Old Town/Former Resident Tours
Mound Town Scale and Structure
Annually the SRARP conducts school programs, tour, lectures, or presents displays for over 5000 people in the CSRA. Below is a lis of programs offered by the SRARP. See something you like, be sure to contact us.
Today, Salem lies nestled within the heart of the modern-day city of Winston-Salem, where each year thousands of tourists and local schoolchildren visit the restored buildings of Old Salem and learn about its past as retold by costumed interpreters. Chartered in the 1950s, Old Salem's public presentation focused on the town's white, Moravian founders. However, by the 1990s, Old Salem, Inc. began to sponsor research that examined the contributions made by African Americans to the town's history (see Dowe 1994; Ferguson 1991, 1993; Ferguson and Hartley 1997; Hartley 1995; Hughes 2005; Palmer Gillies 1999; Sensbach 1998; Taylor 1993; and Ziegenbein 2002). The recent reconstruction of an 1823 log church for African Americans and the restoration of its descendant-an 1861 brick church-exemplify a new effort aimed at capitalizing on the growing market in African-American heritage tourism. Next to these structures lie Salem's Parish graveyard, a colonial graveyard for the interment of non-Moravians, white and black, and a later, segregated graveyard for African Americans.
Like daily life for Salem's residents, interment in Gottes Acker revolved around the choir system. According to the Moravian archivist C. Daniel Crews, choirs were: ...group[s] within a congregation consisting of individuals of like life circumstances [e.g. Children, Little Boys, Little Girls. Older Boys, Older Girls, Single Brethren, Single Sisters, Married People, Widowers, and Widows]...For many years the Single Brethren, the Single Sisters, and the Widows lived, labored, and worshipped together in close fellowship in their respective Choir houses (Crews 1996:5)
As a result, burial of the deceased in choir plots reinforced a gendered ideal of the proper Christian family. However, the role that this gender ideology played in creating both Gottes Acker and its subaltern, Salem's Parish Graveyard, remains largely unexplored. While Gottes Acker and Salem's Parish Graveyard were created for the interment of two different populations, lying as they do at the opposite end of Salem and looking radically different from one another, they trace their origin to the same period in time.
This thesis contends that far from being discrete and unconnected entities on the landscape, Gottes Acker and Salem's Parish Graveyard were and continue to be intimately connected spaces. Moreover, it argues that their mutual development provided for the existence of a segregated graveyard for African Americans after 1815. In effect, the historical connection between Gottes Acker and Salem's Parish Graveyard takes the form of a discourse in landscape.
The analysis of a material culture, archival and spatial data supports this assertion. These include an analysis of gravestones to create a linguistic typology that looks for patterns of similarity and difference between choir cohorts through time. Additionally, a number of primary documents concerning the church's policies regarding graveyards and mortuary practice are examined. A series of historical maps augments these archival sources. Finally, the recreated spatial layout and order of interment in Gottes Acker
Salem's mortuary discourse is not, however, simply a discourse confined to issues of location or proximity. Rather, a broader socio-political context: a context that revolves around issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality has and continues to construct both graveyards discursively. It includes the deployment of material culture and language to articulate a constantly negotiated ideology that emphasizes the familial bonds of a Christian community. The goal therefore, is to take two entities on the landscape, commonly treated as if they are disconnected, and reestablish their mutual dependence through the writing of a history that emphasizes a series of geo-social relations during their formative period (1766-1815). That said, chapters focus on the analysis of the following four discursive arenas: 1) the organization and placement of both graveyards on the landscape; 2) their aesthetic qualities; 3) the deployment of language on the landscape through the placement of gravestones; and 4) the control of access and ritual behavior within and between mortuary spaces.
With the help of descendent community members and aerial photos, the approximate locations of 24 buildings have been identified. However, the exact footprints of most of these structures are still unknown. To date, consultation has focused on conducting archival research and preliminary site mapping, as well as aerial photo rectification in preparation for future archaeological investigation resource assessment.
It is hoped that as the project continues to grow, it will provide an opportunity for comparative analysis with other contemporary African-American schools such, as those located in Dunbarton and Meyers Mill, historic towns of the SRS.
As Hally (1993, 1996) and Blitz (1999) have discussed, Lawton and Red Lake do not fit Hally's expectations. While they are located only a few kilometers apart, neither is larger or has indications of serving more important political and religious functions. Therefore, there is no clear primary and secondary center in this relationship. Jared Wood's (2005) discovery of another small mound town within a few kilometers of both Red Lake and Lawton, still further complicates the political picture. The site, known as Spring Lake, also does not appear to have served a larger number of important functions than the other nearby mound towns.
