Hello, everyone, and welcome back to then Again, the podcast of the Northeast Georgia History Center. I am Marie Bartlett, the director of education here, and today I have with me Dr. Ben Steer, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at Western Carolina University. Thank you so much for being with us today.

It's my pleasure to be here.

Today we are going to be talking about Cherokee architecture, and I do believe it's going to be quite a whirlwind of a tour through time and space here today. I'm so excited to learn more about this because, of course, the Northeast Georgia History Center, we are on the traditional lands of the Cherokee, and we actually have a Cherokee home on our property as well, the White Path cabin, which we'll get to a little bit later. But I really would like to know, Dr. Steer, in layman's terms, can you give us a brief overview of what an average Cherokee home would have looked like? And I know that depends on the time and perhaps the specific location, but could you give us a really broad overview and maybe a few broad overviews depending on the time and space?

Yeah, sure, I'd be happy to. And I promise I will get to Cherokee cabins the 1820s, but before. So I will do my best to sort of lead us to an average description of what an average Cherokee household looked like in the 1820s. Kind of contemporary with the White Path cabin. But I'm going to go back in time to around Ad. 1400 and talk about how I like that idea of what does the average Cherokee house look like? Well, let's begin around ad. 1400. So roughly 600 years ago or so, we see across the southeastern United States among ancestral Cherokee people, but also ancestral Creek people, broadly speaking, like folks living indigenous people living here in the southeastern US. Particularly the Southern Appalachian Mountain region where we are, where both you and I are today. We see the development of a common type of house, like a primary domestic structure that explorers, spanish explorers in the 15 hundreds describe and then English explorers in later centuries often describe sometimes as a hot house. And it's a house form that begins by first indigenous folks would dig out a semi subterranean basin, sort of dig out like a shallow basin maybe a couple of feet deep into the ground. Within that basin. They would then build, sort of set the central hearth, the central fireplace in the house, four big corner support post. And then using a style of architecture that's called earth fast architecture, where you set the poles directly into the ground, build a house roughly 25ft by 25ft on the side. The shape is sort of square with rounded corners and then once that sort of square with rounded corner floor plan with your four central supports is kind of set then building up roof rafters into almost like kind of like a conical roof shape. They're sometimes almost described as like sugar loaves and then cover that roof with thatch. And that well built Winter know for folks who are interested in the Southeast. If you've been to places like the Museum in Etowa or have visited the Okamalgi National Monument down in Georgia or if you've been to the Akuna Lusty living village in Cherokee, North Carolina that reconstructed Winter house is probably the kind of thing that you've seen. And that might be your idea of the kind of iconic, pre contact Cherokee house form. And indeed that winter house persists up into the 17 hundreds. Along with that winter house folks, after the 15 hundreds we can see in the archaeological record are sometimes building small corn cribs, rectangular or circular corn cribs, again using earth fast architecture, so putting posts right in the ground and then on well documented archaeological sites that date to like after 1500. So kind of between 1500 and 1700, we also see in parts of the Cherokee homeland folks building a rectangular summer house that accompanies the winter house, and that's a more open structure. It's rectangular. If your winter house is, say, 25ft per side, and I'm converting like, meters to feet in my head as I do this, because we do archaeology of the metric system. But those rectangular houses might be like 2020 5ft long by maybe ten or 15ft wide. And they're rectangular, often open on one side to create a breezeway, kind of think like almost like a gazebo or kind of open structure. And so those are not heavily insulated. The winter houses are sort of like chinked up with clay, with what's waddle and dolph. So they're really well insulated. Those rectangular houses are open. And so when you look at explorers accounts and folks like Henry Timberlake, military personnel from the 18th century, 17 hundreds moving through Cherokee country, william Bartram coming through the Southeast, they'll describe these winter summer house pairs. And so, for a long, long time, the archaeological record of a typical Cherokee household might be summer house, winter house, corn cribs. Right. Another really important part of the Cherokee built environment, of course, are the townhouses, the big public structures, which are really quite large, as much as like, 50 or 60ft in diameter. They also have that really important central hearth, big support post, but then enough seating for well over 100 people really serving as like, the public building for a house. You don't really have a Cherokee town unless you've got a townhouse up through the 17 hundreds. And so looking at both the archaeological and the historical record, and I promised I was going to eat the cabins, and this is where we're going to finally actually get to cabins. There's an interesting period of time between about 1760 and 1820, and those roughly 60 years, 1760 to 1820, are when we archaeologically and historically sort of see the transition from this earth fast form of architecture, winter houses, summer houses toward these log cabins. And so what's kind of interesting is that if you think about that as like two ends of a spectrum, up until 1760, most Cherokee families are still in this earth bath architecture, winter house, summer house. By 1820, the single room log cabin has kind of become like the traditional Cherokee house form. And it's interesting sort of looking at the archaeological record, that period of time is when it really happens. Not surprisingly, that's associated with disease epidemics, including several really bad smallpox epidemics, seven Years War, Anglo Cherokee War. So these periods of warfare and disruption. So it's kind of in that context that Cherokee are adapting to this new sociopolitical reality, new biological realities, new economic realities, and are adapting their life ways to include these log cabins. So then, yeah, by 1820, I mean, it's interesting, like, really? Yeah, the one room log cabin is kind of like what an average Cherokee house looks like. And I pulled a quote that a lot of us use. This is from the famous missionary to the Cherokee, Samuel Worchester, who folks are familiar with Georgia history. This is like a name folks are probably familiar with, but this is from an account by Warchester in 1825 where he's describing Cherokee houses. And I could have just given you this for the answer. What does Cherokee house look like? But here's Warchester quote. The houses of the Cherokee are of all sorts, from an elegant painted or brick mansion down to a very mean cabin. If we speak, however, of the mass of the people they live in comfortable log houses, generally one story high, but frequently two, sometimes of hewn logs and sometimes unhwn, commonly with a wooden chimney and a floor of punches or what a New England man would call slabs. So that's worchester 1825 kind of giving us a snapshot, and the archaeological record sort of backs that up as well. You're kind of mostly looking at folks having made that transition to fairly simple one room, horizontal log cabins by the 1820s. So that was a very long winded answer to your question, but I hope that was helpful.

