Comparison of plant remains from the Wall and Fredricks sites is particularly informative about changing aboriginal subsistence in one part of the Eno River valley, and the Mitchum site data provide a glimpse of Historic period plant use in the adjacent Haw River valley. However, another seventeenth-century Piedmont site has yielded ethnobotanical data that are useful for comparison with these results. This is the Upper Saratown site in the Dan River drainage of the northwestern North Carolina Piedmont, located about 50 miles northwest of the Mitchum site. This site was occupied during the late sixteenth century, about the time that the Occaneechi occupied the Fredricks site. Information on plant remains from Upper Saratown is taken from Wilson (1977, 1983).
Since the Upper Saratown plant remains were recovered by waterscreening through 1/16-inch mesh, they will be compared with waterscreened material from Fredricks. The assemblages are similar in a number of ways. The hickory nutshell percentage for Upper Saratown (51.6%) is quite close to that for Fredricks (52.4%). However, the corrected acorn-to-hickory ratio for Upper Saratown is nearly one (0.94), which suggests that the two nut types had similar importance there; the ratio for Fredricks based on waterscreened samples is only 0.17. Walnut and hazelnut are also better represented at Upper Saratown than at Fredricks.
Corn percentage is higher at Upper Saratown (37.5%), but this may be a consequence of the greater variety of feature types represented there. Common bean and squash occur in small amounts at Upper Saratown, in addition to bottle gourd. Except for sunflower (represented by one seed), no native grain seeds were recovered from the site. However, watermelon, another European introduction, is represented in addition to peach. As at Fredricks, grape, persimmon, and maypops are the most abundant seed types. A Simpson diversity index of .8876 was obtained for Upper Saratown, which is quite close to that calculated for Fredricks (.8812).
Thus, the Upper Saratown population exploited the same types of resources that were used at Fredricks. Fleshy fruits, including peach, occur in similar proportions at both sites. The same is true for all non-indigenous crop plants except for corn. Both sites show evidence of considerable European contact. A number of factors including local environment, group size, trade relations with Europeans, and archaeological excavation procedures may account for the differences between the two assemblages. In any case, plant use seems to have been similar in both areas during the Historic period. Data on plant remains from earlier sites in the Dan River drainage would be useful for determining whether there were similar changes in plant use between the Protohistoric and Historic periods there as were noted at the Eno River sites.
Elsewhere in the East, changes in plant food use during the period of European contact are in some respects different from those assessed for the North Carolina Piedmont. In the lower Little Tennessee River valley (Chapman and Shea 1981), corn percentage is generally higher than in the Piedmont for both the Late Mississippian Dallas phase (c. A.D. 1300-1600) and the Historic Cherokee period (c. A.D. 1700-1819), with corn percentage increasing sharply during historic times. Although acorn seems to have undergone a similar decline in importance, walnut and butternut were still used frequently in the Historic period. In eastern Tennessee, sunflower, chenopod, maygrass, and knotweed (Polygonum sp.), all indigenous grain seed sources, are as abundant or more abundant at Historic period sites as they are in Late Mississippian components.
