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Hardaway Site
NC-740, Badin,
NC,
USA
Latitude & Longitude:
35° 24' 19.0008",
-80° 7' 2.46"
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North Carolina State
Historical Marker |
Marker Text: "Archaeological site key to understanding earliest native population. Its occupation dates to ca. 10,000 B.C. One mi. N.E." The peculiar characteristics of the Hardaway Site, a bowl-shaped depression atop a hill overlooking the Yadkin River, plus the availability in the Uwharrie Mountains of stone for tools, combined to make the spot an Indian campsite for thousands of years and a modern laboratory for testing archaeological theories. During the Paleo-Indian to Early Archaic Periods (12,000-5000 B.C.), Indians were drawn to the site to exploit the resources of the area to manufacture projectile points and stone tools. Those activities created stratified cultural deposits as much as four feet in depth. The site takes its name from the construction company which in 1913 built the Narrows Dam and Badin Lake on behalf of L’Aluminium Francais, a French aluminum manufacturer. The research potential of the site was first recognized in 1937 by H. M. Doerschuk, an engineer and amateur archaeologist.
Hardaway is among the many archaeological sites in the Piedmont associated with Joffre L. Coe, founder of the Research Laboratories of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina and mentor to generations of archaeologists. Two others are Town Creek and Saura Town. Coe’s research, published in 1964 and based on work at Hardaway between 1948 and 1958, presented models subsequently adopted by other archaeologists. Based on an abundance of discrete projectile point types, Coe identified a series of cultural periods, the earliest being the “Hardaway Occupation,” extending as far back as 10,000 B.C. The research pushed back the date of when it is generally assumed that the eastern U.S. was first occupied. In recognition of its place in understanding the nation’s prehistory, the Hardaway Site was declared in 1990 a National Historic Landmark (only the second archaeological site in North Carolina, after Town Creek, to have that distinction).
References:
Joffre Lanning Coe, The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont (1964)
I. Randolph Daniel, Jr., Hardaway Revisited: Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast (1998)
National Register of Historic Places (1984) and National Historic Landmark (1990) listings
Roy S. Dickens, Jr. and H. Trawick Ward, eds., Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology (1985)
Mark Mathis and Jeffrey J. Crow, eds., The Prehistory of North Carolina: An Archaeological Symposium (1983)
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Hardaway Site Historical Marker Location Map, Badin, North Carolina
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