Stallings Island is the type site of the Stallings culture, a Late Archaic culture of the Middle Savannah River Valley of South Carolina and Georgia in the American Southeast, dated between approximately 5500 and 3000 years ago. The site is located on Stallings Island, in Columbia County, Georgia, in the Middle Savannah River.
The people who lived on Stallings Island hunted deer with stone and antler points and atlatl darts, and fished with bone fishhooks and nets with soapstone net weights, and ate turtles. Several burials were identified at Stallings Island, probably as many as 200-300 total.
The site was first excavated by C.C. Jones of the Peabody museum in the 1920s, and has been tested at least 12 times since that period. Most recently, Stallings culture sites have been investigated by Kenneth E. Sassaman of the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Stallings Culture
Stallings culture is a regional expression of the Shell Mound Archaic, and it is known for the earliest yet known pottery in the North American continent, a fiber-tempered ware dated to about 4500 years BP.
Stallings Island pottery is fiber tempered, that is to say the potters mixed a quantity of Spanish mosss or shredded palmetto leaves into the clay meant for the pots. The oldest ceramics from Stallings has been dated to ca. 5100 BP. Other Stallings sites include the Rabbit Mount, Sapelo Island and Bilbo sites in Georgia.,
Sources
This article on Stallings Island is a part of the About.com Guide to the Archaic Period, and part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Sassaman, Kenneth E. 2006. People of the Shoals: Stallings Culture of the Savannah River Valley. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
This article is a part of the About.com Guide to Archaic Period.
