The Etowah site, located in the northwestern corner of Georgia, still inspires the same sense of wonder and mystery that it invoked in Colonel Charles Whittlesey, a nineteenth-century geologist and amateur archaeologist.
We can, to some degree, generalize that carving a stone with symbols consecrated it and distinguished it from others. In some cases it rendered the stone otherworldly in that it could “grant favors” if properly supplicated. “The stone symbolized the steadfast power of Wa-Ko-da …