The Site

The Wall site represents a fortified town that was occupied during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by ancestors of the Shakori and Eno Indian tribes who were local to the Chapel Hill area. The site was first investigated in 1938, and at the time was thought to represent an Occaneechi town visited by English explorer John Lawson in 1701. Extensive excavations were conducted in 1940-1941, 1983-1984, 2001-2002, and 2015. These revealed several circular alignments of postholes where houses once stood, evidence for multiple defensive walls (called palisades or stockades) surrounding the village, and dense deposits of refuse within a thick midden at the northern edge of the site. The 2015 excavations also revealed the presence of an even thicker midden containing discarded artifacts and well-preserved food remains along the site's southern edge. Students in the 2016 field school will explore this newly discovered artifact deposit and also sample previously unexcavated domestic areas within the village.