Thousands of archaeological sites on the South Atlantic Coast remain unknown to the public

They have been mostly been destroyed in Florida by unbridled development, but from Delaware southward to Georgia, thousands remain . . . but generally unprotected, Enlightened local officials and cultural heritage preservation societies don’t know of their existence and so can’t protect them. The relatively few remaining archaeologists in the coastal regions of the Southeastern United States don’t even know their locations.

These sites are not only the vestiges of multiple levels of a 20,000 year Native American occupation. They also include caches of dinosaur bones, ocean floor campsites of peoples – who made Homo Erectus, Neanderthal or Solutrean style artifacts, Pre-Columbian bases of forgotten Europe travelers, Spanish missions, French/Spanish forts, pirate bases, Colonial Period yeomen farmsteads, tobacco warehouses, rice mills, sugar mills, slave compounds and freed slave villages.

The top of the shell structure in the above photo is about 300 feet (100 m) in diameter. It felt to me more alike a raised platform fortification, not a ceremonial shell ring. I have no clue, who built it or when they built it. During high tide the “moat” around it fills with sea water.

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

In the next article of this series, you will learn that 1971 base camp on Cumberland Island, GA was on the site of a large Mocama Indian village. The majority of Mocama still live along the Orinoco River in South America! They are an Arawak People.

State history and anthropology texts won’t tell you this. You see . . . if the Mocamas could paddle from South America then peoples from southern Mexico could have paddled or walked to the Southeastern United States . . . and that statement has been banned by the Wizards of Seth.

We found quite a few Native American artifacts on the surface around our tents. I stored them in a plastic bag and delivered them to Gov. Jimmy Carter’s office after I returned to Atlanta. I don’t know what happened to these potsherds and tools.

What I do know is that the National Park Service guide to Cumberland National Seashore only vaguely mentions its long Native American occupation and definitely does NOT mention the evidence of Europeans coming much earlier. As far as I can determine, there has been no effort by NPS archaeologists to investigate the eons of human occupation that preceded the establishment of large plantations on Cumberland Island in the late 1700s . . . that omission includes the three Spanish missions on the island.

That’s right. Georgia had over twice as many Spanish missions as California. Only one has been excavated by professional archaeologists . . . Mission Santa Cataline de Guale on St. Catherines Island. In 2007, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City asked me to create three dimensional architectural drawings, based on the discoveries of its archaeologists on St. Catherines. There has been no effort to re-create the architecture of the missions for educational purposes.

A pattern of clandestine activities, associated with historic/prehistoric sites

In April 1995, I moved my personal belongings from my farm in the Shenandoah Valley to a townhouse near Etowah Mounds in Cartersville, GA. This was after local deputies had given formal notice to my ex-wife to remove her property, but she was living with a guy near Dulles Airport anyway. The divorce judge had given me full possession of the 1754-1770 farm and Civil War battlefield, so I planned to move back up there in a year or two. However, neither the divorce court judge nor I knew that I didn’t even own the property in April 1995.

My ex-wife had illegally and secretly filed for bankruptcy in December 1994 during the divorce proceedings. Without even notifying me that the federal bankruptcy had (on paper) seized the property, its trustees immediately and illegally sold the $750,000 property without advertising it via a New Jersey realtor, not licensed in Virginia, to a lady, living next door to The Godfather of the Philadelphia-South Jersey Mafia.

I continued to make monthly mortgage payments on a farm, I didn’t own. I was not notified that my wife had filed for bankruptcy until December 1995. The change of ownership was not recorded in the County Clerk’s office until June 1996. I did not get a penny from the real estate sale in March 1995. All of the profits went to the trustees and lawyers involved, plus my ex-wife. I have never recovered financially from this gargantuan theft, sanctioned by a federal court. Life has its little surprises.

Concealing what archaeologists have discovered

Since then, I have repeatedly encountered the same sort of byzantine intrigues associated with important archaeological sites and historic properties in the Southeast. I do not know why, but it is a fact.

At any rate, shortly after settling into my townhouse, I attended a fascinating presentation at the Etowah Mounds State Historic Site Museum. Two young archaeologists, employed by the State of Georgia and based at Sapelo Island, north of Cumberland, had made exciting discoveries because of their own initiative and intellectual curiosity.

They showed the audience artifacts from multiple levels of Native American occupation on Sapelo Island, plus 16th century European artifacts, which they assumed to be Spanish. The first Spanish attempt to colonize North America was probably on Sapelo Island in 1524.

The most provocative part of the presentation, however, was the slides of UNDER WATER archaeological sites. The two men had discovered village sites and ancient camp sites on the Continental Shelf. The shoreline of Georgia is now as much as 100 miles west of where it was during the Ice Age.

Both of the archaeologists were experienced divers. They discovered a treasure trove of Early Post-Glacial, Clovis and Pre-Clovis stone weapons and tools . . . very similar to those found a few years later at the Topper Site on the Savannah River.

The divers also found ancient stone blades and tools that were identical to those produced by Neanderthal hands in western Europe. There was no doubt about it.

The Topper Site was enthusiastically publicized by the University of South Carolina. However, the discoveries made by the two state archaeologists on Sapelo Island were to have the same catastrophic impact on their lives as the designation of my farm by the National Park Service as a key historic site in the Civil War’s Shenandoah Valley Campaigns.

Soon after displaying in public both Pre-Clovis stone weapons and what appeared to be Neanderthal stone tools at Etowah Mounds, the two Sapelo Island archaeologists were fired. The official reason for firing was that they had made controversial statements to the public and news media, which were not approved in advance by the Director of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. You fire someone because they show pictures of artifacts from Europe that look like artifacts, found under the Atlantic Ocean in Georgia? The real reason was that they were declared to be heretics by the Grand Ole Wizards of Archaeology,

Unable to get jobs in Georgia they were forced to move to other regions. The artifacts that they excavated on Sapelo Island and under the ocean nearby disappeared . . . presumably they were thrown back into the Atlantic Ocean.

No mention of these discoveries made on Sapelo Island and under the ocean nearby, can be found in any archaeological text or website. In 2024, mention the words Neanderthal or Solutrean and you soon receive a legion of comments from archaeologists around the nation, stating that no Solutrean, Neanderthal or Homo Erectus artifacts have ever been found in the Americas.

And the beat goes on . . .