Cherokee Pottery from Northern Georgia

Abstract

From November 15, 1950, to April 7, 1951, an archaeological survey was conducted by the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys, in cooperation with the National Park Service and the Corps of Army Engineers, of the area to be flooded by the dam at Buford, Georgia. On the upper Chattahoochee River we came across an aboriginal cooking pit containing quantities of pottery which could be unhesitatingly identified as historic Cherokee. While a certain amount of confusion as to just what might constitute Cherokee ceramics was dispelled some years ago by the publication of Hiwassee Island, it does seem advisable to present the Buford material as an areal and temporal variant. It differs in some particulars from the Overhill pottery described by Lewis and Kneberg from the Little Tennessee; there are other differences from recently identified Cherokee pottery from the middle Etowah River in northwest Georgia; and again, it is unlike some ceramic assemblages from Lower Cherokee towns in northeast Georgia and western South Carolina.