Bells, Beads, and Buttons: An Artifactual Analysis of European Trade Goods at Peachtree Mound, North Carolina
Open AccessThis research returns to the Peachtree Mound (31CE1) artifact assemblage from Murphy, North Carolina to analyze the evidence of trade interactions between Europeans and the Cherokee. The goods of European-manufacture are formally described and compared with other collections from Contact period sites. I summarize the 1933-1934 excavations and other archaeological reports from the Peachtree environs to provide further context for these trade materials. The Peachtree artifacts strongly indicate exchange with the English during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is unlikely that the inhabitants of this town interacted with the Spanish or Hernando de Soto on his 1540 expedition, as the initial excavation reports suggested. During the Contact period, Southeastern Cherokee communities transformed from chiefdoms to egalitarian settlements with widespread participation in the deer fur trade. The objects of European-manufacture and the small percentage of burials containing trade goods at Peachtree suggest that an elite social structure was still in place by the eighteenth century, and it is likely that European contact had not been established until this time.
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