-
Title
-
Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes
-
Date
-
1873
-
Bibliographic Citation
-
Jones Jr., Charles C. 1873. Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes. D. Appleton and Company, New York.
-
annotates
-
• This volume is a wide-ranging synthesis of Native American antiquities in the southeastern US. Jones Jr. was a 19th-century lawyer and amateur antiquarian. Drawing on site visits, artifact collections, historical documents, and correspondence with other collectors, he describes burial mounds, ossuaries, ceramic vessels, stone tools, effigies, shell objects, and copper artifacts. His focus is Georgia, but he includes comparative material from Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and beyond.
• The work is organized typologically and thematically—covering topics such as mound construction, funerary practices, cremation, ornamentation, and artistic expression. While detailed in description, the study lacks modern archaeological methods: there is no stratigraphic control, limited contextual documentation, and no analytical framework beyond typological classification.
Choctaw / Ancestral Choctaw Relevance:
• The Choctaw are mentioned occasionally and sporadically in broad sweeping comparative statements alongside other southeastern nations. Jones includes them in lists of southeastern tribes known to practice mound burial or cremation, typically alongside Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee. He does not attribute any specific site, artifact, or practice in the book directly to the Choctaw.
• Eastern Mississippi and western Alabama, as discussed, overlap with historically documented Choctaw territory. However, Jones does not explore possible cultural continuity between “moundbuilding peoples” and the Choctaw or other contemporary Indigenous groups.
o His treatment of cultural affiliations emphasizes distance between the archaeological record and the known tribes of the historic period.
• Ceramic types and funerary urns described in Gulf Coast and interior contexts are now known to be associated with ancestral Choctaw, but Jones does not draw such connections. His framework avoids assigning moundbuilders to known tribes, consistent with 19th-century tendencies to separate Indigenous material culture from living Native nations.
Assessment for CRM Use / Archaeological Utility:
• This book does not contain verifiable archaeological data in the modern sense. Field methods were unstructured, provenience is imprecise, and artifact contexts are frequently unknown or anecdotal.
• The text does have legacy value in documenting mound and artifact locations before 20th-century development and destruction. Some of the described artifacts and sites may no longer exist or be recognizable today.
• For CRM archaeologists, this source may be useful for historical background or identifying sites in Alabama and Mississippi, but not for drawing cultural conclusions or evaluating site integrity.
Data Presentation / Decolonizing Commentary:
• Jones’s language reflects 19th-century academic norms. He frequently refers to Native peoples as “savages,” “primitive,” and “aborigines,” and frames their material culture as evidence of lost or vanished civilizations. These terms are now recognized as colonial and pejorative.
o He describes Indigenous peoples as removed or disconnected from the authorship of the mounds, reinforcing a narrative of cultural rupture and erasure.
• Jones does not cite Indigenous perspectives or oral traditions. He omits discussion of the Choctaw’s own historical accounts or any potential cultural continuity with earlier material traditions.
o His interpretive framework reinforces the myth of the “Moundbuilder Other,” rather than exploring the lived histories of southeastern Native peoples.
• Opportunities for reframing: Many of the mound forms, funerary ceramics, and artistic traditions described in the book can now be linked through archaeology, oral history, and ethnography to specific tribes, including the Choctaw. A contemporary reanalysis of these same materials through an Indigenous-centered lens would recognize continuity, resilience, and regional variation rather than disappearance or decline.
-
owner
-
sprice@wiregrassarchaeology.com