Stirring Up a Hornet's Nest: - UGA Laboratory of Archaeology ...

systematic shovel testing). The project was successful in delineating the Kettle Creek battlefield due to the
strategy selected. Other areas that were delineated, particularly the domestic residential sites, would
undoubtedly benefit from a return visit with a more traditional excavation strategy. With this intentional
bias in mind, we present a discussion of the recovered material culture.
Architecture Group
Architectural artifacts that are commonly found on 18 th century sites in Georgia include nails and spikes,
other metal hardware, window glass, brick, and building stone. Window glass is less common on the
frontier and none was found by the present survey. Brick also was rare in the study area. One brick
chimney fall was identified on Locus E. Several other chimney falls were noted but these were made of
local, undressed fieldstone.
Wrought nails were widely distributed over the study area, where they formed several discrete spatial
clusters. Each of these clusters probably denotes a domestic site. Wrought nails were commonly used prior
to 1790 in Georgia and they were common throughout the colonial and Revolutionary War period. Each
nail was handmade and Rose-head, T-head, and L-head wrought nail forms were identified in the study
collection. The wrought nails ranged in size from small finishing nails to large spikes. Once machine-made
nails became more readily available in the Georgia piedmont (by 1810) wrought nails became very
uncommon and were replaced by the machine cut nails. Since wrought nails were used both before and
after the American Revolution one cannot say with 100 percent certainty whether a building built with
wrought nails existed at the time of the Kettle Creek battle. Many of the nails located by the survey postdate
the battle of Kettle Creek. Machine cut nails first appeared in Georgia a few years after the invention
of nail making machinery in 1790. Cut nails were imported to Savannah by ship by 1800, and by 1810 nail
foundries were established in Augusta, Georgia (Georgia Gazette 1800:1). While they can often signal the
location of late 18 th century sites, machine cut nails were not in use during the American Revolution and
would not be associated with the 1779 battle. Many nails recovered during the project were either too
fragmentary or corroded for a full identification. Unidentified square nails were classified as “wrought or
cut” nails. Wire nails were made after 1865. Wire nails were not common in the Kettle Creek study area,
which suggests that the area was not heavily settled after the American Civil War.
A limited array of other metal hardware is included in the architecture group. Survey of Locus E yielded
several examples of door (or window) hardware. These included a hand wrought door lock and two
wrought hinge fragments, which were discovered in Locus E. Large pieces of wrought iron were
frequently recycled by blacksmiths in the 18 th and early 19 th century, which was a period when raw iron
stock was difficult to procure. Large iron scrap also was collected from rural areas of Georgia for the U.S.
war effort during “drives” in World War’s I and II.
Kitchen Group
Kitchen Group artifacts are typically the second most common artifact group on early historic sites in
Georgia. Many of these artifact types, however, are ceramic and glass and were not the targets of the
present metal detector survey. A small assemblage of ceramics and glass artifacts was located on the
ground surface and in the limited excavations, but this sample is admittedly skewed because of the survey
strategy. Ceramics and glass, however, were not expected to be major indicators of the battle of Kettle
Creek so their under-representation was expected and justified by the project goals. Enough ceramics were
located in a few areas, however, for an approximate age estimate for the domestic occupations. Larger
ceramic assemblages are needed to rigorously define the periods of occupations for these sites, which
should be a future project goal.
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