Native American Heritage Month is celebrated from November 1 through November 30 each year. What began as a day of honoring the first Americans became a full month in 1990 when President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November as "National American Indian Heritage Month. Other variations of the month-long celebration include "Native American Heritage Month" and "National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month."
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The natural world pervades nearly every aspect of the Catawba pottery tradition. Nature-inspired motifs include the turtle, frog, black snake, snail, feather and palm leaf, and are often connected to...
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Catawba pottery is recognized as one of the oldest and purest traditional art forms in America. Potters such as Billie Anne McKellar, a fourth generation potter, are often ancestors of a long line of...
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"Green" pots are those that have dried naturally by sun and air circulation, but have yet to be fired. A sunny, windless day is the ideal setting for the day of a firing. Before firing, green pots are...
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Artifacts are manmade objects, sometimes referred to as material remains, that are recovered during the excavation process. Pot shards, intact pots, rubbing stones and arrowheads are examples of...
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Many traditional Catawba pot designs are based on a basic "cooking pot" style, dating back to the Woodland period (1000 BCE - 1000 CE) of North American pre-Columbian culture. Widespread use and trade...
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Hundreds, possibly thousands, of years of weathering and erosion rendered the Hagood Mill site petroglyphs invisible to the naked eye. Amateur archaeologist Mike Bramlett discovered several of the...
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Maintaining Catawba tradition involves passing down family histories, belief systems, language, folklore, the arts and other aspects of cultural heritage. The Catawba Cultural Preservation Project...
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The bean pot is a traditional form that resurfaced in the Catawba potter’s repertoire in the early 1990s. Master potters used an image from an anthropological record of the early 1900s to guide their...
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Rock art at the Hagood Mill site is open to many interpretations. Is the imagery sacred, documentation of historic events, part of a simple amusement, or of a larger pictographic language? The answer...
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The stone outcrop at the Hagood Mill Historical site contains prehistoric rock art as well as a few not-so rare messages likely carved in the 19th or 20th centuries. Archaeologist Tommy Charles...
