Archaeological Investigations at Yourhaney Plantation (38GE18)

214STALLINGSThe Stallings pottery type is considered to be terminal Late Archaic to Early Woodland, typicallydating between 2500 and 1500 B.C. Stallings was first described by Griffin (1943: 169-170)based on 28 sherds collected from the Chester Field shell ring on Port Royal Island near Beaufort.Several forms of decoration occur on fiber tempered pottery, including incising, punctation, andsimple stamping. Only one fiber tempered Stallings sherd was identified in the collection. Theexample is an incised body sherd. The Stallings type represents only 0.14% of the typedcollection.THOM’S CREEKThe Thom’s Creek series dates to the Early Woodland Period with dates ranging from 1800 to 900BC. It was first described by Phelps (1968: 21) based on sherds from White’s Mount and the BoySouth site along the Savannah River drainage in Georgia. Trinkley (1976) provided a secondformal type description based on much larger samples from 13 sites along the South CarolinaCoast. Surface treatments include varieties of punctations, incising, simple stamped, and fingerpinched, with a sandy paste.A total of 304 sherds representing 42.76% of the collection were found. The vast majority of thesewere plain sherds, representing slightly over 90% of the type. Since many of these probablyrepresent undecorated portions of otherwise decorated vessels, this high percentage is not terriblysurprising. Other surface treatments include Reed Punctate, Incised, Combed (includingScraped/Brushed), and Simple Stamped. Reed Punctates included jab and drag, hollow reed, andlunate configurations. Incising typically consisted of vertical parallel lines. The combed vesselstended to be very thin and similar to those defined by Espenshade and Brockington (1989) at theMinim Island site in Georgetown County. It is relatively unusual south of Charleston and appearsto be a regional subtype. Only one simple stamped sherd was recovered and consisted of parallelstamped lines. Technically, combed and simple stamped are under the same type: Thom’s CreekSimple Stamped. However, the sherds listed as combed have finer lines that are not as deeplyimpressed into the sherd.REFUGEThe Refuge series date to the Early Woodland Period with dates ranging from 1000 to 600 BC.Waring (1968) recognized the type as an intermediate series between Stalling’s and Deptfordbased on excavations at the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge. Recognition of the Refugecomponents is difficult because most of the Refuge types are similar or identical to established typesin the Thom’s Creek and Deptford series. Only Refuge Dentate Stamped can be unambiguouslysorted, because the surface treatment does not occur on the other pottery types (Anderson et al.1982: 265). The paste is compact, sandy or gritty and has a sloppy simple sstamped, dentatestamped, or random punctation surface design. Only three dentate stamped sherds were identifiedin the collection, representing only 0.42% of the potteries identified.