Over 37,000 broken pieces of pottery (what archaeologists refer to as sherds) were found during last year's (2001) small-scale excavations at the Madison Park site. Most sherds found at the site are very small, because plowing of the site during the 19th and 20th centuries damaged them. We estimate that over one million of these pieces of pottery will be found during the larger ongoing excavations at the site!
Archaeologists classify pottery by the material, (called temper), that was added to the clay for to make the finished pots stronger. Nearly all of the pottery from the Madison Park site is tempered with sand, but there are also a few examples with mica flakes or grit (crushed stone) tempering.
Archaeologists also study the decoration to assign sherds to "types". The types of pottery found at Madison Park reflect how styles of pots can wax and wane in popularity through time. The differences in pottery types also suggest that there were several distinct ethnic groups of Indians that occupied the various regions of Alabama more than a thousand years ago, and that they traded with the people of the Madison Park site.
The few decorations found on pottery from the Late Woodland time period (AD 500-1000) include geometric designs of incised lines and punctations (dots) and the use of red and orange clay slips that were painted on the outsides of vessels. Less than 1% of the pottery recovered from last year's excavations is decorated.
Broken fragments of a pot's rim give us an idea of vessel shape. The most common shapes were large conical jars and small bowls. Jars, considered cooking and storage vessels, are the most common vessel form. Most of the small incurved bowls are classified as Montgomery Red Filmed.
| Sand-Tempered Ceramics The vast majority (over 99%) of the ceramics from the Madison Park site is sand tempered. In the 2001 ceramic study, 321 vessel rim fragments came from 142 jars and 17 bowls. Slight differences in the shapes of rims could be discerned, although the significance of these variations is uncertain. The largest jars seem to have relatively thick rims. Nearly all of these sand-tempered sherds have no decoration, although most have burnished exteriors, produced when the potter rubbed the outside of the pot with a small pebble once the clay had dried and before it was fired. |
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| Montgomery Red Filmed Red-filming is the most common type of ceramic decoration at the Madison Park site. Most of the filmed vessels at Madison Park are orange-red, a color characteristic of the Hope Hull phase of the Late Woodland period, and most are bowls. One type, Montgomery Red Filmed and Incised is represented by rims with zoned and punctated decorations. |
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| Tallapoosa Punctated A small number of sand-tempered sherds have distinctive punctated decorations often within incised lines. These zoned decorations usually appear near the rims, and the vessels are most likely bowls. Similar decorations appear on Montgomery Red Filmed and Incised sherds. |
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| Catoma Creek Plain One sand-tempered bowl has a series of shallow notches at the top of the rim, typical of Catoma Creek Plain, a type often associated with the earlier Calloway phase of the Late Woodland period. |
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| Autauga Incised A few sand-tempered sherds have a distinctive incised design termed "stab and drag ," The potter used a sharp implement to incise a line into the wet clay, intermittently plunging the point deeper into the clay. The design motif is attributed to the Autauga phase, which followed the Hope Hull phase. |
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