It takes a special kind of genius to pick up plow-brushed and harrow-marked potsherds, arrowheads or wampum beads, and evoke from them the stories of the life and fate of their makers, owners or users. It also takes a fair amount of genius and a lot of knowledge of the physical sciences and cultural history to grub from undisturbed sites the stories behind the artifacts unearthed; however carefully gridded and stratified the site; however meticulously the artifacts are picked and brushed from their beds.

The archaeologist is constrained to keep in mind the frequent asychronism and erratic nature of technological development and human lifestyles, in a world dominated by fears, fetishes and phobias, reflected in the artifacts unearthed in his digs. Neolithic cultures persisted well into the 20th century, in spite of the best efforts to seek out and enlighten them. Some of them evolved into pathetic caricatures of a fading past reality, like the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific. The artifacts of such cultures' lifestyles frequently defy interpretation, except in the context of the records of the chaos that generated (or shattered) the cultures.

The records of the Native American are generally those made by those who contributed significantly to the chaos that makes them confusing, i.e. imperialistic European explorers and colonists, operating under royal European mandates. Just the description of the process is confusing. When Europeans made their earliest recorded contacts with Native Americans, the Native Americans were themselves in the process of exploring and conquering the continent. Success drove the process for all involved. As isolated groups prospered, population growth drove expansion that brought groups into competition and conflict with each other in hunter/gatherer societies.

Without a refined system of recording their progress, a few generations (in the history of a particularly active group) frequently brought them into territorial conflicts with relatives with whom they had lost contact (or knowlege of relationship). Agriculture at first reduced these conflicts, by reducing the migration, and making smaller areas more productive of things needed by the group. However, agriculture ultimately did much to contribute to alienation of related groups, by creating intensifying resource degradation and competition in territories that were having to support more and more people per unit of area.

We get a fair picture of this process from the history of the expedition of Hernando de Soto, through what is now the southeastern part of the United States. This history was written by a half-Indian Spanish nobleman named Garcilaso de la Vega. This history, The Florida of the Inca, was published in Spain in 1605. It was translated and edited by John G. Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner, and published by The University of Texas Press, Austin, in 1980.

According to De la Vega, the flagship of a three-ship fleet, commanded by Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon was shipwrecked in 1524 at the mouth of the Santee River, on Winyaw Bay, South Carolina. The Spanish and French explorations of the Souteast in this era have been exhaustively discussed by Paul E. Hoffman of Louisiana State University. The Delisle map (French, 1718) confirms the identity of the "river Jordan" as the Santee. From there De Ayllon "sailed toward the east (to Cape Fear) and landed on the coast of a peaceful and delightful region near Chicoria..."

De la Vega goes on to describe the deceptively cheerful reception of De Ayllon by the Chicoria. The Spaniards were banqueted and feted by the Chicoria for four days, at a site nine miles ("three leagues") inland. The festivities were followed by the sudden near wipe-out of the De Ayllon expedition by the Chicoria. It seems that De Ayllon had been there before, and had taken some of the friendly Chicoria as slaves when he left.

The people of Chicoria are officially identified by John Swanton in the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 145, The Indians of North America, as the Shakori. The Shakori were a large group of Siouan people who ranged over northern South Carolina and southern North Carolina. It is interesting that the second "i" in the Spanish version of Chicoria has been dropped in American renditions of the name, since it represents a syllable that is emphasised in the Coree cognate.

John Lederer identified the Shakori as culturally the same as the Winyaws. They lived in wattle plastered houses, like those of the poor Celts of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. They played at their ball games so hard their sweat soaked the playing fields. Their main industry was service as porters. Their neighbors were the Waterees (Guatarees), Creek people who tore off the faces of young women of other tribes, for burial with their dead nobility, reminiscent of activities of the Aztecs from whom they were descended.

The Coree culture was complex and territorially competitive. The Coranines were coastal people, but their ethnic and historic roots extended into the heart of America. They were lords of Woccocon, now known as Ocracoke, a Core Bank barrier island, and they were identified by John Lawson as Siouan farmers on the upper Neuse River, known there to Lawson as the Woccons.

Among the Coree kin were the Hatteras and the people of the Core Banks and Woccocon. They had been hunters and gatherers from Winyaw Bay northward to the Curry Tuck's Weyanoke River, and westward to the Mississippi Valley's western estuaries, before the confederation of the Iroquoian peoples in the Great Lakes area drove the Algonquians before them into the Siouan lands of the Southeast. There they created defensive alliances and displaced groups (like the Yuchi and Shawnee), and destroyed (actually dispersed) the powerful and mysterious Eries and Hurons.

