Excerpt from The Donnaha Site: 1973, 1975 Excavations

The Indians that created the Donnaha Site were living near the end of a year time period which began with the first entry of people into the Carolinas, and ended with the European destruction of the native cultures. Although remnants of the Piedmont's Indian people survived here and there, their traditional cultures were forever shattered during the 18th century. Except for the scanty travelers' accounts, and some evidence provided by linguistic traits and Indian oral history (mooney all information regarding those traditional cultures has been gathered by archeology. These archeological data are subject to varying interpretation, and some may disagree with details of the following account although not, I think, with the general historical framework it provides.

North Carolina's first known inhabitants probably arrived about b.c. They were few in number and shifted their camps often, but occasionally they left behind a distinctive stone spear point, the Clovis point. Clovis points occur across most of the United States and southern Canada, and down into Mesoamerica. In several places west of the Mississippi they are present in skeletons of now-extinct animals, especially elephant, but in the eastern u.s., including North Carolina, the points usually are found on the ground surface. In the West, Clovis points are found to date between and b.c. And because of the close similarity in form those of North Carolina likely date about this same time. We know very little about the Clovis cultures in North Carolina; they may also have hunted elephant or other Ice-age creatures, but we have no evidence.

By 8000 b.c. The last major glacier to advance on North America was in rapid retreat, and the plants and animals of North Carolina were assuming their present - day form and distribution. Descendants of the Clovis people changed their culture as well, producing a shorter, wider spear point called Hardaway (coe 1964z64). The Hardaway point initiates a long stage of cultural development in the North Carolina Piedmont, the Archaic stage, which lasted until about 500 b.c., later in some areas.' Most archeologists view the North Carolina Archaic as an 8000 year period of cultural stability, punctuated only by changes in spear point shapes, the addition or deletion of other tool forms, and subtle alterations of site location and site size. The diet was reliant on wild foods, although this is indicated more by site location than actual food remains. It now seems that some domesticated plants may have been grown during the final 2000 years (yarnell but these did not significantly alter the basic cultural pattern. There is evidence that the Archaic population of the North Carolina Piedmont was growing, however (ward 1983z66 - 69; Oliver 1981z26 and that trend may have considerable importance for understanding the end of the Archaic stage.

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