Pepper, George H. (George Hubbard), 1873-1924 Search this
Extent:
13 Photographic prints (silver gelatin)
120 Glass plate negatives
125 Copy negatives (acetate)
Culture:
Mississippian Tradition (archaeological culture) Search this
Type:
Collection descriptions
Archival materials
Photographic prints
Glass plate negatives
Copy negatives
Slides (photographs)
Photographs
Black-and-white negatives
Place:
Nacoochee Valley (Ga.)
Date:
1915
Summary:
The photographs in this collection document the excavation of the Nacoochee Mound, located along the banks of the upper Chattahoochee River in the mountains of northeast Georgia, in the summer of 1915. The excavation was a joint project between the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation and the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Scope and Contents:
The Nacoochee Mound excavation photographs consists of glass plate negatives, photographic prints and copy negatives related to the joint effort of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology to excavate the mound in the summer of 1915. The photographic materials primarily depict the mound photographed from various directions before and during excavation, but also objects and antiquities exhumed from the mound and members of the field team posed singly and as a group on the mound site, including George G. Heye and his wife Thea Heye. Any photographs that include images of burials or human remains have been restricted. Other MAI staff photographed include Frederick Webb Hodge, Charles Turbyfill and Edwin Coffin. George Gustav Heye is listed as the photographer but it is much more likely that George Hubbard Pepper or another one of the MAI staff shot the photographs.
Glass negatives include N00478-N00597. The copy negatives (acetate) have the same N #'s as the glass plate negatives and also include N34266, N36690-N36693, which are copies of the photographic prints. These copy negatives were made by the Museum of the American Indian sometime in the 1960s as part of a large photograph conservation project. Silver gelatin prints include P11593-P11605.
Arrangement note:
Arranged by catalog number.
Biographical/Historical note:
Between May and October of 1915, the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology collaborated to excavate the Nacoochee Mound, located in the Nacooche Valley along the upper Chattahoochee River in northeast Georgia. One of the earliest scientific excavations of its kind in the state of Georgia, the Nacoochee Mound excavation was headed by Frederick Webb Hodge and George Hubbard Pepper and found evidence of at least two mound stages with a total of seventy-five human burials, some of them intrusive from a later time. George Heye, Hodge, and Pepper's co-authored paper, "The Nacoochee Mound in Georgia," appeared in vol. 4, no. 3 of Contributions from the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation.
Although there is also evidence for previous occupation, archaeological evidence at the Nacoochee Mound site and the nearby Eastwood site suggests that these two mound sites probably served as local, primarily administrative, centers during the Middle Lamar Period (approximately late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries). (particularly Eastwood) The village around Nacoochee Mound has not been excavated but is possibly the site of Nacoochee or Chota, two Cherokee villages documented by Colonel George Chicken's 1715 expedition. These two towns continued to appear on maps until the mid-eighteenth century but were abandoned shortly thereafter.
Separated Materials:
See George Pepper's field notes from the Nacoochee Mound, 1915 in the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation records (NMAI.AC.001) in Box 191, Folder 4-8. All archaeological materials from this excavation can be found in NMAI's archaeology collections.
Provenance:
The negatives are field photographs created by the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation in 1915. It is still not clear when or how the photographic prints came to the Museum of the American Indian, though they were cataloged sometime around 1935.
Restrictions:
Access to NMAI Archive Center collections is by appointment only, Monday - Friday, 9:30 am - 4:30 pm. Please contact the archives to make an appointment (phone: 301-238-1400, email: nmaiarchives@si.edu). Some photographs are restricted due to cultural sensitivity.
Rights:
Permission to publish materials from the collection must be requested from National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center. Please submit a written request to nmaiphotos@si.edu. For personal or classroom use, users are invited to download, print, photocopy, and distribute the images that are available online without prior written permission, provided that the files are not modified in any way, the Smithsonian Institution copyright notice (where applicable) is included, and the source of the image is identified as the National Museum of the American Indian. For more information please see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use and NMAI Archive Center's Digital Image request website.
Topic:
Excavations (Archaeology) -- Georgia -- Nacoochee Valley (Ga.) Search this
Mounds -- Georgia -- Nacoochee Valley (Ga.) Search this
Antiquities -- Georgia -- Nacoochee Valley (Ga.) Search this
Indians of North America -- Georgia -- Nacoochee Valley (Ga.) -- Antiqiuties Search this
Genre/Form:
Slides (photographs)
Photographic prints
Photographs
Black-and-white negatives
Citation:
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Nacoochee Mound excavation photographs, Item Number; National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution.