One of the most interesting discussions of the Coree is in Tales and Traditions of the Lower Cape Fear, by James Sprunt, published in 1896:

"During the late (Civil) war these remains of an Indian settlement were frequently unearthed by the Confederates engaged upon the intrenchments around Fort Fisher; and here were buried the last of the Corees, Cheraws and other small tribes occupying the land once inhabited by the powerful Hatteras Indians. They were the allies of the (anti-European) Tuscaroras in 1711, and in an attack upon the English suffered defeat, and have now disappeared from the earth and their dialect is also forgotten. The Hatteras numbered about 3,000 warriors when Raleigh's expedition landed on Roanoke Island in 1584, and when the english made permanent settlements in that vicinity eighty years later, they were reduced to about fifteen bowmen. The Cape Fear Coree Indians told the English settlers of the Yeamans colony in 1669 that their lost kindred of the Roanoke Colony, including Virginia dare, the first white child born in America, had been adopted by once powerful Hatteras tribe and had become amalgamated with the children of the wilderness. It is believed that the Croatans of this vicinity are descendants of that race."

Ignorance of the textual records of the temporal reference frameworks sometimes makes a mockery of the archaeological interpretation of artifacts'historical significance. Doctrinal bias, based primarily on economic, political and military faits accompli, distorts the archaeological product rendered, unless the archaeologist has the historical knowledge and integrity to resist it. Pressures to produce (i.e. publish) make excessive demands on unimaginative archaeological intellects. Professional peers deal harshly with the historical heretic. And so the same foolishnesses are perpetrated, and the same nonsense is perpetuated, generation after generation.

Obfuscation in history is the result of ignorance, more often than not, because the perpetrator (or perpetuator) simply doesn't know the facts. At other times it is a deliberate misrepresentation of facts, to put a better face on a bad situation at a point in space and time. At its worst, it is a cynical lie, brazenly told and officially sanctioned, to achieve ends that are political (with their roots in economic vested interests).

The Native American is slipping into his own cultural and spiritual unreality, in an effort to escape the nonsense out of which he intuitively knows no sense can come. To clear the air over the American Mythology, we need to look honestly and realistically at the written records of the times under consideration, not at mute and moot artifacts and purpose-serving interpretations of their significance that hide the truth.

We need to face the facts of the meanness of human nature in economic conflict. That is the real ground from which we must carefully dig and plot the story of America's first millenium. The facts demand it. Thinking people should be asked to accept no less honest and coherent an explanation of the cultural mess our nation is in today, which has so many racial ramifications.

My own family has a record of over three hundred years in America. It would be surprising if, in that span of time, on a frontier of interface and intercourse of all kinds with the diverse Native American peoples (who were in a perpetual conflict with one another), some of my ancestors had not entered into marriage relations with Native Americans. They did, in fact, and the traditions are very explicit. The records are less revealing, for very real (if not good) reasons.

John Lawson advocated the wedded union of poor Europeans with Native Americans, for a variety of valid reasons. However, the idea that Indians were suitable mates for poor people has within it an elitist bias. The Europeans frequently followed his advice, but more often in spirit than in the letter. My great great great grandmother was traditionally identified as a Coree Indian woman.

Records suggest that the leaders of colonial society had a variety of relationships with the Native Americans on the frontier. My family was always associated with the "Lumbees" and "Coharies." The Coree were traditionally identified as "bad indians." The fascination in this for a young child was irresistable, but not irrepressible. I was not encouraged to look into it, but I did.

Until my sons became Boy Scouts, I did not pursue my interest in the dynamics of the genesis of the Native American into a sort of carnival curiosity, who (in the Southeast) has difficulty justifying his personal or subjective identity. When I became an assistant Scoutmaster, (by default, since nobody else in the community was willing to get involved) it became my duty to infuse into my sons James and Alan, and their like-minded schoolmates, an appreciation of the history and value system out of which the Boy Scout movement grew. It was generally unexciting, except for the vaguely interweaving into it of the Native American, and a rigor and vigorousness of ideal and exploit identified with him.

As a child I was untamed. My time was spent roving, foraging for my own identity. Civilization's bounties were spurned in favor of other goods. Wilderness was the lure, and freedom was my reward. Freedom always struggled mightily against the contraints of duty in my bosom. But duty ultimately won. I became fettered, if untamed. The Boy Scouts symbolize the tamed savage, who, but for the grace of God, would surely become a wild Indian. As a child I understood all this, without need or benefit of verbalization of it.

