Stylistic Elements on Thom's Creek Pottery from Spanish Mount (38CH62)

Summary

This research concerns decorations on hand-built pottery from Spanish Mount (38CH62), a 4,000-year-old, Late Archaic period Native American shellfish mound located next to a tidal creek on Edisto Island, Charleston County, South Carolina. The people of Spanish Mount produced what archaeologists call Thom’s Creek pottery, a sand-tempered ware embellished with punctated linear and curvilinear designs. Although researchers have been studying Thom’s Creek pottery for decades, they have yet to develop a comprehensive guide to the various tool punctations, or stylistic elements, that were impressed on the vessels. Tool types, and the stylistic elements they create, can potentially tell archaeologists something about communities of learning or practice among Thom’s Creek potters and their neighbors. To study tool-type diversity, I focused on an assemblage of ceramics from a single unit at the Spanish Mount site, organizing the sherds by stylistic elements and experimenting with clay in an attempt to distinguish what tools were used to make various punctated designs. I named and described these stylistic elements, creating a reference glossary. This will enable other researchers to compare their assemblages’ decorative modes and stylistic elements to those on Thom’s Creek as well as assist in identification of pottery. Additionally, I employed an archaeological database to input each sherd and its attributes by stratigraphic context. This data allows for the organization and creation of data tables that can be analyzed for changes in stylistic element use over time. This research as well as the excavations performed at Spanish Mount are extremely important to cultural preservation because erosion, likely strengthened by climate change, has destroyed vast portions of the mound, leading to the loss of data, knowledge, and material culture.

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Contact(s): Lillian Ondus; Karen Smith

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