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Title
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Mobile’s Waterfront: The Development of a Port City
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Date
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2000
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Bibliographic Citation
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Gums, Bonnie L. and George W. Shorter, Jr. 2000. Mobile’s Waterfront: The Development of a Port City. In Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes, edited by Amy L. Young, pp. 30-51. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
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annotates
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• 1MB189 excavations monograph, which divides the site up by the excavation blocks from the 1990s.
• Choctaw and Creek pottery recovered, including colonoware forms that are not attributed to Native or African influences or makers.
• Earlier Mississippian sherds are attributed to redeposited materials, and incidental inclusions in features that represented land filling activities, particularly Feature 16 (labeled as a midden). This feature also contained portions of vessels they attributed to Creek and Choctaw potters, but the context dated to the Spanish Colonial occupation of the city and they doubted that Native potters were still living in Mobile in the early nineteenth century (Gums and Shorter 2000:59).
• Excavations in Block 1 revealed three smudge pits (Features 67, 80, and 129) around the perimeter of Structure 1, and while the burning of wet corncobs to process hides is mentioned, the assemblages included a mix of European and Native materials, and no attribution is made.
• The entire Native American assemblage from Block 2, as analyzed by Mueller in Chapter 9, represents Choctaw or ancestral Choctaw types: Moundville and D’Olive types, Port Dauphin series (attributed to Mobilian potters), Chickachae and Kemper combed, as well as Chattahoochee Brushed (attributed to Creek potters).
• The historical background portion of the report mentions Choctaws ‘in and around’ Mobile from Bernard Romans.