As a man, I knew from experience that the line of least resistance offers the greatest reward, as worth is socially measured. As a man I learned to appreciate the hypocricies that grease the way to social acceptance and material success. I learned, too late, the meaning of the Army's injunction, "Be all you can be." In spite of the Boy Scouts and my most judicious guidance, my boys still made many of the same mistakes I did. But we all came to understand that Horace Greely's order, "Go West, young man!" was just the echo of the mandate under which Europe profitably populated America with Whites and Blacks, Native American interests notwithstanding.

Thus vaguely put, the implications don't seem very sinister. We have to look at specific records to get a clear sense of what Mr. Greely implied. My great great great grandmother's people bore the brutal brunt of some of the early expressions of the "manifest destiny" promulgated by European authority, by its representatives in America. At the 28 July 1715 meeting of the North Carolina Executive Council the pattern was prepared for future castings of the fate of Native Ameicans (and injudicious acssociates and advocates), two years after the so-called "Tuscarora War." The record reads:

"The Governor having made known to this Board that the Core Indians have made a Revolt and Dangeruosly wounded one of his Majestes Subjects named Robert Shrieve It is the Opinion of this board that the said Action is a violation of the peace lately made with said Indians and that proper measures may and ought to be taken for the Entire Destruction of the said Nation of Indians..."

How's that for summary justice? The authorities then were somewhat less sensitive of national and personal rights, than they are today. Or were they? Ask the Somalis and the Sudanese. Military strategy and economic interests ride metaphorically strange horses, even starved and spavined plugs, in desert places that can provide staging areas for expeditions to control wealth.

Lest we imagine that Governor Eden's proclamation against the Corees was a local abberation from a more generally benevolent policy, listen to what Angus Calder tells us in his impressively scholarly tome, Revolutionary Empire, about concurrent treatment of the Irish Catholics. It reflects the written and unwritten English policies that impacted on Native Americans who impeded European progress or interfered with the European combine's harvest of wealth. The bitterness and heat of it still gags and sears Britain today, but it does nothing to harm the interests of the economic descendants of its perpetrators:

"The Lord Chancellor Bowes and the Chief Justice Robinson both distinctly laid down from the Bench 'That the law does not suppose any such person to exist as a Roman Catholic.'...Religion, not race, was the dividing factor by which Protestant landowners sought exclusive privilege, but the drive of the Code was virtually to create two different races (of people who were essentially racially homogeneous), identified with two different classes, the haves and the have-nots."

Does that help to make the Bosnia-Hertzegovina mess make sense? The obvious analogs are like historical parables. Open your eyes and you can't fail to see. But there is none so blind, etc. The problems for the Native American revolved and revolve around a powerful Anglo-European axis, not easily influenced by the ordinary person. This was a lesson brutally taught to a colonial militia major from North Carolins's Albemarle, when he presumed to resist it during the "Tuscarora War."

The census of the Indians made by John Lawson suggests that the Coree nation was insignificant, just a few families. Understanding of the tribal dynamics of North Carolina yields a different picture of these people, that was well known by a government that well understood why the Baron of Graffenried was spared, when Lawson was killed. A re-reading of John Barnwell's story condemns him out of his own mouth, and with him the entire European policy of American colonization.

Yesterday I got in the mail the Ward and Davis archaeological study of the Piedmont Siouan sites. It's not the sort of thing one reads, unless you enjoy the torture of being wrapped around an axle of hot tedium. It is eloquent in what it doesn't say about the contents of N.C. Piedmont Siouan kitchen middens.

Twelve sites were studied. Faunal remains were found in only nine of the sites. In the nine sites in which faunal remains were studied, there were 11,715 specimens of this category found. Of the 11,795 faunal remains found, only 6085 were identified, even though they were able to identify white-tailed deer and striped skunks (as opposed to the spotted variety). No bovine remains were identified, even as erratic intrusions of the sort my grandparents planted, when faithful cows died of natural causes.

Nearly half the faunal remains (48%) were unidentified in the Ward and Davis study. It takes a lot of integrity to report numbers like that. My obvious next question is whether or not it is conceivable that any of the unidentified osseous remains were those of bovine ungulates? If so, could they have been buffalo? If so, I wondered, could I see them? I immediately queried Jeffrey Crow, North Carolina State Archives Administrator of Historical Publications, who is an archaeologist with whom I've recently discussed such things, and I'm awaiting reply.

