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Warren Wilson Archaeological Field School
Day 31, 7/13/02

More than five hundred people came to the site today to visit our welcome tent, to take site tours, to look at artifacts, to look at photos of fieldwork, to look at posters and brochures, and to visit with members of the Catawba community from South Carolina. Dave describing archaeological finds at the Berry site during the 2001 and 2002 field seasons, and outlining our vision of a continuing project to study the archaeology of Spanish expeditions and native chiefdoms in the upper Catawba Valley.

Thanks to everybody who visited us at the Berry site on Saturday for our public field day. We spoke with people about the archaeological fieldwork we have been doing, and we showed people the burned structures we have uncovered during our excavations. We shared our thoughts about the nature of the Spanish presence here in the upper Catawba Valley during their expeditions across southeastern North America in the sixteenth century, and about the native town that was situated here during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of our students were still doing fieldwork today. Others were talking with visitors about artifacts and about many aspects of our field project. It was a fun way to wind down a truly remarkable field season.

Thanks to the Berry family for their stewardship of a remarkably rich archaeological site and their generous support of our interests in studying it and other sites in Burke and surrounding counties, and for their help in making our public field day a tremendous success!

Thanks to everybody who visited us on a rainy day, thanks to the many different people who have made many different contributions to our project this year, and please come back to visit us here on the web and in the field this coming year!

Thanks to our friends in Morganton, Hickory, Charlotte, and Asheville, without whom our 2002 field season would not have been nearly as successful nor as much fun as it has been.

We appreciate contributions and donations from Warren Wilson College (Asheville, NC), Western Piedmont Community College (Morganton, NC), Mary Charlotte Safford, Paige McCall, Cyndie Calloway, Raymond Goodfellow, Dori Barron, Lee Kiser, Regina Nesbitt, Lynne Galvin, Lamar Wommack, Ben Anderson, Larry Clark, the Collett family, the Berry family, Dale Feed and Coal Company (Larry Dale), Morganton Timber Products (Larry Merrell), Wall Lumber, Eddie Sellers, Julie Swaney, Marshall Walker, Abbot Construction Company (Ken Waters), Lowe's Of Morganton (Carl Wyland), Sossoman's Funeral Home, Historic Burke Foundation (Micki Vacca), Burke Historical Society (Dottie Ervin), Witherspoon Surveying (Chris Witherspoon and Andrew Fleming), Appalachian Naturescapes (Terrel Knutson and Carl Meyers), and the City of Morganton.

We are also grateful for media coverage of our field project by ABC 13 from Asheville, WLOS TV in Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer, Morganton News-Herald, the Asheville Citizen-Times, the Hickory Daily Record, the Raleigh News and Observer, the AP Wire Service, and NPR in Charlotte.

Please keep in touch, check back here for updates about our plans for fieldwork in 2003 and beyond, and please consider joining the Friends of Catawba Archaeology to get involved in the study of native chiefs and Spanish explorers in the upper Catawba Valley during the sixteenth century.