Of course. I mean, it really gives context to what does it look like pre contact versus post contact. Do we know exactly why the Cherokee decided to use the more, perhaps Western style, like a log cabin? Do we know why they decided to make that?

I mean, that why question is really great. And so I would direct folks who are really interested in this question to a recent book that's out with the University of Tennessee Press native American Log Cabins in the Southeast, edited by Gregory A. Wafflekoff. And that book was a product of a symposium at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in 2016 where a bunch of US. Archaeologists who were kind of interested in these questions about log cabins. That question in particular, like, why and how did indigenous people in the southeast make this transition, sort of tackle that question with in particular evidence from the archaeological record, right? Like, what does the archaeology of cabins look like between these years of 1760, 1820, and what can that tell us? We can do away with one kind of simple, overly simple explanation. It's not just like some kind of top down assimilation process, right? It's much more complex than that. So in those decades of 1760 to 1820, indigenous people in the southeast are adapting to these all kinds of new forces, economic forces, biological forces, new kind of environment. And they're really strategically adapting certain kinds of technologies, including housing in this case, while also maintaining other kinds of technologies. To give some examples, at a lot of these archaeological sites, we see people continuing to use traditional clay ceramics, traditional clay pots, at relatively high rates, even as they're like building cabins. What does that tell you? Well, that means they're still cooking food in traditional ways with the same kind of pots they've been using forever, right? But then adapting to this kind of architecture, we also see it's kind of interesting. Again, for centuries, millennia in the southeast, you have this, again, earth fast architecture, right, like post and ground architecture. This is a very different way of building houses, putting out cutting horizontal logs with metal axes and then laying them out in this cabin format. We do actually see some kind of cool transitional forms in the archaeological record where it looks like folks are still using some upright posts in the ground and then laying down logs between those. If you can kind of picture that podcasters, right, so you can imagine almost like parallel lines of posts in the ground, but then you're setting your logs, your split rails in between those posts to kind of build up your cabin frame rates, which is really cool to think about. Like, what are some of these transitional forms sort of look like? So part of it is and anthropologists love thinking about houses, right, to kind of step back, big picture. They can tell us so much about people and what they value. But there's some particular case studies you can you can look at. In some cases, you can look at who are some of the folks that are adopting cabins early in these communities. In some cases, they are like strivers or like, movers and shakers. There's some great examples in this book in this edited volume from like a kataba context and also seminal context where you can see these are kind of like leaders in the communities who want to have a cabin as almost like a kind of power play to show that they're hip and they're adopting the same kind of architecture that other folks are doing. I think kind of thinking more at a societal scale of whole groups of people adopting these captains. There's a wonderful historian. She's at UPenn. Now. Julie Reed She's a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a historian who does a lot with 19th century Cherokee history. And I'm paraphrasing one of the points she makes in a lot of her work, which is that you can often look in the 19th century and see she has this great sort of one liner that Cherokee are changing so they can stay the same. They're changing certain parts of their lifeways, certain parts of how they move through the world economically and socially so that they can also maintain things that really matter to them, like their language and their culture. Right? So if you build a log cabin from the outside, you look like a settler, right? I mean, you sort of look like the other people who are moving into your communities. You're outwardly showing that you're adapting, kind of broadly speaking. We talk about that idea of the, quote, unquote kind of scare quote, civilization policy, right, that the American government is kind of rolling out even as early as the 18 hundreds. And so outwardly, you build a log cabin, you sort of look like you put on Western clothing. You're kind of adapting to this broader cultural, social, economic landscape. But then inside the cabin, what are you doing? Well, you're still speaking Cherokee and you're still cooking with in many cases, obviously, you're adopting some of these new kind of metal pots and pans and kettles and things. But in a lot of cases, man, you're still cooking with ceramic pots. And so your language is being maintained in the home. Cuisine is being maintained in the home. So that's a little bit oversimplified. But in some ways, that's an outward change that you can make by building a cabin that also allows you to stay the same, in some ways, maintain parts of your culture. It's also true that Cherokee in the 18 hundreds, just like anybody else would do, they're adapting to new kinds of technology and using new kinds of technology. So you could think about what do you need to build a log cabin? Metal axes so you can split logs, access to draft animals in some cases. Think about how heavy a 20 foot log is. Right. If you're going to move that. Right. I mean, that's not just necessarily people power that's often draft animals, whereas in the past with that earth bath style architecture that's groups of people building houses together with hand tools. So it also represents that they're adapting to these new technologies and using them even as parts of their culture, are kind of staying the same.

