Videos: The Topper, Cactus Hill and Thunderbird Archaeological Sites

Paleo-American archaeological sites in the Savannah River Basin, plus the Blue Ridge Foothills and Shenandoah Valley of Virginia

Since this autumn, we are studying the ancient roots of the Southeast’s indigenous peoples, many readers would probably want to see what these important archaeological zones look like, plus have a better understanding of the artifacts unearthed. Unfortunately, I cannot find videos of any of the TV programs from the late 1980s, which interviewed Bill Gardner at the Thunderbird Archaeological District . . . only a recent site visit by the Archaeological Conservancy.

There is one observation that I would like to add to the presentations by South Carolina and Virginia archaeologists. The Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, contains an exhibit on the Homo Erectus fossils and artifacts found in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. When I first saw photos of the artifacts found in the 55,000 BC layer of the Topper Site and the Mastodon Butchering Site on the coast of California, they reminded me of what I had seen in Amsterdam long ago. Yes indeed . . . checking photos from the Allard Pierson Museum, it did seem that artifacts from both sites strongly resembled Homo Erectus . . . not Denisovan or Neandertal artifacts.

Subscribers to The Americas Revealed in 2020 may recall that while on my fellowship in Mexico, I photographed what appeared to be a statue of a captive Homo Erectus at a Olmec Civilization town site in Tabasco State. The head of the statue matched in every detail how paleontologists portray Homo Erectus.

In the video below, Kelly Berliner visited a soapstone quarry. It also contains what she calls “piles of rocks,” but actually they are collapsed stone cairns. Archaeologists working on a cairn and soapstone quarry site near Winchester, VA eventually determined that the cairns were used for cremating bodies.

Cairns are also a very common site at the soapstone quarries in northern Georgia, plus also seem to have preceded several terrace complexes. Sandy Creek County Park near Athens, GA is the most accessible archaeological zone for seeing agricultural terraces, stone cairns and soapstone quarries in close proximity.