Active fieldwork in the middle Savannah River valley by Ken Sassaman ended in 1999 with work at Stallings Island, the namesake site for the Late Archaic culture that was the focus of his research for over a decade. Besides Stallings Island (9CB1), substantial excavations were conducted at the three other sites near Augusta, Georgia: Victor Mills (9CB138) in Columbia County, Georgia, and Ed Marshall (38ED5), and Mims Point (38ED9) in Edgefield County, Georgia. Fieldwork at Stallings Island was supported by the landowner and steward, the Archaeological Conservancy, and funded by the National Geographic Society; fieldwork at Mims Point was under permit and support of the U.S. Forest Service; Victor Mills and Ed Marshall were privately owned at the time of investigations. Institutional and financial support for all field expeditions came from the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina. Although fieldwork was structured by a research agenda to refine the history of Stallings Culture, all four sites were victims of looting and thus in need of salvage operations.
Fieldwork ended over three decades ago, but comprehensive technical reports have yet to be issued for any of these sites. Analysis of the vast artifact collections took place in the early 2000s, with NSF support. Samples of the vertebrate and invertebrate fauna have been identified, as have botanical remains. Trips to the Peabody Museum at Harvard to analyze the Claflin collection from Stallings Island added much data on bannerstones, bifaces, carinated vessels, worked bone and antler, and more. Added together, the volume of unpublished information is immense.
The time has come to get these reports out. The first to tackle is Victor Mills, a remarkable site on a Georgia bluff overlooking the Savannah River. In the summer of 2020, the collection from 1994 salvage excavations was pulled out of mothballs and reconciled with the existing catalog. Secondary analyses on pottery, soapstone slabs, and faunal remains were initiated. All plans and profiles were digitized and annotated. We obtained five more AMS dates to add to the two from the 1990s. The report is underway and scheduled for a late 2020 open-access release.
Victor Mills is rare for being a single component Early Stallings site. Dating ~4350-4100 cal B.P., the occupation at Victor Mills was not residential, at least not over the long term. A small shell midden on a slope attests to the collection of shell fish, fish, deer, and other resources. People obviously partook of food resources while there, but their main activity appears to have been the collecting, processing, and storing of mast resources, hickory nut in particular, and perhaps also acorns. An assemblage of large pits is complimented by abundant fire-cracked rock, perforated soapstone slabs, sherds of plain fiber-tempered basins for “stone boiling,” and an assemblage of ground and pecked stone, including large anvils. Charred hickory nutshell is ubiquitous, if not always abundant. Fall use of the site is indicated, but we imagine that stores made in the fall were likely tapped over the course of the winter and early spring. UF Ph.D. student Emily Bartz is taking up the problem of mast processing and storage for her dissertation project.
Next year (2021) we hope to tackle Mims Point, followed by Stallings Island (2022), Ed Marshall (2023), and finally a synthesis of the entire project (2024). In the meantime, various smaller projects continue, notably the Ceramic Social Geography project with Zack Gilmore, and refinement of Stallings chronology. The list of papers and books below include some of these more recent results, along with older works. A popular book on Stallings Culture (People of the Shoals) is now available as an open access pdf file.
Further Reading
- Sassaman, Kenneth E.
1993 Early Pottery in the Southeast: Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. - Sassaman, Kenneth E., and Asa R. Randall
2007 The Cultural History of Bannerstones in the Savannah River Valley. Southeastern Archaeology 26: 196-211. - Sassaman, Kenneth E., Meggan E. Blessing, and Asa R. Randall
2006 Stallings Island Revisited: New Observations on Occupational History, Community Patterning, and Subsistence Technology. American Antiquity 71:539-566. - Gilmore, Zackary I., Kenneth E. Sassaman, and Michael Glascock. 2018. Geochemical Sourcing of Fiber-Tempered Pottery and the Organization of Late Archaic Communities in the American Southeast. Journal of Archaeological Science 99:35-46.