Archaeology
Lab Work

"Before World War II, archaeological dates in the East were, for the most part, sheer guesses. This situation changed with the advent of radiocarbon dating. All that was required to determine something’s age was a handful of associated charcoal – or any suitable organic material. However, eastern archaeologists were not completely out of the woods. Finding buried, intact cultural horizons where tools and charcoal could be reliably assumed to be contemporary was not an easy task. Because of erosion, plowing and other ground-disturbing activities, the archaeological remains left at many ancient habitation sites, which often were occupied repeatedly for several thousand years, have been mixed and homogenized on a single surface rather than stacked or stratified in discrete soil layers.…Coe was one of the first to recognize this problem.” Time Before History (Ward, Davis: 15-16).

Coe successfully excavated at Lowder’s Ferry and the Doerschuk sites that were nearby (riverside) alluvial floodplain sites with satisfactory stratified soil layers. Everything became more complicated with the excavations at the Hardaway Site since it was a high ridge above the river and contained shallow stratified layers and significant human site disturbance including plowed soil. But Coe gradually was able to extract a great deal of sound archaeological analysis and created new techniques for such an unusual high ridgeline ancient archeological site that was occupied for many thousands of years and contained stunning amounts of artifacts and chipped stone due to its ancient age and consistent occupation. Coe described a dozen distinct cultural groups who occupied the Hardaway Site up until the "Caraway (Keyauwee) component occurring after A.D. 1700." (Dr. Steve Davis has pointed out that modern archaeological evidence does not support Coe’s early 18th Century date just above. The presence of Keyauwee artifacts at Hardaway is not sufficient in and by itself to posit that the site was occupied just decades prior to the European settlement in the mid-1700s. Currently many archaeologists view Hardaway as being occupied until around the 16th or early 17th Century. Additional research is needed.)

Perhaps most importantly Joffre Coe was able by using projectile points found at Hardaway, the Doerschuk site, the Lowder’s Ferry site, and the Gaston Roanoke River site to place names and approximate ages to those projectile points and to show the interconnectedness of sites throughout the southeastern US. “Coe was able to make temporal sense of a ‘hodgepodge of projectile points types’ previously recovered (from the sites listed just above)…Taken together, a composite stratigraphic sequence was created that allowed Coe to associate particular chipped stone points with various subperiods of the state’s prehistory that today we know spans some 12,000 years. This result was unprecedented and stimulated similar stratigraphic excavations around the Southeast.” Time, Typology, and Point Traditions in North Carolina Archaeology, I. Randolph Daniel Jr., 2021, University of Alabama, (p. 1).