Students dig historic hangout
By Marie Freeman
freeman@wataugademocrat.com

Way before the pot-belly stove inside the Mast General Store became a favorite Valle Crucis gathering spot, a small gneiss outcropping located on the banks of the Watauga River was a popular hangout for nearly 10,000 years.

Appalachian State University professor and archaeologist Tom Whyte and his field archaeology students have meticulously brushed away layers of the site to reveal evidence of human visitors from 10,000 years ago to present.

According to Whyte, who teaches at the ASU department of anthropology, the site is significant because it offers a view of how lives changed over thousands of years in one place.

“We are seeing cultural change through time. The site provides a good glimpse of human cultural evolution in the mountains,” Whyte said.

The site was discovered by Charles Church in 1968 when, working on his property, he exposed a human skull. He brought the site to the attention of ASU biologist Frank Randall, who exhumed the skeleton.

In 1971, Hal Pugh, an ASU student doing an independent study, also worked at the rockshelter until Church’s Charlais bull chased him away.

In 1975, Burt Purrington, one of ASU’s first archaeologists, examined the site and claimed it to be ruined by the previous digs.

But Whyte discovered this not be the case when he started working the site with his students in 2003.

“There was still plenty to work with because the site was deeper than expected and extended onto the slope below the shelter,” Whyte said.

Upon further examination of the skeletal remains, Whyte determined them to be of a 20-year-old female. She had been placed in the rockshelter in a fetal position with her head facing outside the rockshelter.

Whyte’s group then excavated Randall’s back dirt pile and found infant human bones.

“We’ll never know without DNA testing if that was a mother and child, but speculate it could be. They may have died together in childbirth” Whyte said.

Among other artifacts Whyte’s students have found pottery shards, spear points, an assortment of other stone tools, and animal bones including those of a porcupine found buried down deep in the stratum from 7,000 years ago. There is also an abundance of burnt rock from human-made fires.

“I always tell my students that it is not what we find at a site, but what we find out about the site which is important,” Whyte said.

For example, one of his students, Andy Kruse, found a 9,500 year-old Kirk point in what Whyte refers to as the “garbage zone,” an area on the slope below the rockshelter where the visitors threw out their trash.

“This area is where we have found some of the more interesting and better preserved layers. We have excavated in this unit down to the late Pleistocene period, 10,000 years ago,” said Whyte.

The notched and serrated Kirk point and associated items confirm the presence of humans in the higher elevations of western North Carolina in the early Holocene Epoch and hold a story about the lives of the earliest seasonal migrants to the region.

Asking what type of humans used this place as a stopping-off point, Whyte shrugged his shoulders and asked, “ Do you know who your ancestors were 10,000 years ago?”

But he says the evidence for the late prehistoric period, just prior to European colonization, points to Siouan speakers such as the Catawbas and their relatives.

“That is my hypothesis,” Whyte said.

The site’s security remains a question because Church has sold a right-of-way section that includes the site but Whyte is grateful for the time he and his students have had to work and learn.

“Charles is a good friend and without him no one would have even known this place existed. He has always allowed us access and even encouraged us to be here.”