NEWS

Alcoa donates N.C. archaeological specimens

By SPEED HALLMAN
Office of Development

CHAPEL HILL -- Nearly 2 million spear points, stone tools and pottery shards unearthed in Stanly County comprise a census in stone and ceramics, revealing clues about North Carolina's earliest inhabitants.

Archaeologists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unearthed the 10,000-year-old artifacts at the Hardaway site on the Yadkin River, the oldest excavated archaeological site in the state and one of the oldest in North America. Alcoa Inc., owner of the land and the artifacts, has transferred ownership of part of the collection – some 135,519 artifacts – to the university’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology.

"Hardaway is our best window into life 10,000 years ago," said Vin Steponaitis, director of the Research Laboratories. "This gives us a collection we can use to teach students and citizens of North Carolina about some of the oldest cultures in the state."

Steponaitis praised Alcoa's stewardship of the site and the artifacts, and said the company was instrumental in winning National Historic Landmark status for the site recently from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

"Even though the artifacts were found on our property, we believe they belong to the citizens of North Carolina," said Bruce Cox, manager of Alcoa’s Badin Works. "We wanted to transfer them to the university not only to help educate the student body there, but also to gain a considerable understanding of the history of North Carolina and our ancestors."

About 1.8 million pieces from Hardaway were collected between 1948 and 1980 and brought to Chapel Hill for study. Only about 10 percent has been cleaned and cataloged. Boxes and boxes -- 491 to be precise -- of artifacts are stored in Wilson Library awaiting study. Steponaitis is seeking gifts and grants to finish the job.

Even so, 10 percent was enough for Carolina researchers to publish two ground-breaking archaeological studies based on material found at the site.

Tod Hunt, a 1970 Carolina alumnus and great-grandson of an Alcoa founder, helped Carolina negotiate the transfer with Alcoa headquarters. His grandfather, Roy A. Hunt, was chairman of Alcoa when a Carolina archaeologist first set foot at Hardaway.

Alcoa built an aluminum manufacturing plant at Badin in 1917. The site was named for the Hardaway Construction Co., builder of the dam at Badin Lake that provides electricity for the plant.

The area had been popular among arrowhead hunters for years, and in 1937, an Alcoa engineer brought Carolina archaeologist Joffre Coe to the site. Formal excavations began on a small scale after World War II; then Coe turned his full attention to the site in the mid-1950s. He found a rich array of spear points -- enough to determine that at least three distinct cultures occupied the site during the Archaic Period (8000 - 1000 B.C.). The name "Hardaway" was given to the earliest type of spear-point found, followed by "Palmer" and "Kirk" - names of Badin families.

Coe was the first to determine a cultural sequence for the period and his 1964 book "The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont" detailed his findings. But sharing his information had a down side -- relic hunters from all over the Southeast descended on the site and removed some artifacts, despite the best efforts of Alcoa and the university to protect the site. Today, North Carolina's open records laws protect archaeological sites by permitting their locations to be withheld.

In the second major Hardaway study, recently published as "Hardaway Revisited" (University of Alabama Press), UNC-CH doctoral student Randy Daniel compared Hardaway material to artifacts found at other sites in the Carolinas and traced individual pieces to ancient stone quarries in the Uwharrie mountain area. His work gives scientists a new perspective on early travel and settlement in the region.

Steponaitis said Alcoa's gift makes the Hardaway artifacts permanently available to future scholars and students at Carolina. He said he expected that new technologies will be used to answer new questions, much as Daniel was able to shed new light on ancient cultures 35 years after Coe's work was published. Appraisers said the collection has unlimited research potential for archaeologists studying the ancient cultures of the Carolina Piedmont and the Southeast.

The artifacts from Hardaway join the university's 5 million-piece North Carolina Archaeological Collection, one of the finest collections of Southeastern archaeological materials. The collection contains artifacts from about 7,000 North Carolina sites, with 98 of the state's 100 counties represented. It also includes extensive photographic collections dating from the 1930s, and smaller archaeological and ethnographic collections from Latin America, Europe and Japan.

Materials from the Piedmont, including findings from the UNC-CH campus, dominate the collection. Excavations at the Eagle Hotel site near Graham Memorial and behind Battle-Vance-Pettigrew turned up details of early student life. Work at the Occaneechi site on the Eno River in Hillsborough revealed the beads, bells and pipe bowls signaling the first contact with Europeans.

The collection outgrew the Research Labs' small basement quarters in Alumni Building years ago. Much of it is stored in Wilson Library. The library needs the space, and Steponaitis wants to bring the collection out to teach North Carolinians about the state's first inhabitants. His plans include a traveling exhibit for schools and libraries around the state and a new building to house the collection and exhibit its finest specimens.

"This is the archive that underlies our current understanding of North Carolina's ancient history," Steponaitis said. "The North Carolina Archaeological Collection needs a permanent home, a place where this part of the state's legacy will always be available for teaching and research and can be displayed to the public."

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Development Office contact: Speed Hallman, (919) 962-0027