Swenson 2016 American Antiquity Review (original) (raw)

Mounds, Myths, and Cherokee Townhouses in Southwestern North Carolina

American Antiquity, 2009

This paper explores the role of public architecture in anchoring Cherokee communities to particular points within the southern Appalachian landscape in the wake of European contact in North America. Documentary evidence about Cherokee public structures known as townhouses demonstrates that they were settings for a variety of events related to public life in Cherokee towns, and that there were a variety of symbolic meanings associated with them. Archaeological evidence of Cherokee townhouses—especially the sequence of six townhouses at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina—demonstrates an emphasis on continuity in the placement and alignment of public architecture through time. Building and rebuilding these public structures in place, and the placement of burials within these architectural spaces, created enduring attachments between Cherokee towns and the places in which they lived, in the midst of the geopolitical instability created by European contact in eastern North America.

(2015) Revisiting Platform Mounds and Townhouses in the Cherokee Heartland: A Collaborative Approach

2015

This article describes the development and initial results of the Western North Carolina Mounds and Towns Project, a collaborative endeavor initiated by the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research Program at the University of Georgia. The goal of this project is to generate new information about the distribution of late prehistoric mounds and historic period townhouses in western North Carolina. This ongoing research has produced updated location and chronological data for 15 Mississippian period mounds and historic Cherokee townhouses, and led to the discovery of a possible location for the Jasper Allen mound. Using these new data, I suggest that David Hally's model for the territorial size of Mississippian polities provides a useful framework for generating new research questions about social and political change in western North Carolina. I also posit that the cultural practice of rebuilding townhouses in place and on top of Mississippian period platform mounds, a process that Christopher Rodning describes as “emplacement,” was common across western North Carolina. In terms of broader impacts, this project contributes positively to the development of indigenous archaeology in the Cherokee heartland.

Revisiting Coweeta Creek: Reconstructing Ancient Cherokee Lifeways in Southwestern North Carolina

Southeastern Archaeology, 2002

This review of the history of fieldwork at the Coweeta Creek site (31MA34) in southwestern North Carolina sets the stage for the case studies that follow. The Coweeta Creek site, a mound and associated village in the upper Little Tennessee Valley, was excavated from 1965 to 1971 by the Research Laboratories of Anthropology (RLA) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the Cherokee Archaeological Project. The primary goal of this broader regional project by the RLA was to reconstruct the origins and development of Cherokee culture in the Appalachian Summit province of western North Carolina. Case studies included in this collection concentrate on select aspects of the archaeological record from Coweeta Creek to explore native lifeways at this ancient Cherokee town.

Reconstructing the Coalescence of Cherokee Communities in Southern Appalachia

The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 2002

This paper outlines major historical developments connecting prehistoric Cherokee settlements and societies with those present when Spanish expeditions traversed the southern Appalachians during the 1500s, and with the groups of Cherokee towns present during interactions with English and French colonists during the 1700s. Public structures known as townhouses, and public plazas adjacent to them, were critical architectural spaces to these developments, because they were settings for the events during which Cherokee households created and renewed shared identities as Cherokee towns and communities.

A Local Analysis of Early-Eighteenth-Century Cherokee Settlement

Social Science History, 2007

Results of an original analysis of Cherokee town placement and population c. 1721 are presented. Period and contemporary information were analyzed using local statistics to produce multivalued, mappable characterizations of the intensity of the processes of town placement and population. The analysis focuses on the scale and the space in which these processes took place among the Cherokee in order to open the way for examining the legacy of human-induced environmental change in southern Appalachia.

Cherokee Ethnogenesis in Southwestern North Carolina

2013

Dozens of Cherokee towns dotted the river valleys of the Appalachian Summit province in southwestern North Carolina during the eighteenth century (Dickens 1967, 1978, 1979; Perdue 1998; Persico 1979; Shumate et al. 2005; Smith 1979). What developments led to the formation of these Cherokee towns? Of course, native people had been living in the Appalachian Summit for thousands of years, through the Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippi periods (Dickens 1976; Keel 1976; Purrington 1983; Ward and Davis 1999). What are the archaeological correlates of Cherokee culture, when are they visible archaeologically, and what can archaeology contribute to knowledge of the origins and development of Cherokee culture in southwestern North Carolina? Archaeologists, myself included, have often focused on the characteristics of pottery and other artifacts as clues about the development of Cherokee culture, which is a valid approach, but not the only approach (Dickens 1978, 1979, 1986; Hally 1986; Riggs and Rodning 2002; Rodning 2008; Schroedl 1986a; Wilson and Rodning 2002). In this paper (see also Rodning 2009a, 2010a, 2011b), I focus on the development of Cherokee towns and townhouses. Given the significance of towns and town affiliations to Cherokee identity and landscape during the 1700s (Boulware 2011; Chambers 2010; Smith 1979), I suggest that tracing the development of towns and townhouses helps us understand Cherokee ethnogenesis, more generally.

Cherokee Townhouses: Architectural Adaptation to European Contact in the Southern Appalachians

Public structures known as townhouses were hubs of public life in Cherokee towns in the southern Appalachians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D., and in towns predating European contact. Townhouses were sources of cultural stability and conservatism during periods of dramatic change, and they were an architectural medium through which Cherokee towns adapted to life in the postcontact Southeast. This article summarizes the characteristics of townhouses in the southern Appalachians dating from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries A.D., focusing on size and shape, the surfaces on which they were built, sequences of building and rebuilding, and the presence or absence of burials inside townhouses. The architectural form of townhouses rooted people to particular places, but Cherokee townhouses also enabled towns to move from one place to another, because a town could build a townhouse at any particular place, old or new.

Domestic Houses at Coweeta Creek

Southeastern Archaeology, 2009

This paper compares and contrasts the rebuilding sequences of late prehistoric and protohistoric Cherokee structures at the Coweeta Creek site in the upper Little Tennessee Valley of southwestern North Carolina. Several domestic structures dating to the 1600s were built and rebuilt in place, as was the public structure (or townhouse), whose six successive stages span the period from the mid-to-late 1600s to the very early 1700s. By contrast, domestic structures dating to the fifteenth century demonstrate a less compact and less formalized settlement plan. The formally planned town at Coweeta Creek—comprising the townhouse, town plaza, and domestic houses—postdates early European contact in the southern Appalachians, and this paper argues that the formal settlement plan at Coweeta Creek created a sense of place that emphasized permanence in the midst of the destabilizing effects of European contact on native peoples of the Southeast.