Murphy Bottom Uncovered

If you ask old-time residents of Pickens County, they'll tell you that Murphy Bottom off of Jerusalem Church Road (near two branches of Scarecorn Creek) in West Pickens used to be the place to find arrowheads. Some people mention that a village may have been there at one time.

Archaeology sites in Georgia are The site was originally designated as 9 Pi 12. It also has the designator of 9 Pi 103. The real topic of interest was always the who, when, where, and what. The why is obvious.

After some exhaustive research, I can finally tell the residents of our county something a little more definitive than the rumors and folklore of the place have given us previously.

In 1956, a man named John Wear, an amateur archeologist from Fairmount excavated the site. He had found the usual suspects: grooved adzes, spades, flint points, checked stamped pottery, and fabric-marked pottery. More interestingly he discovered a refuse pit with burnt corn cobs. Archaic arrowhead points indicate that in the Late Archaic Period this was a great village. A high amount of ceramics indicated that site was also occupied much later during the Middle and Late Woodland Periods.

In other words, the Murphy Bottom site was the largest type of excavation of a village site in the county at the time. It helped to differentiate the settlement patterns between the higher mountain elevations and the floodplains. An absence of specific types of pottery and ceramics helped narrow the time range down.

Village life waxed and waned over a period of time from approximately from 3000 BC through around 500 AD. Of course, this would indicate that this was not a Cherokee village nor a Creek village site. This was much earlier.

Interestingly, as discerned from the extensive archaeologic data, the upper reaches of the Scarecorn Creek area (near Rich Mountain) were abandoned or infrequently visited from 1000 AD - 1850 AD.

It should be noted that the original report written by Wear has been lost over time and the only references to it, those by Morse (1960) an

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d Smith, Ledbetter, Wood (1988), etc. are the primary sources of this information.