Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2022 - 62

LETTER FROM GEORGIA
(continued from page 60)
If the River Glen piled-stone features
contained human remains, this
would have important consequences.
Under Georgia law, sites with buried
human remains cannot be developed.
Were Loubser and his team to determine
that the mounds contained
Native American graves, the site
would be protected.
Over the course of their three
field seasons, Loubser and his team
excavated sections of seven of the
piles. They found that they were all
built above deliberately dug shallow
depressions. They also found no traces
of a plow zone, or soil disturbed by
agriculture, near the mounds. Logan
was able to locate a 1944 aerial photograph
of the site that showed there
were cotton fields in the area, but
that a large stand of hardwood trees
covered the hill where the mounds
are located. " We showed pretty definitely
that they were not made by
farm clearing, " says Loubser. " I think
the farmers avoided the area precisely
because removing the stone piles
would have been labor intensive. "
When the team excavated in the
center of the largest raptor-shaped
pile, they uncovered 61 fragments of
human long bones. Immediately below
A thirteenth-century copper plate
made by members of the Mississippian
culture depicts a man dressed in bird
regalia. Birds played a special role in
Mississippian religious practices.
the bones, they unearthed stone
tools and a Wolfskin-phase bowl
fragment. Similar artifacts have
been found in Wolfskin-phase
burial caches in natural rock outcrops.
Such caches contain fragmented
human remains, miniature
funerary pots, and clay pipes decorated
with intricate birds' heads.
The evidence the team discovered
meant that the River Glen
piled-stone features constitute a
cemetery under Georgia law, and
plans to build houses on the site
were put on hold. Logan recalls
a conversation he had with
one of the contractors working on
the development who operated heavy
excavation equipment. " I showed him
some of the stones and explained their
significance, " says Logan. " He told me,
'I bulldoze and destroy stone piles like
that all the time.' "
N
ow protected, the River Glen
stone piles join a growing body
of sites in northern Georgia
that are transforming how scholars
think about the history of the people
Mississippian shell ornaments depict (left) a raptor in combat with a feline figure and
(right) a medicine person in the act of flying during an out-of-body experience.
62
who lived here after Spanish explorer
Hernando de Soto made his way
through the region between 1539
and 1543. The archaeological record
shows that after the introduction
of European diseases led to social
instability and increased warfare,
Mississippian people moved into
increasingly smaller settlements and
individual farmsteads. Scholars have
assumed the population also collapsed
around this time. " We've always
thought that this period marked an
abrupt end of Mississippian lifeways
and elaborate ceremonialism, " says
Loubser. But beginning in the 1990s,
researchers noted that in northern
Georgia, the population during the
Lamar period actually grew, perhaps
in part because people were migrating
into the area. Five Lamar farmsteads
that have been identified within a few
minutes' walk of the River Glen site
are just some of the hundreds of such
sites that have been located across the
counties of northwestern Georgia.
Very few European artifacts have
been discovered at these farmsteads,
suggesting local people may have been
h
ARCHAEOLOGY * July/August 2022
Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2022

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