The buffalo must have been a key economic and cultural factor in the migration of the Sioux from the Northwest into the Southeast. The first reference to them, in the Southeast, is an oblique one. In 1591 Garcilaso de la Vega completed La Florida del Ynca, in which he noted that Hernando de Soto's expedition was fed beef by the people of Cofachiqui. They also saw cow horns and shields covered with cowhide. But they saw no cattle, even though they traveled on broad roads made by some unknown agency.

Keeping in mind that the main population centers of the Indians became settled by Europeans, often ultimately as cities and towns, we clearly have problems in archaeology in the realm of extrapolation from isolated Indian sites (which were probably occupied by the least socially and economically adept) to meaningful ethnographic data. Having made that criticism, I want to say that I'm not unmindful of the personnel, logistical and budgetary constraints under which such studies are conducted.

What we are basically talking about is tracing the migration of a people who, like modern Americans, had summer beach homes, and more substantial winter dwellings. In the summer they lived at the coast in easily ventilated framed houses that were covered and walled with rush mats. This is an adaptation of the Long House typical of the Iroquois and Algonquian, that left few archaeological artifiacts in the coastal Carolinas. In the winter they lived in more substantial homes, in the hills of the Piedmont of the Carolinas, built in the old Welsh thatched wattle and daub fashion.

Their social passion was hockey, played exactly as the old Celts played it--wildly enough to soak the ground with their sweat. They had guns as soon as the white man came among them, and were thereafter economically enslaved by their need for gunpowder and firewater, delivered to them in wicker-covered green bottles in exchange for fur and slaves. They had a long history of warfare with northern invaders, who finally historically obliterated them, in a political alliance with European invaders. It's an old story and tradition, that antedates the Civil War.

Old family stories have to be given some credence. Most of us are not smart enough to make them up from scratch. Since I was a boy, I have sought signs of the Corees, my Indian ancestors. Some of my neighbors have Indian artifact collections picked up in the Patetown area, that would beggar those in the museums in Raleigh. Torhunta has yielded bushels of artifacts per year for generations. There are signs, though, that the mother lode is about played out. The surface finds, after big rains, are just not what they used to be.

My search for the past is a simple one, that won't end with a pile of potsherds, points, pierced beads and deer horns, nor any other geo-, ethno-, zoo- or botano-archaeological artifacts. I've followed the paper trail. The Occoneechee Trail was a continuation of the Shenandoah Trail south of the Yadkin River Valley. On the Dividing Line Map the Shenandoah Trail ends at Wachaw, or the Heart of North Carolina. People don't think much about the signficance of Ft. Boone in S.C. In most people's minds D. Boone was just a colorful yokel in the hire of Hendersons, et al., from the Yadkin Valley to Kentucky.

Daniel Boone was a leader in the ultimate removal of the buffalo from the Southeast. He continued a tradition begun before Robert Beverly's time. Beverly describes, in The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), how the Indians of Virginia conducted mass hunts, in which they burned the cover from the land as they surrounded the buffalo and slaughtered them for their hides. Leather was the plastic of the industry of Beverly's time. Beverly was amazed that the Indians did not shoot each other in the frenzy of the kills.

The buffalo was the great builder of Indian roads, whose activity was much diminished by the time of the report of survivors of the Lost Colony of John White by William Strachey in 1612, who reported the lament of the closing of a major trail to the South, because of warfare. There were many less-traveled trails that led the enterprising to market in Wachaw times. Henderson makes it clear that there was a fierce economic struggle between North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia for the trade with Wachovia. It was a bitter pill for North Carolina and Virginia, but Charleston got Bishop Spangenberg's trade. In the light of that, it is interesting, that the map of the dividing line, by the enterprising Welshman Peter Jeffferson (father of Thomas Jefferson), et al, shows that the Shenandoah Trail ends at Unitas (site of the United Bretheren settlement), on the Yadkin River in 1749.

"Wachaw" combines Wacccamaw and Saxapahaw, later to gain fame as the Waxhaw home region of Andrew Jackson and James Polk. Unitas was as far as the wagons went then. Most of the trade and traffic went by river, as late as 1749. There was a lot of traffic through the old Chicora country before the last buffalo there was fed to Alexander Cuming. I've got a Cummings line in Wayne County, so I wonder how much my own people may have known about Crazy Alexander, King of the Cherokees. Certainly, they wasted no time in following Alexander Cuming into Cherokee country. There is a Pate Indian mound in East Tennessee, on the campus of the Agricultural College, UT, Knoxville.

