Figure 4.
RESTORED FROM PIT D SMALL DENTATE IMPRESSIONS ARE ON THE INSIDE OF THE LIP. EXTERIOR BRUSHED EXTERIOR INTERIOR SURFACE OF ROAD
From the surface of the road there was collected three rimsherds, 20 body sherds, bone scrap, and a hammerstone which had a pit in two of its flat faces. Artifacts are reported to have been found on the surface of the field surrounding this hilltop site, but we found scant evidence of occupation in the plowed soil. This lack of surface material may be further evidence of considerable deposition over the pits that were exposed in the roadway across the site.
Leonard Blake sent a copy of the original manuscript of this excavation to Patrick J. Munson of the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, and Mr. Munson kindly submitted comparisons and comments on the 23SC50 and Late Woodland ceramics in the American Bottoms. The following is from his letter of June 15, 1966.
“The pottery shows similarities to both Korondo Cordmarked and what I call “Early Bluff” (which includes part of what Griffin calls Canteen Cordmarked and which conforms to part of Titterington’s Jersey Bluff focus). Korondo and Early Bluff are definitely related in some way (probably regional variants of what is basically the same cultural pattern) and your material therefore represents still another variant of this same pattern.
The comparisons and contrasts can best be illuminated in the following table:
| Korondo | Early Bluff | St. Charles | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vessel Shape | x | x | x |
| Mostly Cordmarked | x | x | x |
| Mostly Sherd Tempered | x | x | |
| Mostly Grit Tempered | x | ||
| Squared Lip | x | ||
| Rounded, “sloppy” lip | x | x | |
| Interior Lip Cord Wrapped Stick stamp | x | x | x |
| Interior Lip plain stamp | x | x | |
| Exterior Lip plain stamp | x | ||
| Vertical Lip plain stamp | x | ||
| Undecorated Lip | x | x | x |
As such, your material seems about as similar to one as the other, every attribute being shared with either Korondo or Early Bluff, or with both.
Also your radiocarbon dates, or at least the two earliest ones, conform quite well. Dr. Robert Hall, now of the University of Chicago, has two dates for a Korondo site in the southern part of the American Bottoms (Stolle Quarry) AD-700 and 900, and by a process of elimination, Early Bluff in the northern portion of the Bottoms must date pre-850. (Korondo is found in the southern part of the Bottoms and south; Early Bluff is in the northern portion and north.) Your one dentate stamped sherd ([Fig. 1]) is probably Naples Dentate Stamped, and as such is surely an accidental inclusion—I doubt if this Middle Woodland type was made later than A.D. 400 at the latest. Also the largest projectile point from pit D looks like a sloppy Snyders Point, again a Middle Woodland type and probably an accident (or a specimen collected by the Late Woodland peoples). The smallest point from the pit is probably a Late Woodland Koster Point (cf. Perino, 1963, Central States Arch. Jour., Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 95-100).