Page 134 - Knighted_2018

including taking anything and everything found, exhuming bodies, and indiscriminately digging
large-scale, destructive trenches.13 Contemporary archaeological practice justified this damage,
done in the name of advancing scientific knowledge of the ancient societies of America.

In his 1938 report to the Smithsonian Institute's Bureau of American Ethnology, titled “A
Preliminary Report on Archaeological Explorations at Macon. Ga,” found in Bulletin 119, Kelly
discussed the progress of the excavation, along with his interpretation of its findings. Kelly
concluded, much in agreement with past scholars, that the site at Ocmulgee evidenced distinct,
unrelated periods of habitation. His theory postulated that during the Mississippian period,
Ocmulgee was a fringe settlement of a larger cultural phenomenon that had its locus farther to
the northwest, along the Mississippi River. This centralized society influenced satellite regions
such as Ocmulgee in recognizable waves that could be used to measure the closeness of their
affiliation to it during any specific period. Kelly based his conclusions on the spatial and
chronological distribution and changes of lithic and ceramic assemblages found at the Middle
Plateau.14 This approach allows Kelly to argue that key changes in pottery and lithic traditions
represent specific periods of habitation, not a culturally cohesive people adapting to changing
sociopolitical and environmental pressures over time.15 Once again, an anthropologist ignored
cultural affiliation between geographically overlapping peoples. He fundamentally
misrepresented occupation chronologies and traditions.

Kelly's findings continue to influence how some modern institutions interpret the cultural
connections of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and pre-contact civilizations. The Kelly

13 Carol Mason, The Archaeology of Ocmulgee Old Fields, Macon, Georgia. (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama
Press, 2005), 26-31
14 Arthur Kelly “A Preliminary Report on Archaeological Explorations at Macon, Ga.” in Smithsonian Institution

Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 119, ed. M.W. Stirling (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1937),
58-63.
15 Arthur Kelly “A Preliminary Report on Archaeological Explorations at Macon, Ga.” 65-67.

129