren’t big. The quantities of charred acorns and hickory nuts and remains of deer, squirrel, and rabbits that archaeologists found in the pits suggest people relied heavily on wild foods. Archaeologists call this blend of grown and wild foods for subsistence a mixed economy.

Dealing with death

Hogue gives archaeologists a glimpse at how Piedmont people living then dealt with death. Hogue’s cemetery was small. Eight people lay buried there in round or oval graves. Hogue villagers arranged each body for burial by drawing the person’s knees up to the chest. They put no offerings in the graves. But in some, large rocks were placed at the feet of the deceased. Why? Archaeologists don’t know.

Small hamlets like Hogue were sprinkled through the north-central Piedmont between AD 1000 and 1200. Most sat on ridges bordering the narrow floodplains of small rivers and streams. But a few exceptions, like Hogue, sat along major rivers. Because all these hamlets have only scant traces of houses, artifacts, or other hints of daily life, archaeologists think that few people lived in them. What’s more, people seemed to change village locations every few years.

The Wall site

Throughout the Mississippian period, many peoples of the central Piedmont continued to live in small hamlets like the one at Hogue. But in the northern Piedmont, by 1400, most peoples lived in compact villages. One village that archaeologists have found is the Wall site, located on the same bend in the Eno River as the Hogue site. It was occupied about 1600 CE.

Wall spread over more than an acre. Archaeologists have found remains of seven round houses, each about 25 feet in diameter. They have also found outlines of a couple of smaller buildings that may have been cribs or sheds for storing food. Wide, shallow pits are sprinkled among the houses and cribs. From the pits’ design and because they contain charcoal, ash, and remains of plant and animal matter used for food, we can guess that the pits were hearths used to prepare feasts for community ceremonies. Surrounding the entire village was a stockade, a wall made of upright posts. Whether people constructed it for protection from enemies or to keep animals from stealing food is unknown.

A compact village

Archaeological traces of a round house at the Wall site. Small stakes mark locations where posts once stood.

Archaeological traces of a round house at the Wall site. Small stakes mark locations where posts once stood.

About 100 to 150 people probably lived at Wall, and archaeologists think that they lived there for only twenty years. While they were there, they planted fields of corn, beans, and probably squash in the rich soil along the Eno River. They gathered the wild fruits and berries that rooted and grew in the areas they churned up around the plots. Seasonal supplies of acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts came from nearby forests. So, too, did their main source of meat, the white-tailed deer. Other small mammals, turtles, fish, wild turkeys, and passenger pigeons added variety. The trash they left behind provides evidence of all these foods.

In earlier Piedmont villages, people buried their dead in cemeteries, but at Wall, graves were placed within or just outside homes. People sealed the graves with timbers or large stones and made funeral offerings. They used shell beads to decorate burial garments; sometimes, they strung the beads and put them on the deceased as jewelry. They also put small clay pots of food in graves, perhaps to sustain the person’s journey to the other world. And because food remains are found in the dirt used to fill some graves, archaeologists think that feasting might have been part of their burial ceremony.

Wall villagers also had a distinct style of pottery. They decorated vessels with a design archaeologists call simple stamped. This design consists of a series of parallel lines running in one direction that people etched on a wooden paddle; the design was transferred on the wet clay by striking the paddle against it.

Other villages

Was Wall typical of Piedmont villages in 1600? In some ways it was typical. Across the Piedmont, people relied on agriculture as well as hunting and gathering for their food. Houses were all about the same size, and burial sites were all similar, suggesting that this society was fairly egalitarian — no one lived more grandly than anyone else.

In other ways, Wall was unique. Most Piedmont peoples still lived in smaller villages that were more spread-out and less fortified. But over time, Piedmont villages were becoming larger and more compact. Archaeologists can suggest two reasons for this change. First, as small villages grew and spread out, people found themselves living farther from the fields they farmed. Small family groups may have split off and formed compact villages near their fields. Second, as farming became more important, larger villages may have made agricultural work more efficient — people could better organize themselves. They may also have found safety in numbers.