Blitz (1999) has suggested that archaeological examples like this one may represent a social form that is not hierarchically organized, as Hally's model assumes. Instead, using ethnohistoric data on Creek communities. Blitz argues that closely spaced mound towns like Red Lake, Lawton, and Spring Lake may be centers in a confederacy where there are no hierarchical political relationships among the centers.
When we reconstruct the structure of both Lawton and Red Lake from the work that has been conducted so far, the two towns appear to be completely different kinds of centers. Lawton has two mounds and a well-defined residential zone enclosed within a ditch and palisade wall. Red Lake has three small mounds, spread over a much larger area, and has no evidence for a ditch encircling the immediate vicinity of the mounds. However, a closer comparison shows that these mound centers are very similar both in terms of scale and structure. Each town is comprised of a core area of two or more mounds arranged around an open space that we have interpreted to be plazas. Ringing the core is an area of midden that we interpret as the domestic occupation zone. When you superimpose Red Lake over Lawton, it becomes clear that these core areas and associated dense occupation zones are about the same size.
Two things appear different, however. First, the occupied area of Red Lake seems larger than that of Lawton. This is an artifact of the work done at each site. In working at Lawton, we chose to focus our energy on the area inside the ditch. Mississippian occupation continues outside of that ditch along the slough edge in both directions. We have not tested enough to find the actual extent of that occupation, but it is clearly Hollywood phase.
The only really clear difference between these two towns is that the core area at Lawton is set off from the rest of the site by the ditch and presumed palisade wall. In a sense, we have what we think is a sacred precinct surrounded by and separated from the rest of the community. Although there is no ditch at Red Lake, we have not yet conducted the work to determine if its sacred precinct is separated from the rest of the community by a wall.
Jared Wood's (2006, pers. comm.) work at the nearby Spring Lake site seems to indicate that the mound complex at that site was on about the same scale as Lawton and Red Lake and laid out in a similar fashion. The site has a single mound adjacent to a small plaza, all surrounded by dense occupation that continues up and down the adjacent waterway. Pottery recovered by Wood indicates that Spring Lake dates to the Hollywood phase, as well.
These similarities in scale and structure bring us back to questions about the political relationships among these sites. Considering only scale and structure, these sites do not appear significantly different. It is true that Red Lake has three mounds, Lawton two, and Spring Lake one, suggesting a potential hierarchy. However, it is not clear how each mound functioned, so it is not possible to understand if the number of mounds translated in any way into religious or administrative differences that would be indicative of an administrative hierarchy. We have found evidence at Lawton that each of the mounds served different functions: one was residential for elites and the other ceremonial (Stephenson and King 2004). Unfortunately, we do not have the information to compare Lawton to Red Lake mound function at this time.
At Lawton, the civic-ceremonial core of the site is set apart by a wall and ditch. It is possible that the labor invested in these features suggests that Lawton's civic-ceremonial space had a greater importance than civic-ceremonial space at other sites. Again, it is possible that the mound and plaza cores of Red Lake and Spring Lake also are separated from the rest of the occupation. The work simply has not been done to evaluate that possibility.
There are obviously many questions to answer before it is possible to clearly understand the political relationship among these sites. However, the layout and distribution of the mound towns in the middle Savannah River valley may provide some insights into those relationships. The settlement system in this part of the Savannah River valley, as far as we understand it, is reminiscent of the talwa or town systems of the Creek Indians, particularly of the 17th and 18th centuries. Creek communities had a sacred core that included a winter council house, a square ground where summer councils and important ceremonies took place, a ball pole and field, and sometimes one or more small mounds (Howard 1968; Knight 1994). This civic-ceremonial space was surrounded by households that often were strung up and down the major drainages on which the towns were located (Etheridge 2004; Knight 1994; Worth 2000). This is a classic dispersed settlement system. Following Bruce Smith's (1978) arguments for Mississippian settlement in the Mississippi River valley, the middle Savannah River valley makes ecological and social sense in the ridge and swale floodplain setting of the Coastal Plain.
In many instances, Creek towns were scattered up and down major drainages, sometimes close enough to one another that the scatter of households for one town butted up against the households associated with a nearby town. Town affiliation was important among the Creeks, and although some towns were more important than others, each had a great deal of autonomy (Knight 1994; Saunt 1999).
It is possible that what we are looking at in the middle Savannah River valley is a social system not unlike the Creeks of the 18th century. There was social ranking, but it was embedded within the clan system and expressed in terms like "older brother" or as part of the Red and White symbolism of war and peace (King 2003). In these systems, there were some communities that everyone recognized as more important, and there was a certain deference shown to those communities and their leaders. However, individual towns were largely politically independent (Knight 1994; Saunt 1999) y/e think it is fair to call these entities chiefdoms (King 1999). There were certainly social and political relationships among them, but there was no overarching hierarchy linking them all into one social system.