The trails of the buffalo are well remembered. The buffalo was slaughtered to make room for European livestock, mostly beef cattle. My great grandfather, Frank Pate, herded cattle and hogs to Petersburg when he was a teenager, according to my grandfather Taud (Daniel F.) Pate. The Sherrods, who provided him his second of three wives, hired him to drive stock to the feeding stations they maintained on the way to Petersburg. I have an old muzzle loader made in Petersburg by a man named Daughtry. The brother-in-law of my greatx4 grandfather Isham Pate was a Daughtry.

There are a lot of facts you can get about the past that stratigraphic archaeology won't tell you, no matter how well you master the methodology of the discipline. Tellico Archaeology by Jefferson Chapman covers the same ground I have, as does The Prehistory Of North Carolina, by Mark Mathis and Jeffrey Crow. But archaeology is not going to yield the explicit data I need to trace the Chicoran diaspora, no matter how creative the imagination of the archaeologist. I've checked to see what they tell us.

The bones described by William Bartram have long since mouldered away in the humid heat and driving rains of the area. For me, the ancestors show the way. I know, that's not the way scientific History is written, but I am operating out of a personal milieu with a lot of questions that need answers. The nature of the questions is such that they cannot be meaningfully addressed by archaeology even as ostensibly definitive as the Indian Communities of the North Carolina Piedmont, A.D. 1000 to 1700, by H.T. Ward and R.P.S. Davis, Jr., without humble recourse to the old written records.

All my writing is work in progress. Please ask your friends to let me know if they run across Chicora, Shakore, Sugaree, Sugau, Saxapahaw, Haw, Core, etc., Bureau of Ethnology synonyms, in old material not readily availible. James Adair deleted this group of Indians from his History, leaving an odd lacuna in a line of his text. Then he hunted treasure, ran trading posts, waged war and speculated in land in the areas they occupied before their displacement and eventual extinction, absorbence into the Catawbas or the Cherokees, or migration westward in a variety of companies and statuses.

I have hoped for a long time that I might find specific reference to interaction between the Polks (originally Pollocks) of Sugar Creek (in the present Charlotte area) and Sugaree Indians. The Polks probably bought their land on Sugar Creek, but must have been instrumental in elimination of the buffalo from the area. I'm looking for the details of the events leading to the founding of Charlotte. It's a rough but interesting story of allies, ancestors and associates of the Catawbas, mostly about folks who were simply absorbed into the rough and dirty edge of White society--not material for official historians.

For decades I knew that I was descended from a self-identified Coree Indian woman, before coming to grips with it and meaningfully relating myself to the significance of this claim by my ancestors. When I began studying and writing about the Coree Indians (who are officially known by many obscurely related cognates), I learned that this was a subject in which few were interested, and one many would prefer to see suppressed. "The moving finger having writ, moved on," etc. My grandfather said, "Well, it's not something to talk about," as he grudgingly shared the little he knew.

To really appreciate it, we must think of history as a process. It is meaningless as a set of sterile events and associated dates. The dates are relevant only when they provide correlative reference points for related events of human interaction. We have to see History as the reason we are who, what and where we are. It should be participative, in the ethnographic sense. It should yield a history and a heritage, a picture, in which each of us can proudly find himself, his parents--and his ancestors.

My family took a fierce pride in our Indian ancestry. But the flaw is in the "fierce." We have come to fear words. Well, sticks and stones may break our bones, as the old saying goes, but if we know who we are, words should never hurt us. If we're wrong, we can fix it. Words may malign, damn or purport to demean us, but they can never really hurt us if we are socially well and morally strong. The problem with social political correctness is that nothing, including ignorance, is perfect.

However protective and defensive our sociologically engineered environment, we all get disturbing glimpses of reality beyond our personal borders, some of which come crashing unexpectedly into our worlds, as I recently did into my brother's life. His father, my mother said, "Was a Lumbee boy." My interest in the social evolution of Southeastern Native Americans has afforded me several disturbing glimpses of our past. In a less sensitive psychological and sociological era, writers were sometimes painfully honest about "What happened?" We have to recur to those writers to learn explicitly who we are what we are--and why?

A writer with a clear view of the whole spectrum of North Carolina's historical reality was Archibald Henderson. I have an ancient Henderson line, so I'm predisposed to pay attention to Archibald, whose 5-volume NORTH CAROLINA The Old North State And The New was published by the Lewis Publishing Co. (Chicago) in 1941. Henderson claimed responsibility for only volumes I and II, since the other volumes are mainly compendiae of family information from private sources. Of volumes I and II Henderson said:

"This history of North Carolina is not written to please North Carolinians...."

