Q&A with UNC archaeology professor Steve Davis

UNC professor of archaeology Steve Davis worked with colleagues and students from 1983 to 2002 to excavate three Native American villages — including one prehistoric village — outside of Hillsborough on the Eno River.

Davis will talk about his findings during a lecture at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens Tuesday. Staff writer Gabriella Cirelli spoke with Davis about the inspiration for the project and how it resonates today.

Daily Tar Heel: Can you tell me a little bit about the project? How did it come about?

Steve Davis: It’s actually a project that began back during the Depression — it was one of the first scientific archaeological excavations in the state, and it was undertaken in 1938. In 1940 and 1941 the work expanded, but after Pearl Harbor, everything shut down. If you flash forward several decades to 1983, when I started working at the University, myself and two colleagues went back up to Hillsborough to remove that research. Our purpose was to try to understand better the impact of European colonization on native people.

The site that was excavated in the late 1930s and early 1940s was thought to be the village of the Occaneechi tribe, which was visited by an English explorer named John Lawson in 1701. We went back and had some questions about the identification of that site because the earlier work hadn’t found any physical evidence of native peoples.

DTH: What did you find there?

SD: We investigated that initial site that had been studied and concluded that it had been occupied too early and was probably abandoned for a century by the time Lawson came through the area. So we began looking elsewhere and found evidence of a second village about 400 feet away, and with financial support from National Geographic, we started our initial work there in 1983. We found European trade artifacts like glass beads, fragments from guns, steel knives, scissors — a range of artifacts that could be dated based on style, and they all pointed to 1700.

During the four years that we excavated there, we exposed the entire village that was probably one-quarter of an acre and probably had no more than 50 to 60 people. Since there was no evidence of rebuilding, we concluded they inhabited the village for no more than a decade.

DTH: Where are these artifacts now?

SD: All of the collections, back to what was found in the late 1930s, are housed on UNC’s campus in the collections facility in Hamilton Hall as the North Carolina Archaeological Collection. It is an analogous collection to the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library. These artifacts are the documents for writing the history and pre-history of North Carolina.

We don’t know a whole lot about these people from the written record — what we can learn about them and how they lived comes from these artifacts.

DTH: Why are you holding the talk now if you finished the project in 2002?

SD: Well it’s Native (American) History Month, and this was a major archaeological project that was conducted in the near vicinity of Chapel Hill. It’s a really significant long-term project. So it’s not that it’s breaking news, but it’s basically sharing what we’ve learned over the years through our long-term research. The last decade has been continuing this story.

DTH: What are you hoping that attendees of the talk take away from your work?

SD: I think people often find it surprising — the archaeology that exists in their own communities, and you tend to think of archaeology and think of Egypt and far away places, but these native peoples have been in North Carolina for more than 12,000-14,000 years, and if you know what to look for you can find traces of those earlier peoples in terms of the artifacts they’ve left behind just about anywhere. Archaeology doesn’t have to be in a remote location or exotic — significant archaeological resources exist here that allow us to interpret our own community and what happened centuries and even millennia ago.

There’s also a subtle message that all of these resources are extremely fragile — they’re very quickly disappearing, and everyone should take responsibility for being stewards of these resources. They’re all we have to connect us to this historical past, and once these sites are gone we lose the resources to learn more about these peoples.

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