EXCAVATIONS AT THE AMITY SITE: FINAL REPORT

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSIONS

[Page 72] The 1985-1986 field seasons at Amity determined that Amity was a palisaded village of longhouses dating to the Post-contact period. These three traits -- palisade, longhouses and Post-contact period artifacts -- combined with the site’s location between Lake Mattamuskeet and the Pamlico Sound were considered necessary but not sufficient conditions for equating the site with Pomeiooc. After such a promising start, the 1988 - 1989 field seasons have been very much a protracted anti-climax. While no "smoking gun" was found to incontrovertibly assign the site to either the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the weight of evidence has shifted away from the Pomeiooc hypothesis. The failure to find further longhouse patterns or other evidence of a substantial town, acquisition of radiocarbon dates which recalibrate most convincingly to the AD 1640 to AD 1670 period, and the accumulated pattern of trade goods all indicate the Amity site to be smaller and more recent than Pomeiooc.

After excavation and recording of nearly an additional 800 square meters (8600 sq. ft.) in 1988-1989, the Amity Site remains a two or perhaps three house hamlet or farmstead. An additional five meters of palisade were revealed, but curved in such a manner as to define an enclosed circular area insufficient to include even the two known houses, much less the 18 depicted by John White. Admittedly absence of proof is not proof of absence, but this pattern of site structure alone seems sufficient reason to reject the Amity Site as the archaeological manifestation of Pomeiooc.

The radiocarbon dating of the Amity Site has been difficult. Five dates ranging from AD 1320 to AD 1790 are available. Disregarding the earliest and latest dates and calibrating the remaining two isotopically corrected dates, indicates AD 1640 to AD 1670, rather than AD 1585, as the most likely time of site occupation.

Furthermore, the artifact assemblage of the Amity Site diverges from that expected of Pomeiooc. In general the overall quantity of artifacts seems inadequate for a town of 18 houses and a presumed population of 150 people or more. In addition, the artifacts recovered from Amity seem more characteristic of the seventeenth century than of the late sixteenth. Tellingly, the excavations produced no jetons, necklace beads or small metal tools, the trade goods that seem most likely to have been distributed by the Fort Raleigh colonists.

The aboriginal pottery recovered from the Amity Site, Colington Simple-stamped, is at this time only broadly temporally diagnostic. It was certainly in use both during the seventeenth century (Egloft and Potter 1982) and the Fort Raleigh period (Harrington 1962) and apparently earlier as well, judging by the evidence from the Riding Ring site (Painter 1981).

Rouletted smoking pipes such as those recovered from Amity are at this time well-dated to the mid- to late seventeenth century (see above Chapter 4). They could perhaps be earlier, as late sixteenth - early seventeenth century aboriginal sites are as yet unreported from the Chesapeake Bay area (Keith Egloft, personal communication 1989). Significantly, the one smoking pipe recovered from Fort Raleigh is not of this type (Harrington 1962).

[Page 73] The trade goods found at the Amity Site make a tidy mid-seventeenth century assemblage. The trade bead types from Amity individually span the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but as an associated assemblage they have only one reported parallel, that of New England circa AD 1650 to AD 1675 (Bradley 1983). The glass projectile points seem to be made of square-sectioned bottles that date AD 1625 to AD 1675 (Noel Hume 1970; McCary 1962). This fits with the documentary evidence from Virginia of a seventeenth century trade in bottles to the Indians (Mcllwaine 1924:165). The kaolin pipe fragments include specimens with bore diameters characteristic of the seventeenth century. As these occur without accompanying Euro-American ceramics, it seems most reasonable to conclude they reached the site as trade goods. Calculation of a Binford formula date, admittedly suspect due to a small sample size, yields a date of AD 1661. This closely approximates the dates generated by calibrated radiocarbon dating.

In summary the Amity Site does not possess the archaeological signature of a large sixteenth century town such as Pomeiooc. Rather it appears to be quite small occupation of only about two or three houses. Its population size was probably on the order of 10 to 40 people. Given the sparse recovery of artifacts and the absence of botanical indicators of a summer occupation, it seems possible that the Amity Site was a seasonally abandoned farmstead. As such, the site would have been occupied in the late spring to plant corn and harvest spring-ripening grasses, and then abandoned until fall when it was re-occupied to harvest corn and plant grasses. Summers presumably would be spent along the shore to exploit aquatic resources, and the winters, perhaps, in an "upland" location pursuing deer. Such a scenario accords with the historical descriptions of the coastal Algonquians seasonal round (Quinn 1955:283; Barbour 1986:162) and accounts for the paucity of artifacts, the absence of summer fruits, and the location of the site on prime agricultural soils. It is unexpected, though, that such a seasonally abandoned site would be palisaded. The alternative scenario is to view Amity as the remains of a quite small hamlet, occupied steadily enough to warrant palisading. Unfortunately since the recovery of faunal and botanical remains was so limited at Amity, it is impossible to know if the absence of summer indicators is real or merely apparent. Hence, there is insufficient evidence to determine conclusively site function.

