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Notes:
Mound C at Etowah is a context illustrating one local style that is contemporary with the Eddyville style (a.k.a. "Braden A") of the Central Mississippi and Lower Ohio regions. I have named this style from East Tennessee and northern Georgia "Hightower" after an old name for the Etowah site. There are sufficient links of these gorgets with dated contexts in eastern Tennessee and in northern Georgia to make a late 13th century date probable for the manufacture and even the archaeological deposition of most specimens. As I shall point out later, this style should not be confused with the materials from some contexts in the so-called "village" areas of the Etowah site.
Brain's method for assessing dating in his and Philips' study of shell gorgets depends very heavily on what he calls "homogeneous burial associations"or "HBAs." These HBAs are supposed to be "multiple graves in a well-defined archaeological context" with various similarities and which may be taken to "represent a relatively short duration" (p. 129). The HBAs are a kind of substitute for actual grave-lot associations. In practice, however,Brain has created HBAs that are too broad and diverse, and whole sites are treated as though they had only short-term, homogeneous occupations. I think these are the major factors in the Shell Gorgets dating of many styles so much later than has been done by regional specialists in those sites. Brain attributes late associations to particular gorget "styles" by assuming their supposedly "reasonably contemporary" associations (p. 129) in entire mound or even sites. Moreover, the chronological markers themselves are often dubious. Thus, Brain argues for generally late dating, despite long periods of occupation at many of these sites. In many cases of claimed "association," the question of concern to critics is site duration, rather than whether or not heirlooms exist in actual, direct association with later items. This is a particular problem for sites such as Lake Jackson in Florida and Etowah in Georgia that are crucial to Brain's argument, but the same problems also are present for many other locations discussed.