I love that quote. They're adapting to stay the same. It's not that they necessarily want to embrace every single aspect of this Western European culture that's coming down, but they understand that perhaps some things have to change a little bit, at least outwardly, so that they can stay the same. They can stay who they are.

Yeah. So copyright Julie Reid on that one and interested people, please check out please check out Julie's work. She's really fabulous and has a lot of I'm intrigued. I'll do excellent work on history. Yeah, yeah.

I'll have to go look that up after it sounds incredible, especially since she is a member of the Cherokee Nation as well. It'd be incredible's perspective. Now, you also mentioned a townhouse. And of course, you can't have a town without a townhouse, right. That kind of, I would assume denotes a town is that there is a house there. So can you tell us a little bit more about what an average town would have looked like around the townhouse? Is that the center of the village? And how does that kind of transition as well into this era of kind of log cabins? Is there an equivalent to that, or does it kind of just go out of history?

Yeah, that's great. And so your listeners are experiencing what my poor students have to listen to a lot, which I'm going to start by backing up a few centuries before I actually get to the question that you're asking me. I hope folks are enjoying this and it's not terrible. Let's go back then into the 17 hundreds again and to give us a starting point. So we'll kind of a little bit arbitrarily, but imagine we're say in 1720 or 1730, right? Which at the time, actually, we have some early census records and maps of Cherokee towns. Cherokee in the Southeast at that time are living in five large groups of towns. There's the lower towns in northern South Carolina and Georgia. The middle towns which run along the little Tennessee River from roughly like Dillard, Georgia, up into Franklin and up into Calais, North Carolina. There are the outtowns, which are kind of the most remote, and like modern day Cherokee, North Carolina, the Kuala boundary is actually in those outtowns. Kalowee, North Carolina, where I teach at Western Carolina University, we actually have learned that our campus is built on we knew it was built on a Cherokee town, but the name of that town was Tali Shishkwayahi, which means Two Sparrows Town in Cherokee language, and that would have been one of the Cherokee outtowns. You then have the valley towns, which are located along the Valley River between Murphy's Andrew that was incredibly densely occupied in the 17 hundreds by Cherokee communities, and the overhill towns in East Tennessee along the Tennessee River. A lot of our archaeological understanding of 18th century Cherokee culture comes from huge excavations that TVA did of those overhill Cherokee towns at places like Toqua and Choda and such. So you have these groups of towns, and within each of these groups of towns at any given time, you have dozens of towns, each of which has a townhouse that marks the center of that community. And the townhouse, architecturally, is very similar to the winter house. In fact, you can in many ways kind of think about townhouses almost as, like, scaled up winter houses. So you have a central hearth, big support post seating for dozens, even hundreds of people. They're the places where big community decisions are made, where ceremony take place. Those townhouses have very often pretty clear cosmological orientations. The four corner posts are oriented in some ways, the four cardinal directions. My colleagues at Western Carolina, dr. Bret Riggs and Dr. Jane Eastman have recently been doing archaeological field work at a Middletown Cherokee town, the site of Wataga down in Macon County, North Carolina. And they've got good evidence based on remote sensing magnetic radiotry they've been doing to create a sort of subsurface map of the site. That site has really interesting cosmological orientations to things like summer solstice, winter solstice that folks are really intentionally positioning the townhouse to catch the sunrise, for example, at particular important times of the year and to chart the movements of stars as well, which is really interesting. So these buildings, these townhouses are cosmologically richly, just very densely symbolic. But also they're the practically speaking, they're the places where people meet where decisions are made. There's a long history of making decisions by council. In Cherokee communities, it's where the councils meet. And so you can sort of imagine you got these five groups of towns. Within those groups of towns, you've got your individual town with your townhouse and then dozens of these winter summer households kind of surrounding that townhouse around a large central plaza area. There's also room for playing, playing stick ball, playing the ball game within those communities. And then you do also have, at the same time, in the 17 hundreds