Then Henderson goes on to explain the laborious scholarly process, from overwhelmingly voluminous and diverse sources from all over the world, through which he wrote. He said, "Constructive characters and creative mentalities, hitherto under-rated, misprized and even ignored, have been placed, so far as the writer's critical faculty permits, in truer perspective." In the process he searched the canon and apocrypha of early North Carolina history, but had such a voluninous bibliography he didn't include it in his published work.

Henderson touched all the bases. He promoted no causes. He opened all the doors for those who want to peek into the corners and rummage through the boxed-up goodies so treasured by the addicted History enthusiast. Henderson's History should be the next priority for re-print by the Historical Publications Section of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

Henderson discussed Barnwell's campaign, and notes the capture and enslavement of the friendly Core Indians that I'm studying. Indian slavery was not a uniquely North Carolinian instititution in the 1700's and 1800's, even though South Carolina and Virginaia outlawed it (North Carolina did not). But Indian slaves were held as "coloreds", mulattos, etc., in all the slave states, until the end of the Civil War, as my friend Claude Moore could tell you from his own family history. Dirt-digging archaeology isn't going to tell me what I want to know about those folks, and their kin who avoided or escaped bondage.

Archaeology is defined by Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary as "the scientific study of the life and culture of ancient peoples, as by excavation of ancient cities, relics, artifacts, etc." We have tended more and more to think of archaeology as an adjunct of geology, involving systematic digging in gridded earth to uncover mute and moot objects, about which convicted adepts then elaborate more or less plausible, gentlemanly, impersonal and benign interpretations, based on previous interpretations that have achieved the status of "doctrine."

Most of this activity ultimately subordinates itself to specialized branches of nuclear physics for dating archaeological finds. I am not totally ignorant of this sort of thing, since I have a major in Nuclear Technology from the University of Nebraska, earned after my degree in Biology from Huntingdon College. A much more satisfying aspect of archaeology is the study of explicitly descriptive and graphic artifacts, such as ancient writings and maps. This is the intellectual domain of the explicit and incriminating, that frequently fails to be gentlemanly non-attributive.

The graphic and explicitis the classic domain of the Historian, and we must include the written records, most of which have, or find, no place in the history books, nor in the more or less intelligently reasoned conclusions of the archaeologists, many of whom presume to interpret the affairs of historical peoples with points and potsherds. Those folks are currently not accepting of the role of the buffalo in the history of North Carolina's Native Americans, even though the "Weroance" painted by John White is wearing a buffalo robe around his waist, with an obvious buffalo tail hanging down behind!

History, by identification is the story of vested interests, expressed to favor the economic powers that be. This History is usually funded out of the public till--since capitalists never spend their own money--so its content can be carefully monitored and controlled. In my writings I have predjudiced my theses, at my own expense, by making no bones about my skepticism of much geo-archaeological activity and its interpretations.

I contend (as did Heinrich Schliemann and other classic archaeologists) that archaeology of sites significant in historical times must be correlated with the most ancient written and graphic artifacts, such as contemporary written reports of observations and associated drawings and maps. This is the touchstone of valid archaeology. Any other approach is a journey into Alice's Wonderland, regarding matters relating to the historical Southeastern Native American.

On occasion, I have been rather flippant about matters that are actually of serious interest, even concern, to me, relating to my own understanding of the dynamic of Siouan migrations. In some writings I have expressed my resolve to leave description of such things to those whose livelihood depends upon their creativity within the established doctrinal structure. Unfortunately, for me, I'm having difficulty giving up efforts to solve the mystery of my Indian ancestors' fate, and can't resist making some observations about such things, as I perceive them.

For some reason unknown to N.C. historians, the Polks (originally Pollocks, generally identified as Scotch-Irish; literate, articulate and communicating professional soldiers and civil servants, as represented in America) gravitated to the Siouan Sugarees in the present Charlotte area in the mid-1700's. The Sugarees were linguistic relatives of the Catawba people (I believe the Katteras-Woccons of the Core Banks) who were run out of the Wayne County area by the Tuscaroras. They were related linguistically to the Tutelos, Saponis and Occoneechees, that I further contend were a part of the old civilized and culturally sophisticated kingdom of Chicora, that was romantically seated at Cofatechiqui in De Soto's time. The Core, or Coree, were linguistic relatives of the Woccons identified by Lawson as Siouans, who were in the Goldsboro, N.C. area.