Those were tumultuous times. Disease had swept the land, felling untold numbers of people. War had claimed more.
Intruders came from the north too. They wanted the land — or, in some cases, the people who lived there.
In the midst of this chaos, a family built a home. They erected it near a stream in the green hills. It had a hearth in its center. On winter nights, surely, the family crouched before it, listening to the wind.
Who were the people who lived there? Where did they go? Those answers, lost some 400 years ago, may lie in the soil of the Chattahoochee National Forest.
Archaeologists and volunteers recently wrapped up digging at a forest tract where a house stood four centuries ago. The dig, the second conducted at the site, turned up evidence of human occupation — pot shards, the remains of a smoking pipe, the circular hearth.
Scientists will spend the next year studying their finds before returning to the site in March. They consider the artifacts valuable in helping understand a period about which they know little.
James Wettstaed, an archaeologist at the national forest, in north Georgia, is eager to return.
"It's one of the neatest sites I've ever seen," said Wettstaed, who has worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 26 years. "It's close to the top of one of the most important sites I've ever seen."
Officials won’t say exactly where the home’s remains are located, only that it’s somewhere in the folds of 750,000 federally-owned acres. They don’t want looters defiling the site.
The site turned up two years ago. Off-road enthusiasts on all-terrain and four-wheel-drive trucks had torn up a stretch of forest floor, exposing the soil. Forest service officials called in archaeologists to conduct sample digs on the tract, just in case something from another era turned up. It did: the dirt surrendered evidence of a long-ago structure.
In March 2014, scientists, aided by volunteers, conducted the first dig. They found evidence of fence posts and scorched areas, hints of a structure perhaps 25 feet across. They returned last month for another dig and came back with pottery shards and the remains of a pipe that someone had used to smoke tobacco. Tests estimated the artifacts were about 400 years old.
Who were those people? They could have been connected to Creek or Cherokee tribes indigenous to the region. Or they may have been Native Americans from farther north, moving into new land.
Whoever they were, they may have had tense lives. Four centuries ago, some Native Americans raided other tribes for slaves. The ravages of diseases brought the previous century by Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto lingered. And people were at war with each other.
Whoever dwelt in the house, said Wettstaed, “lived in chaotic times.”
The site, Wettstaed said, had been popular for centuries. Archaeologists also found a few items dating to about AD 100, others to 1100.
The artifacts are getting a thorough cleaning and review. Wettstaed said he and others plan to learn everything they can from the mysteries surrendered in the forest.
Mark Williams, an archaeology professor at the University of Georgia, is curious about this latest find. Williams is director of the Georgia Archaeological Site File, a compendium of archaeological sites across the state. Some date back as far as 14,000 years. He's also director of the university's Laboratory of Archaeology. A Georgia native, he's had his hand in archaeological digs, figuratively and literally, all his life.
Not as much is known about human habitation in the area of the national forest as in other parts of the state, said Williams. Whatever diggers found, he said, should add to that limited knowledge.
“Every site we dig gives us new insights,” he said. “It’s a minor step in the right direction of learning how people lived in that part of Georgia.”
Wettstaed hopes to put the artifacts on display when experts have finished studying them. For now, they remain off limits — tiny hints of a period when life was anything but an idyll.
The items, though small, have a large hold on his imagination, too.
“To hold something that’s been there (hidden) for hundreds of thousands of years?” he asked. “It’s pretty neat.”
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