some dispersed households away from towns. So here, like in the mountains of North Carolina where I live, take our campus, for example. So thinking about Tali Shishkoyahi or Tuspera's Town. You had a central town with a townhouse, but then at the same time along some creeks and drainages off the Tukasiti River, there's archaeological evidence for small 18th century Turkey households who are a little bit farther out from kind of the center of town, but would obviously come into town for meetings and big ceremonial events and just to see people and hang out and stuff that we do. Interestingly. This is just great stuff from the ethnographic record. Every year at the Green Corn Ceremony, there was a traditional practice whereby people in towns would put out their own house fires and relight their house fires with fire taken from the central horrors of the townhouse in their communities thereby linking each individual household with that central fire from those know. For folks who may be familiar with some of the more famous Cherokee ethnography if you read James Mooney's Myths of Cherokee there's a really important passage in which Swimmer, who was sort of the elder that provides a lot of the information that Mooney writes about. Swimmer talks about the idea that at some of the larger Cherokee townhouses, at the more famous Cherokee mother towns, specifically the site of Godua, the central place that a lot of eastern Cherokee think of themselves as being from, and the site of Nikwasi swimmer talks about there being these everlasting fires at these mean. He's saying that those mounds that contain those townhouses really are still alive and the central fire is still burning at those places. So we can also think about townhouses, right? Sort of symbolically metaphorically being these places where you have these everlasting fires that are still going. And so that's a kind of town plan that really is symbolically loaded, but it's also just like a very practical way to build a community, right? I mean, it's sort of interesting if you listen to questions about American architecture and real estate now we have all these problems with housing. A lot of cutting edge designers are trying to build these intentional communities where everything's within walking distance, right? Not to be simple minded about it, but, boy, there's a walkable community. You sort of have your townhouse, which is your place for public kind of services that you need, as well as community gathering. And folks are living in a tight knit community. So I'll put that out there for what it's worth for people who are interested in looking to the past for solutions to current problems. So that style of building communities really persist up through, like, 1760s when you start seeing these raids against Cherokee like the Montgomery and Grant expeditions by the British and early American militias, and of course, the famous Rutherford's military action against Cherokees a little over a decade later. As Cherokee communities, particularly like in western North Carolina, they're kind of pushed south and west toward the extreme southwest corner of the state and then also kind of moving down into Georgia a little bit as well. We see that that older pattern of Nucleated towns with the townhouse gives way to a more kind of dispersed settlement pattern. So folks are living a little bit farther out, spaced out a little more, and in some cases at the same time that folks are beginning to adapt to building log cabins for their domestic know, you get building sort of like Western style council houses. So folks in northern Georgia may have had a chance to go to Nuichota, for example, and see the restored council house at Nuichota. And there's sort of a Western style early 18 hundreds building where that's serving as like a meeting house and council house. And so that institution of the council house still remains as an important social institution, but it moves into a horizontal log know, in the same way that people are adapting this as well. So that's a very long winded answer that you see a general move away from these Nucleated towns to a more dispersed settlement pattern. And along with that, and obviously, there's variation across North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, south Carolina. There's variations in terms of how it's happening. But you do see folks adopting this new form of architecture to build the townhouse. But that institution and the functions the townhouse are serving are still very much the same.

So we talked a little bit about the changes that have occurred, especially from these traditional more post in ground to the more log cabin style that's a little bit more Western European. But could you tell us what are some of the main changes to Cherokee architecture over the centuries that are perhaps people wouldn't recognize as much as, like, oh, well, this is a circular earth indwelling versus a log structure. Are there any more subtle changes that we also see?

