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The Gordon Site in Southern Mississippi*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

John L. Cotter
John L. Cotter*
Affiliation:
National Park Service, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

The Gordon site has been mentioned previously by Ford (1935, 1936) as site 61, the type site for the Coles Creek ceramic complex originally identified by a surface collection of 175 sherds. In his initial survey of the site, Ford placed it uppermost in the Coles Creek horizon, although the exact relationship of that horizon to other Southeastern cultures was at that time uncertain. Ford states:

perhaps this name is a little unfortunate. Neither of the two original sites (the second was the Mazique Plantation Site which was not chosen for type site designation because of historical confusion with the White Apple Village of the Natchez) is quite typical of the many that have been located in southwestern Mississippi and eastcentral Louisiana. They differ in that they each yield a few sherds of the Tunica complex. Despite this fact there is no evidence that any of the Coles Creek sites retained their inhabitants until the time of contact with Europeans. The entire complex may be regarded as prehistoric (1936, p. 172).

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , October 1952 , pp. 110 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1952

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Footnotes

*

Acknowledgement is made to the following persons and agencies for contributions toward the completion of this report: J. Fred Gordon of Fayette, Mississippi, who granted permission to excavate the site while it was yet in his ownership, prior to acquisition for the Natchez Trace Parkway, Marshall T. Newman and Henry W. Setzer of the U.S. National Museum, Washington, for human skeletal observations and animal bone identifications, respectively, Volney H. Jones, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, for undertaking vegetal identifications, James A. Ford, James B. Griffin, William G. Haag, Philip Phillips and George I. Quimby and Alex D. Krieger for their consultations. This study, however, was completed before the writer had access to the Greenhouse (Ford 1951) and Medora (Quimby 1951) reports, thus permitting him the luxury of arriving at his conclusions with a fair degree of independence. Credit is due Jesse D. Jennings who initiated the program under which this study was made and to the staff of Natchez Trace Parkway, headed by Superintendent Malcolm Gardner, and to the Bureau of Public Roads. The burden of field and laboratory work was shared by archaeological aide John C. Stone, whose death of a heart attack at the age of 36 occurred in the final stage of the work. His faithful and able efforts will, it is hoped, be memorialized in this report.

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