single burial pits would also suggest 

 that some Native American families 

 buried their deceased and came back 

 later to rebury them in an ossuary. 



"It appears that they were digging 

 these pits up," Mathis says. "Ultimately, 

 it may have been that everybody was 

 supposed to end up in an ossuary." 



Or, perhaps not. The coast is dotted 

 with lone graves still holding flexed 

 bones that may have been the final 

 burial of commoners. 



At this point, the 

 questions about 

 prehistoric Indians still 

 outnumber the answers 



But archaeologists 

 have learned so much 

 from the burials 

 because the bones are 

 still in good condition. 

 This fortune can be 

 traced back to the 

 Native Americans' 

 eating habits — not 

 what they ate but what 

 they discarded. 



The mounds of 

 discarded oyster and clam shells, called 

 shell middens, leached calcium carbon- 

 ate into the ground and fortified the 

 bones buried nearby. 



The process began thousands of 

 years ago as Indians supplemented their 

 diets with shellfish. The bivalves were a 

 nutritional mainstay for both coastal 

 settlers and the inlanders who trekked to 

 the beach when food was scarce. 



Over time, they amassed huge shell 

 middens that probably lined the entire 

 coast. Virtually all shell midden sites of 

 more than one acre contain materials 

 from the time of Christ up to at least 

 1400, Mathis says. 



But beginning in the 18th and 19th 

 centuries, farmers mined them for lime 

 for their fields. By the 1920s and 1930s, 

 highway builders borrowed from the 



middens for road ballast. 



The shell mounds, however, have 

 survived to the extent that they can 

 direct researchers to a potential ar- 

 chaeological site. 



Researchers choose excavation sites 

 by looking for the durable shells, 

 ceramics and stone and by thinking 

 about what the Indians needed to live, 

 such as fresh water and food. They look 

 also for elevation and soil type. 



Volunteers Nathan Couch and Marco Brewer unearth a prehistoric hearth 

 at the Broad Reach site. 



Baum was excavated by Phelps 

 after erosion on the Currituck Sound 

 exposed the first of eight burials. 



This is not unusual. Successive 

 erosion and drowning of the shoreline 

 through time has obliterated the coastal 

 sites of early cultural stages, Phelps 

 says. Even riverine sites in what was 

 once the Coastal Plain are submerged 

 beneath the estuaries. 



The Broad Reach site, on the other 

 hand, was excavated to save artifacts 

 that would have been discarded in the 

 development of a 75-slip marina. 



Had the site not been salvaged, the 

 losses would have included pottery 

 from Indians who lived 2,000 years 

 ago. The majority of artifacts collected 

 near the shell midden, however, date to 

 900 and 1440. 



The 1440 date was drawn from 

 radiocarbon dating on shell that had 

 been burned to powder in a pit, an 

 unusual finding in coastal North 

 Carolina, Mathis says. Researchers 

 found 30 to 40 pits that were probably 

 perpetual cooking fires burning in 

 front of homes, he says. 



Using these clues, Mathis esti- 

 mates 50 to 200 people lived there 

 full-time. 



Like the Baum and 

 Broad Reach sites, most 

 excavations in coastal 

 North Carolina are 

 reactive — responding 

 to erosion or building 

 plans. And Phelps and 

 Mathis say research 

 isn't happening fast 

 enough. 



"I fear that if we 

 don't do something 

 about it, I could all but 

 guarantee in 20 to 30 

 years, (the sites will) be 

 gone," Mathis says. 

 The key is educating 

 people that the history of Native 

 Americans is an important part of 

 American history, Phelps says. 



"The problem in America is that 

 this isn't our Euro-American history. 

 This is somebody else's history. And 

 it's very difficult to convince John Q. 

 Public that the Native Americans are 

 as good as he is," Phelps says. 



"We're a can-do society. We think 

 we don't need to know the past. Yet 

 these are people who had been 

 adapting to the coast for 3,000 years. 

 ... There's a lot of information from 

 archaeology that would apply, but we 

 have this idea that modem technology 

 can do anything. It doesn't matter 

 what people did in the past, which 

 means that we're not going to have a 

 planet tomorrow." M 



12 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992 