Yeah, that's really interesting. So starting with sort of the more obvious stuff first, indeed, I mean, this transition from Earth fast architecture, post and ground construction to doing horizontal log cabins really is a big one. There are also some kind of more subtle things that present some interesting challenges for archaeologists, but then are also sort of worth thinking more about anthropologically and kind of broadly that post and ground architecture leaves a really nice archaeological signature. If you're an archaeologist and you're doing, say, like magnetic gradiometry over a site, or in the older days, if you're doing big horizontal excavations, post in ground or Earth vast architecture, it leaves you like a blueprint. I mean, you end up having a site map that it looks like a top down blueprint that you're used to reading. You can see where all the posts are. Okay, this house measures 25ft by 25ft. Here's all the wall posts, and here's the central hearth. Right. Log cabins can sometimes have a lighter archaeological footprint than that, because if you're setting down logs on top of foundation footings or even some cases, just setting logs down, like, right on the ground to build your structure, well, that's not going to leave a hole in the ground. And so in some cases, the only archaeological remains of a log cabin might be like an artifact scatter or perhaps the remains of an attached chimney, which is going to leave maybe evidence of burning and maybe stone foundations for a chimney. One cool thing that begins to happen in the early 18 hundreds with some of these cabins, though, which is kind of cool, people start digging cellars. And so in some cases, the real archaeological signature of a cabin is a big old square deep cellar. And what are folks using these sellers for? Well, among other things, like sweet potatoes, like storing root crops, which is kind of cool because there you're seeing changes in diet that are being reflected in these sellers as well. But then that seller also provides an interesting place to sort of potentially store and hide important objects, like maybe ritual objects that, again, you don't want them to be quite as visible to outside communities. And in some cases, we do have evidence that you're finding objects in Cherokee cabins that might be kind of ritually charged that are down in these cellars. And in that book that I've recommended once and I'll recommend it again native American Lock Cabins in the Southeast. Again, my colleague Dr. Bret Riggs at Western Carolina has a wonderful chapter in there that he co wrote with Tom Belt. Tom Belt is Cherokee. He's a Cherokee language expert. He actually taught Cherokee language at Western Carolina for many years. And he and Bret have a co authored chapter in that book where they talk about some of the linguistic associations with how people talk about Sellers. The idea of the ground digging into the ground, actually providing a safe and positive place to store powerful objects like richly charged objects. And so there's a lot of really interesting ritual that might be taking place kind of kind of below the surface that would be totally like just flying over the heads of European observers who don't really know about this stuff. There could be a lot of interesting ritual stuff happening in Sellers as a place to store important objects that, again, are just going to totally kind of beyond the comprehension of Euro American settlers, which I think is kind of an interesting thing to think about. I would point out too. I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but in addition to the adoption and adaptation of building log cabins you do see in North Carolina, at any rate, some folks who are still building a structure refer to as like, the hot house. And it's almost like a smaller version of the winter house that's being used as a place to keep warm. It's still like a structure that can get really hot. I mean, it can get really warm where folks are doing things like parching potatoes and corn because you can get it really hot and even kind of dry in there. And then also using it for essentially like sweat baths for ritual. And so you have this older style of architecture, the architectural style of the winter house being kind of adopted to build a structure that now is kind of like secondary to being your primary domestic structure but still has these really important ritual functions. And at least at some sites in Western North Carolina which was one of the kind of more traditional bastions of Cherokee culture in the 19th century, you see that architectural form persisting, which is really neat. So again, it's kind of interesting. When I went into some of this research, I was expecting to see this break from post and ground architecture to log cabins being in some ways, like, more of a bigger deal than it was. And I think, not surprisingly, because indigenous people are really resilient cherokee are adapting. They're adapting to these new ways of building structures, but they're maintaining, adapting lots and lots of elements to what we would think of as like, traditional culture. Very often under the. Radar of people who just don't see that happening.

What you said just leads perfectly into our next question, which is, what do you think are some of the most common misconceptions about Cherokee architecture in general?

Yeah, that's a great question, and I want to be careful not to impose too many of my own sort of biases on this. But just generally speaking, I think a lot of Americans tend to, through no fault of their own, really not have a great general understanding about indigenous cultures and Native American cultures at all. A lot of my students at Western are so eager to take our courses in Cherokee studies and history and anthropology and just have a chance to learn really good, detailed historical information about Native American and specifically Cherokee communities because they never got anything beyond the one chapter about the thrill of tears in their high school textbook. And I see you shaking your head because maybe that was your experience also. So I think a lot of folks do just because of the nature of the way we tend to teach about Native American culture, if at all, in our high schools tend to think about indigenous cultures as being kind of monolithic and maybe not changing over time. And so one of the, I think the most rewarding things that doing detailed studies of Cherokee architecture where you're really trying to understand, like, at the decade to decade level, how are things changing? There's all this dynamism. There's people that are adapting to new forms of architecture. You've got maybe like movers and shakers and strivers who want to get into a cabin as fast as they can to kind of display their affiliation with a new source of power. Other folks who want to maintain older ways of building. And at these broad societal scales, even as you see a shift away from a way of building houses and towns that had been prevalent for centuries, obviously, folks are maintaining really important parts of their culture and their identity, even if they're changing the kind of houses that they live in. And I don't think we would expect that to be terribly shocking when we're talking about American culture. But because we tend to have this monolithic view of indigenous cultures, I think we tend to simplify that sort of simplify that process. So, yeah, it's a really interesting thing to think about, both for its kind of broader anthropological implications in addition to helping us understand unique Cherokee cultural identity and history as well.

I think that's a very good summary, perhaps of some people. They haven't had the chance to learn about a lot of different Native American cultures. And when we say Native American people don't think about just how many different cultures and tribes and nations that there really, truly are in America and that they all get kind of grouped together. And it seems like there's also not as much study on the East Coast as there is perhaps on the West Coast which were able to be on their own longer, perhaps before contact, just due to America starting on the East Coast and then progressing towards the Pacific. Do you have anything to add upon that? I see you thinking, contemplating.