THE POSSIBLE LOCATION OF POMEIOOC

The Amity Site excavations force the conclusion that Pomeiooc has yet to be found. This is in spite of the fact that more archaeological effort has been expended looking for it than any other site in the state. It is certainly possible that the site no longer exists. It seems almost certain that many of Native American villages documented by Hariot and White have been lost to coastal erosion. One need only contemplate the transformation of Stumpy Point Lake as shown on the Moseley Map of 1733 into the present Stumpy Point Bay to realize that the universe of extant Native American sites in the coastal region cannot represent the entirety of Native American settlements. As the Pamlico terrace comprising the Albemarle - Pamlico peninsula is both broad and low, an inland location may not have been sufficient to spare Pomeiooc this fate. A small rise in sea level could well transform many square miles of inhabitable land into marsh. Eastern Hyde County has sufficient marsh to hide many dozen Pomeioocs.

More optimistically, there is between Lake Mattamuskeet and the head of Far Creek a substantial acreage of high ground that has yet to be surveyed due to forest cover (Figure 10, p.24). The location of this area accords with the placement of Pomeiooc on the White map. Further as the lake ridge broadens in this area, it offers a considerable amount of aboriginaily farmable soil that may have been an inducement to settle away from the littoral. This remains as a high probability area for archaeological sites, Pomeiooc among them.

It seems unlikely at this date, however, that Pomeiooc will be located in any currently cultivated field in the Engelhard area. Many high probability areas have been surveyed in vain. Too, given the multi-generational farming history of the ridgetop fields, it seems unlikely the [Page 74] presence of a substantial Indian site could have gone completely unnoticed, yet no local person has come forward with knowledge of such a site, in spite of repeated "high profile" archaeological projects involving many local people.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE AMITY SITE

Divorced from the onus of being Pomeiooc, the Amity Site is in its own right an important archaeological site. In the coastal region of North Carolina, it is, first, the only Postcontact period Native American site yet discovered-, second, the only example of a palisaded settlement; and third, the only Native American habitation site discovered that is not located in a littoral environment. Discovery and excavation of the Amity Site has increased greatly our understanding of the culture of the North Carolina Algonquians.

The Algonquians dominated the Carolina Sounds region prior to the eighteenth century and thus played a seminal role in the early history of North Carolina. Unfortunately, after the departure of White and Hariot, few of the early settlers troubled to write of the Algonquians, and their subsequent cultural extinction necessitates that archaeology will be our principle means of learning about them (Garrow 1981). The excavation of the Amity Site provides a sound start towards understanding the nature of their culture during the period of their co-existence with the Euroamedcan settlers.

Assuming that a mid-seventeenth century date for the Amity site is correct, the degree of continuity between the life it reflects and that of the Algonquians observed by White and Hariot some 75 years before is striking. The North Carolina Algonquians still built longhouses and palisades, still grew corn, beans and squash and still hunted and gathered in the local forests and fished the local waters. Some changes were evident, of course. Some glass beads now accompanied their shell and copper counterparts as personal adornment, and some arrowheads, still fashioned in traditional form, came to be made of this new material as well.

Perhaps a more ominous change is suggested by the size of the Amity Site. Hariot makes no mention of Algonquian towns of less than 10 or 20 houses; Amity cannot claim so many. The Amity site is not only small, but as yet unique. Whereas Algonquian' sites of the period preceding European contact are numerous, later sites are vanishingly rare. Apparently the epidemics observed by Hariot (Quinn 1955:378) exerted lasting effect in the Pamlico region.

Still, the Amity Site allows us to see that during the mid-seventeenth century, at a time when the more populous and powerful Powhatan societies on the Chesapeake Bay were being reduced to tributaries of the English, the Indians of the Pamlico lived essentially as they had for generations before. Unfortunately for them, the demise of their Powhatan brethren would open the way for the Virginians to enter the Carolina Sounds. Soon the Pamlico Region would again be well populated, but this time few of its inhabitants would be Native Americans.

Appendix A > > >

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Carolina Algonkian Project, All Rights Reserved