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Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009

Excavation finds in Telfair could rewrite history on DeSoto

A Telfair County archaeological site has yielded the largest number of early Spanish artifacts ever found outside Florida, prompting its lead archaeologist to conclude that it – and not Macon – was a location visited by Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto.

“It really is a big deal,” said Dennis Blanton, a Fernbank Museum archaeologist who presented a paper on the findings at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference last week. “Some went so far as to use the words ‘slam dunk.’ But those who have devoted their careers to the topic want to see more. I’ve joked: What’s it going to take, monogrammed cuff links?”

The most commonly accepted theory since the 1980s has been that DeSoto’s path came through what is now Macon, where a thriving Lamar Indian community built the large mounds that remain today.

But Blanton says he now believes the village where DeSoto stopped in 1540, called Ichisi in chronicles of the explorer’s trip, was in modern Telfair County near an old channel of the Ocmulgee River.

His reasons: The excavation turned up beads dating from the DeSoto period, as well as iron, brass and silver objects. Nothing of this nature has been found at the Macon site.

The finds were in and around the remains of a building Blanton identified as a council house because of its design, large size and the presence of fragments of shell and elaborate smoking pipes.

Blanton added that almost all Spanish objects found previously were with burials, which also makes the Telfair location unique. The council house was burned down soon after the time of DeSoto’s passage, Blanton said.

“It’s sort of like Georgia’s version of Pompeii,” he said. “You’ve got this sudden destruction, and there it lay for 500 years. ... We’re finding these Spanish artifacts right where they were left. That’s just golden for us.”

But DeSoto is a contentious topic in the world of archaeology, and some disagree with Blanton’s interpretation.

“We think DeSoto would have headed to the Fall Line where villages were,” said Marvin Smith, an archaeologist at Valdosta State University. “He was looking for food and wealth.”

Smith, one of the researchers who reconstructed the commonly accepted route of DeSoto through Macon, said the objects found in Telfair County might have come to America with DeSoto but reached the area through trade.

Smith said pig bones or the remains of armor or horseshoes would be even more persuasive evidence. DeSoto traveled with a 600-man army, which was herding pigs for food as it went.

Another possible explanation for the Spanish artifacts, which Blanton acknowledged in his paper, is that they came from the failed 1526 colony founded near Sapelo Sound by Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon.

“The colony dispersed, and it’s believed that many of the people went to live with Indians,” said Stephen Hammack, a Macon archaeologist who is secretary of the Ocmulgee Archaeological Society. “Those items could be trade goods that were remnants from the colony.”

Hammack thinks “the jury’s still out” on whether DeSoto stopped at the Telfair site.

The theory that DeSoto traveled through Macon is based on historical records of his journey and what is known about the location of Indian populations during that era, said Blanton and Smith. But no archaeological evidence has been found to support that route, and a 1939 federal commission actually placed DeSoto’s trek closer to Telfair.

“People have dug and dug in the Macon area and there are simply no Spanish artifacts to be found,” Blanton said.

Smith, who has spent much of his career tracking Spanish artifacts across the Southeast, said he hopes further excavation will reveal more about the rest of the Telfair settlement.

“It would be nice to see how big a political unit that really was,” he said. “I think we’re going to learn an awful lot about that region.”

Blanton said he plans further investigations at the site as well as other possible DeSoto stops in the Dublin area and near the Flint River in the Albany area.

When the project began in 2006, Blanton and collaborator Frankie Snow weren’t even looking for DeSoto. They were initially searching another part of the property for an early Spanish mission when, almost by chance, they tried digging in the area where the council house was found.

For the first two years, Blanton’s team included many local volunteers as well as members of the Muscogee Creek Nation, whose ancestors populated most of Middle Georgia at the time DeSoto arrived.

The site is owned by Glass Land & Timber LLC, whose owners are Wilson and Patricia Thorpe of St. Simons.

“We’re as amazed as they are,” said Wilson Thorpe this week. “It’s just by happenstance they even found this site.”

Blanton said Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta plans to open an exhibit in April or May featuring items found at the excavation.