No, that's great. Yeah. You're raising so many really great issues. Yeah. I mean, there's over 570 federally recognized tribes today, and that's not counting state recognized tribes. Again, one of the things that I've had the great privilege to work really closely with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians now for coming up on almost 20 years, depending on how you count it. And indeed, there are so few tribes in the Eastern woodlands that were able to maintain their ancestral homelands, and in particular, the remarkable kind of ways that the Eastern Band were able to negotiate with the state of North Carolina and the federal government resist removal in some cases. In other cases, sort of lawyer up and fight in the courts and also use things like corporate law to incorporate as a charter in the 18 hundreds to maintain their foothold here in the east. It's really remarkable. And so I would also encourage people just more broadly, if you think about a place like White Pass Cabin which I think is a wonderful it's a wonderful thing for people to come see and engage very physically with Cherokee history. Learn more about the remarkable resistance and struggle and success that Cherokee have had to stay here in the east. It really is a remarkable story and one that I would encourage folks to try and learn more about on your own, for sure. Yeah.

And of course, that is one of the stories that we tell here at the Northeast Georgia History Center. We have, of course, our exhibit, Land of Promise, which starts with the indigenous population going back thousands upon thousands of years ago. Of course, we highlight the Cherokee Nation as well, and in the exhibits, and then, of course, we have our historic structures outside of the museum. The cabin does not fit hindors, even though we do consider it to be our largest historical artifact. So we have the White Path Cabin outside, and we encourage people to come and visit it. We believe that this cabin was originally built by the traditionalist Cherokee leader Whitepath, and we believe that it was built in the very late 17 hundreds, sometime between 1780, 1790. But then Whitepath, even though he attempted to resist a lot of different European influences into the Cherokee Nation, most specifically, he led a revolt, really trying to keep Cherokee religion centralized and very much rejection of Christianity and the Christian teachings that were coming in to the Cherokee Nation. But he was forcibly removed from his house, his homelands, here on the Trail of Tears, and ended up dying while in Kentucky. So after he was forcibly removed, the land was taken into the by the federal government divided up, put into land lotteries and it was awarded to a man named John Fisher and then he sold it to the Pinson family. Now, after the Pinson family came in about the 1840s, they remodeled the cabin, in a sense. And they added on a different room to his because we believe that White Path had a one room cabin which may or may not have had a loft. We believe that it did. And then the Pinson family, they added a second room and a connecting, open air connecting hallway, making it a dog trot style cabin. Extended the loft to the second room as well and over the hallway. But I was wondering we've sent you pictures and we also have a video on YouTube giving a tour of the cabin that is from the Pandemic days. But I was wondering, in your expert opinion, can you still see traces of Cherokee architecture on that left side of the building that are fingerprints of White Pass?