Town Creek Indian Mound and Pee Dee culture

In one site in the southern Piedmont, something different appears. Town Creek Indian Mound, near Mt. Gilead in Montgomery County, is North Carolina’s most visible, and most visited, archaeological site. Framed by a backdrop of tall pines, a reconstructed stockade daubed with red clay surrounds grounds dominated by a flat-topped earthen mound—what archaeologists call a platform mound. A square, thatched building whose sides also glint with red clay sits on top of it. Steps carved in the mound’s eastern side lead to the building. Where they begin, a rectangular area once flanked by open-sided, covered buildings spreads out from the mound’s base. A tall pole is planted on one end, with a bear skull resting on top. Nearby sit two other clay-sided and thatched buildings.

Town Creek is reconstructed from archaeological evidence. It sits on the west bank of the Little River, upstream from where the river joins with Town Creek. A few miles downstream, the Little River flows into the Pee Dee, which itself becomes the Great Pee Dee River cutting south to empty into the Atlantic. With these river names, it’s no surprise archaeologists called the culture of the people who lived in that Montgomery County spot from 950 to 1500 CE the Pee Dee, and the site at which they gathered Town Creek.

Who built Town Creek?

Photograph of Town Creek Indian Mound burial house and major temple.

The burial house was a round, thatch-roof hut in which the Indians of Town Creek buried their dead. Photograph by David Walbert. About the photograph

The name Pee Dee sometimes causes confusion. The archaeological Pee Dee culture was named after the Great Pee Dee River. That river, in turn, was named after an Indian tribe that lived there in the Colonial period (and still lives in South Carolina today). Although they have the same name, the archaeological culture and the modern-day tribe are not the same. The modern Pee Dee may or may not be descendants of the people who lived at Town Creek.

Exactly who built Town Creek is something archaeologists have been trying to sort out since the mound was saved from plowing by archaeologist Joffre Coe in the 1930s. It’s an unsettled and sometimes controversial topic. Was it people or ideas moving in that sparked the Pee Dee culture? Some combination of the two? However the evidence finally answers the questions, archaeologists agree on one thing. The Pee Dee culture was a local version of the Mississippian tradition that shows up across the Southeast, from Georgia to eastern Oklahoma.

Central towns

Mississippian cultures included several traits found at Town Creek, including:

  • temples and civic buildings set atop earthen platform mounds
  • social and political hierarchies, with priests and chiefs
  • religious symbolism artistically represented in jewelry and ritual items
  • corn agriculture and a variety of ceremonies surrounding it

These kinds of binding habits tended to focus towns on ceremonial and political centers.

Town Creek was one such center. Apparently, Town Creek was the hub for a number of Pee Dee villages in the southern Piedmont. Some are distant. Many are accessible by water. One village, called the Payne site, is about 30 miles northeast of Town Creek. Others, which archaeologists call Leak and Teal, are in Richmond and Anson counties. From what they’ve learned through excavating the villages, some archaeologists think Pee Dee culture people built Town Creek after some of the towns had been established.

Pee Dee culture

urns in a display case

Large urns were used for burial after cremation. Photograph by Dirk Frankenberg. About the photograph

Right now, the best guess is that the Pee Dee culture surfaced in North Carolina around 950 CE. People first started making distinctive pottery, decorating vessels with a unique group of geometric stamped designs. Some were large urns used for burial — people of the Pee Dee culture cremated some adults and infants and put their ashes in the large clay urns.

The Pee Dee culture also had a distinctive architecture and intensive agriculture. Houses and public structures were rectangular, a shape that sets them apart from the round buildings used by other, contemporary Piedmont peoples. And, although they hunted, fished, and collected wild foods like everybody else, Pee Dee culture villagers were mainly farmers of corn.

Presumably, the Town Creek ceremonial center was built only after a large enough population had accepted and settled into Pee Dee culture life. Regularly, people from surrounding villages congregated there for ceremonies.

On a lighter note, people from different towns and clans may have played competitive games on the field near the mound’s base. Each summer, people celebrated the harvest of early corn. Called the Busk, the ceremony signaled hope for a winter of filled granaries; it was also a time of renewal when people swept out their homes to discard old clothes, pots, and foods.

A fading culture

By 1400 CE, Town Creek’s importance as a ritual and ceremonial center for the Pee Dee culture was fading. By 1600, Town Creek was a memory. During those 200 years, some habits held. Cremations and urn burials were still done. The large, fertile fields surrounding the old Pee Dee villages were still planted in corn, beans, and squash. The Pee Dee River gave up its harvest of fish and mussels and the forests its fruits, deer, and other game. But people stopped making rectangular houses, constructing instead oval-shaped buildings. And they quit building mounds.