OU ARCHAEOLOGIST

RECEIVES $167,000 NSF GRANT

 NORMAN – Robin Beck, University of Oklahoma archaeologist and assistant professor of anthropology, together with his colleagues David Moore of Warren Wilson College and Christopher Rodning of Tulane University, recently were awarded a $167,000 National Science Foundation grant for their project “Joara and Fort San Juan: Colonialism and Household Practice at the Berry Site, North Carolina.”

Fort San Juan de Joara was the earliest European settlement in the interior of what is now the United States. Fort San Juan was occupied from January 1567 until the spring of 1568, 40 years before the English colony of Jamestown, Va., and 20 years before Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony at Roanoke, N.C.

“Research into the long-forgotten episode of Fort San Juan's founding and subsequent fiery destruction, under the auspices of the Upper Catawba Archaeology Project, offers to help re-write the history of European exploration and settlement in eastern North America, promising a new and deeper understanding of Spain's early presence in this colonial borderland,” Beck said.

On Dec. 1, 1566, Captain Juan Pardo departed from Santa Elena, the capital of Spanish La Florida (located on modern Parris Island, S.C.), with a company of 125 men. Gov. Menéndez commissioned Pardo to explore the interior, to claim the land for Spain while pacifying local Indians and to forge a route from Santa Elena to Spanish silver mines in northern Mexico. In January 1567, Pardo arrived at Joara, a large native town located at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. Pardo renamed this town Cuenca, after his own native city in Spain, and built Fort San Juan de Joara, leaving 30 men to defend the fort and occupy the town. In May of 1568, news reached Santa Elena that the people of Joara had destroyed Fort San Juan during a surprise attack, rebuffing Pardo's effort to extend Spanish colonial ambitions into their domain. This attack ended Spain's only effort to colonize the interior of eastern North America.

“We have identified the Berry site – located along the upper Catawba River, in what is now Burke County, N.C. – as both the native town of Joara and the location of Fort San Juan,” Beck said.

At the site, Beck and his team have discovered numerous 16th-century Spanish artifacts, including pieces of Spanish ceramics, lead shot, brass lacing tips and wrought iron nails.

“Excavations in this area have revealed five remarkably intact burned buildings that form a distinct compound around a central plaza,” Beck said. “Our research indicates that these were the buildings that quartered Pardo’s soldiers stationed at Fort San Juan.”

According to Beck, limited work in one of the burned buildings has revealed an astonishing degree of architectural preservation, including intact features such as carbonized wooden posts that still remain upright and fallen roof timbers that still retain their bark. Artifacts inside the building include decorated ceramic pots, a clay smoking pipe and chain mail armor.

“We have yet to enter the other burned buildings in this area, but we have every reason to believe that they are just as remarkable in their contents and preservation,” Beck said. “That all five were burned serves as a chilling testament to how relations between the Spaniards and the people of Joara ended tumultuously in the spring of 1568.”

The National Science Foundation award will fund two seasons of excavation at the Berry site, during which Beck and his team will completely excavate one of the burned buildings and extensively sample two others. The project will bring together archaeological specialists from many institutions, including Southern Illinois University, Washington University – St. Louis, the University of Tennessee and Pennsylvania State University. Landowners James and Pat Berry continue to show generous stewardship, allowing the team to carry on their research.

“Our continued excavations at the Berry site promise unique insights into the beginnings of European colonialism in eastern North America,” Beck said.

Articles pertaining to the work conducted by Beck and his team have appeared in the March 2006 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, also located on the Internet at www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2006/march/digs.php, and in the August 2003 issue of the National Geographic. For more information about the work being conducted at the Berry site, reports and images, visit the team’s Web site at www.warren-wilson.edu/~arch, or contact Beck at (405) 325-4456 or rabeck@ou.edu.

Project Directors

Robin Beck (Ph.D. Northwestern University 2004) is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and has been a member of the Upper Catawba Archaeology project since 2000. In 1996, as part of his M.A. project at the University of Alabama, he directed a settlement survey of Upper Creek-Warrior Fork, the tributary of the upper Catawba River along which the Berry site is located. He co-directed a proton magnetometer survey at the Berry site in 1997, and it was during this survey that the burned structures were first identified. He has co-directed excavations at Berry since 2002, and he has conducted extensive research and published on the routes taken by early Spanish expeditions through the southeastern United States. Beck also has conducted research and written on Mississippian chiefdoms in the Southeast, including a recent article in American Antiquity, flagship journal of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1998-2001, he worked in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Bolivia and Peru, and from 2000-2001, he directed excavations at the site of Alto Pukara, Bolivia, as part of his dissertation research at Northwestern University.

David Moore (Ph.D. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 1999) is a faculty member at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C., and has been actively involved in the archaeology of North Carolina’s mountain and western Piedmont regions for nearly 25 years. He served for 18 years with the Western Office of the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology and has been teaching full time at Warren Wilson College since 1999. He has directed major excavations and/or field schools at numerous sites in North Carolina, including Hardaway, Warren Wilson and Berry. His work in the upper Catawba Valley began in 1986 with excavations at the Berry site as part of his dissertation research. He returned to the Berry site in 1997 with Robin Beck and Thomas Hargrove for a preliminary proton-magnetometer survey. The University of Alabama Press recently published a revised version of his dissertation, Catawba Valley Mississippian: Ceramics, Chronology, and Catawba Indians (2002). He is also the author or co-author of several articles on the archaeology of western North Carolina, including a recent article co-authored with Robin Beck on the late prehistory of the Upper Catawba Valley. In 2000, Moore formed the Upper Catawba Archaeology Project with Robin Beck and Christopher Rodning.

Christopher Rodning (Ph.D. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 2005) is an assistant professor at Tulane University and has been involved in the archaeology of western North Carolina and the Appalachian Summit area since 1994. He has been a member of the Upper Catawba Valley Archaeology Project since 2000, and co-directed Berry site excavations from 2001-2004. As part of his dissertation project at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Rodning has conducted extensive analysis and published on Mississippian ceramics, mound architecture and mortuary practices at the Coweeta Creek site in western North Carolina. He recently edited a special volume of Southeastern Archaeology, which focused on Coweeta Creek, and in 2001, the University of Florida Press published his edited volume Archaeological Studies of Gender in the Southeastern United States (co-edited with Jane Eastman). Rodning has published numerous articles on the late prehistoric and early historic native societies of the southern Appalachian region.