So I hesitate to use the word expert for anything that I say. But I'll do my best shot at it. Yeah. In having a chance to look at some of the excellent photos and video that you were able to provide, I think my takeaway is that it really does fit this kind of broad pattern of most Cherokee building, these kind of simple one room cabins in the late 17 hundreds. So I think that kind of fits. Well, obviously, there's been restoration kind of on the inside. So it's sort of hard to see how well, if any of that original kind of chinking or DOB has been preserved, that's kind of cool, that waddle and DOB technique, of course, kind of precedes cabins and goes back to Earth's vast architecture. And so that's one thing that some archaeologists, again in particular in this volume that I've sort of been plugging our whole conversation. That's an interesting thing to look at in terms of maybe looking at traditions of house building that kind of persist throughout that transition into building split rail, horizontal cabins. But one thing that does occur to me that's really neat to think about is that here's White pad through somebody who, as a historical figure is renowned for trying to maintain important elements of traditional Cherokee culture to resist removal, to sort of maintain Cherokee identity. And he's living in a cabin. So here's somebody who had adapted this form of architecture. At the same time, if you actually look at who's living in what kind of cabins by the late 17 hundreds, early 18 hundreds, most of your Cherokee population in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama they are living in these kind of simple one room cabins. And it's relatively few people like your major ridges. Your John Rosses, again, I'm assuming, some interest and a little bit of historical background for listeners here. But your really famous figures in removal era politics, a lot of those guys are living in really fine houses, sort of like your economically elite Cherokee by the early 18 hundreds, certainly are living in two room or larger cabins, or even, again, to go back to that Warchester quote, like these really fine painted houses, right? But the vast majority of Cherokee putting a rough figure on maybe like 80 or more percent of Cherokee are living in these kind of simple one room cabins. Again, thinking about this almost like kind of a tension between adapting new ways of living, but then also maintaining a really important Cherokee cultural identity that really harkens back to precontact architecture. Which is to say that when you look at Cherokee houses from the 17 hundreds, 16 hundreds, 15 hundreds, pretty much everybody's building their houses the same size. Nobody has McMansions, nobody is competing for status by building bigger houses. That's a very Euro American thing to do to kind of build a larger house as a way to show status changes, to compete with status. And if I can be allowed to get really wonky with your listeners for just a minute. Over this last year, I've been working with some colleagues at the University of Georgia, dr. Jen Birch and her partner, Stefan Brannon. Dr. Brannon actually works for New South Associates, an archaeology company in Georgia. We've been working with some other archaeologists who are interested in using genie coefficients to look at social inequality in the past. And genie coefficients, it's actually an index that economists use to compare income at societal levels. And so take a country's income, basically throw it into a histogram. You do some math and if you have a country that has a lot of inequality and a lot of corruption, they're going to have a really high genie coefficient. Like they're going to ping in at like a 0.6 or a zero seven. So if you look at a place with lots of corruption, lots of problems and lots of inequality, runaway inequality, they're like going to ping in like a 0.6.7. If you look at a place like Sweden where you have lots of income equality, like pretty flat, right. That's going to ping in at like a 0.2, right, or something. The US. Is kind of in the middle of that. And so there's some archaeologists now who for a few years, it's kind of led by Tim Kohler at Washington State, have been using house size from archaeological sites in the way that economists would use income as a proxy. And then taking genie coefficients of archaeological sites in the past to try and get a sense of how equal or unequal was this society. Now, there's all kinds of problems with this. It's not a perfect instrument. But what's kind of interesting about this is if you look at archaeological sites in the eastern woodlands, broadly speaking so ancestral Cherokee sites, creek sites, even up around the Great Lakes and up into Canada, ancestral Iroquoian sites, Hajanasani sites, they have really low genie coefficients, like really low in the like 00:15 range or the 0.2 range. So if you're using houses to look at social equality, the takeaway from that is there's not a deep tradition in the eastern woodlands of indigenous people where one person in that community builds a much bigger house than everybody else. It's just like not a thing that you do. That's not how you display your wealth. There's a long history of a kind of egalitarian ethos decision making by council downplaying wealth inequality, playing up a sense of community in the way that you build your houses. And that really core value of valuing a kind of sense of equality and downplaying really fancy displays of wealth that maintains itself even in the face of a lot of just these incredible changes. So I think it's really cool that you can look at a person like Whitepath and well, yeah, he's adapted to living in a European style cabin. Yeah, he's not building a McMansion. But then I'll leave it to listeners to kind of think about, well, who is building the mansions and who is starting to take on these European ways of building houses to signal wealth? How is that connecting with a lot of other big changes and connecting with the story of removal itself? That's a whole other podcast, I suppose, but interesting thing to think about.

Absolutely. Now, how did you get into studying Cherokee architecture? Because it seems like it's perhaps a little bit more of a you don't just sign up for a major in Cherokee architecture.

That's great.

So how did you decide that this was going to be your area of study and why do you find it so fascinating?

