Archaeological excavations at the Fredricks site recovered almost 17,000 artifacts of European or Euroamerican manufacture. A majority of these were obtained from English traders from Virginia; the remaining artifacts, which mostly were found in the disturbed plowed soil that covers the site, post-date the establishment of Hillsborough in the mid-eighteenth century. Because of time constraints when these artifacts were analyzed, approximately 1,700 artifacts from disturbed contexts, and which clearly postdate the occupation of the Occaneechi village, were excluded from study. These artifacts included brick, unidentifiable iron, slag, cinders, and nineteenth-century ceramics that were recovered from the plowzone during 1985 and 1986. The remaining artifacts are discussed below and summarized in Table 7.
Artifacts are discussed by activity group following Stanley South's functional classification scheme (South 1977:95-96). However, the use of this organizational framework is not intended to suggest that these artifacts always functioned in an aboriginal context in the same way as they were intended to function in the European context. It also was necessary to modify South's original scheme in order to incorporate categories for glass trade beads, construction materials, metal resources, and some ethnobiological items such as carved wood and leather. While most of the Euroamerican artifacts or artifact fragments could be identified, only a small number of items (e.g., ceramics, some beads, gun parts, pipe stems, whole bottles, and spoons) could be accurately dated. The remaining artifacts could only be assigned to a broad temporal range of manufacture or utilization (e.g., a kettle, knives, scissors, iron nails, and iron implements).