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Hardaway (31ST4)

Site History

The Hardaway site (31ST4) is a multicomponent precontact site that may date as early as the PaleoIndian period but definitely includes Early Archaic components. It is the oldest excavated site in North Carolina. The site, located in the Uwharrie Mountains in Stanly County, just outside the town of Badin, was named for the Hardaway Construction Company who built the dam that blocks the Yadkin River near the site.

Archaeological Investigations

The Hardaway site was first reported to professional archaeologists in 1937 by collector Herbert M. Doerschuk. The first professional excavations, limited in scale, were conducted in 1948 and 1951 by Joffre Coe, working with Paul Strieff and Herbert Doerschuk. In 1955, larger scale excavations were initiated, using arbitrary levels to excavate units. In 1958, an excavation strategy that employed excavating in natural levels began and it was these vertical stratigraphic controls that allowed Coe to formulate chronological phases at the site based on projectile point types and which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, which was published in 1964.

Coe returned to the site in 1975 and continued each summer through 1980. This work yielded large quantities of lithics and flaked stone, although the hoped-for early stratified deposits were less well preserved than anticipated.

Unfortunately, there are no radiocarbon dates available from the site, so its exact age has not been determined. The site has also been heavily disturbed by pothunters, who dug larger crater-like holes across the entirety of the site. The Hardaway site is one of three sites (Doerschuk and Lowder’s Ferry were the others) used by Joffre Coe to create his cultural chronology for Piedmont North Carolina.

References

Coe, Joffre L.

1964   The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 54, pt. 5, Philadelphia.

Daniel, I. Randolph, Jr.

1994   Hardaway Revisited: Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Ward, Trawick H., and R.P. Stephen Davis, Jr.

1999   Time Before History: The Archaeology of North Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

(Edited from Ancient North Carolinians: A Virtual Museum of North Carolina Archaeology (https://ancientnc.web.unc.edu/indian-heritage/by-region/southern-piedmont/hardaway/))