Yeah, that's a great question. I was incredibly fortunate as a young archaeologist to have the privilege to work on archaeological sites on projects for the Eastern Banitric Indians. So I graduated from college in 2003 from Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, North Carolina. And then I worked for a cultural resource management company called TRC. They're still around and great archaeological firm. They still do a lot of work for the Eastern Band up here in west North Carolina. I regularly correspond with friends and colleagues who still work there. But gosh, I guess when I was like 23 or 24, I was put on this project in which TRC was excavating and recording the entire footprint of what was going to become the new Cherokee K through twelve school complex just outside of Cherokee, North Carolina. It was a 40 acre excavation. It was, I think, potentially, depending on how you count out like the largest excavation in the history of North Carolina. Huge, huge project. And this was in 2004, 2005, that I was working on this site outside of Cherokee. It was called the Ravensford Project on the Ravensford tracked. I was one of a huge crew of like 50 or 60 archaeologists who were working five days a week trying to record the entire footprint of this archaeological site before this school was constructed. And it was just a remarkable project. We had members of the Eastern Band that were frequently on site with us as monitors and also just visiting. I remember one day the AP Cherokee history class from Cherokee High came out to what was going to be their new high school to look at the site. And the thing that people were most interested about on the site were the houses. Obviously, we were finding all kinds of really fascinating things out there pottery and projectile points. But the fact that we were excavating such a large area meant that we were exposing entire houses. And there was just something really special about being able to show folks, well, here's the footprint of a house. This is 25ft by 25ft. And you can actually kind of imagine yourself sitting down in this thing, like around a fireplace, and in particular, just having that incredible privilege to work so close with the Cherokee community and having Cherokee visitors out there. You think about the Cherokee clan system, right? And everybody belongs to one of seven clans on their mother's side and also on their father's side. And so you think about folks that are visiting out there and at the time having conversations about this with, among other folks, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Eastern Ban of Cherokee Indians, russell Townsend, who's a good friend and mentor. And Russ was talking about the relationship between Cherokee visiting that site and the houses we were uncovering. And he said, look, there's a one in seven chance that you're related to the folks who built this house through the clan system. And you think about just how impactful that is and how meaningful that is. These Cherokee students, for example, who are visiting out there, it wasn't just a boring high school history trip, right? I mean, they were not only seeing this archaeological observation happening, but as an American who's moved around a lot, it's hard to even imagine that kind of close connection, right? Like, there's a one in seven chance that I'm directly related through the clan system to the person who lived in this house 300 years ago. That's really, really powerful stuff. Really powerful stuff. And so that hands on experience of trying to excavate understand these houses and then also having that in real time opportunity to do interpretation and try and understand these places while working side by side with folks in the Cherokee community was really just awesome. It was really neat. And I think also that project was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. In terms of the Eastern Banachara, candians worked from the ground up on the research design for that project. So, for example, we did not excavate any graves on that project. We had a specific mandate. You can see what graves look like when you encounter them without disturbing any human remains. They have a very specific kind of footprint they leave behind. And so those were recorded just at surface level, but then not disturbed and protected. And that's a practice that's becoming really common for any kind of archaeologist who work up here in western North Carolina these days. So it was really just a privilege to work on that site. And, yeah, the coolest thing out there were the houses. That was the thing that was helping us understand changes in Cherokee culture. And so when I went to after a few years of working in the field, I decided I did want to go to graduate school and get a PhD. So I went to the University of Georgia and focused not just on Cherokee houses, but more broadly on trying to understand Native American houses changed over time across the Southeast. And then I think too, just houses are really cool. Like anthropologists have been interested in houses for a long time. And you can learn an awful lot about a community at multiple scales, from the scale of the individual house and how people arrange things in a room to the kind of like Zillow Bird's eye view of looking down. At houses like a sociologist in 30,000ft and trying to understand what kind of changes can you understand about a culture or society through their houses? So, yeah, it's a great thing to think about. I had the specific experience of falling in love with the architecture, with the archaeology of architecture. But then, boy, as an anthropologist, it's really exciting and really interesting. You can do wonky things like try and do genie coefficients on house size to look at social inequality in the past, or you can try and drill down and really understand what can White Pest Cabin tell us about this one person's life 200 years ago? So, yeah, I hope I've made some converts out there. It's a really cool thing to think about.

Absolutely. I love social history. I love fashion history. I love historic houses because I feel like through fashion, that's something that you're putting on your body. It's incredibly personal, and that's expressing who you are in a very personal way. And houses, it's what you surround yourself with every single day of your life and what you're using every single day of your life. And it can really, on a personal level that I feel like people can relate to a little bit better tells us about a bigger picture.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you so, so much for being on our podcast today and getting us an introduction to Cherokee architecture, because I know that I think this is we've been chatting for about an hour, and that is just an introduction to this incredibly interesting study. But perhaps we can do another podcast digging in a little bit more in the future if our listeners are interested. But again, thank you so much for being here. Do you have any final thoughts for us.

Yeah, I'll just make one last plug for folks who are interested in that book. It's native American Log Cabins in the Southeast. Edited by Gregory A. Waselkoff. University of Tennessee Press. You can find it wherever books are sold. So would encourage folks to take a look at that. And then another resource that I'll recommend for folks who are interested in learning more about Cherokee culture more broadly, there is a wonderful resource from Cherokee Nation that's called OCO TV. And if you just google OCO TV, it's spelled O-S-I-Y-O TV. So like ocotv.com. It's sort of like PBS by the Cherokee Nation. And so they're roughly 30 minutes episodes about Cherokee history and culture and contemporary Cherokee issues. For educators, these are especially great because the producers break them down into, like, five or six minute video segments. And so if you're a high school teacher or a college professor out there, or just somebody interested, and you're looking for higher quality stuff than what you might find just kind of in the dark corners of the Internet, ocotv is wonderful, and their Cherokee Almanac series in particular has interviews with anthropologists, archaeologists, historians. So if you're interested in this kind of stuff, ocotv has these really wonderful, excellent quality five, six minute video segments. That can be a great way to educate yourself and perhaps your students. I'm assuming some of the folks out there might be fellow Nerds who are listening to this, or Nerd teachers out there. And so that's a wonderful resource that I can't recommend highly enough for folks who want to educate themselves and others about Cherokee history and cult.

Yes, and we can make sure that those are also linked in the bio so that it is very easy for all of our listeners to be able to go and see all of those wonderful resources. But thank you again for being a wonderful resource today and for introducing us to Cherokee architecture.

It's been my great pleasure. Thank you so much.

Then again is a production of the Northeast Georgia History Center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by media producer Juada Rodriguez. Our digital and on site programs are made possible by the Ada May Ivester Education Center. Please join us next week for another episode of Then Again.