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A plaque on US Highway 311 near its crossing with the Dan River just east of Walnut Cove commemorates the culture of the Saura. Since it is now known that there were several Saura villages in the Dan River region, the names “Upper”, “Middle” and “Lower” are out of date. What we know of the Saura derives from both history and archaeology.

After the Europeans dawned on the American continent, the Saura people were visited three times by John Lederer, a German physician. His second visit took place in 1670. He found their villages on the Catawba, Yadkin and Dan Rivers. He thought the “Upper” and “Lower” Saura villages on the Dan River did not yet exist. In 1673 James Needham and Gabe Arthur reported Saura villages in the areas where John Lederer found them.

In 1972, 25 native American burials were found in Stokes County; most of the skeletons lay with their heads facing west.

Who were these people? Who were their ancestors? How much is known about them?

An exhibit that in 1996 moved from the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, Va. To the Danville branch calls them the “Dan River People”. From prehistoric times they were inhabitants of the “Upper” Dan River watershed, including the upper reaches of the Smith and Mayo Rivers and their tributaries.

Like other native Americans, the Saura lived in harmony with their environment, making full use of nature’s abundance without causing permanent damage to their part of the planet.

Prior to 1000 AD. The earlier forbears of the Saura were hunter-gatherers and lived in temporary camps perhaps, as a not to William Byrd’s Histories claims, “originally” in the mountain region of western North Carolina where they were known as Saule.” After 1000 AD. They practiced agriculture and lived in palisaded villages. They were ancestors of the Sara (Saura, Sauro, Charah, Cheraw, Sarraw), who left the area after 1700. They were members of the eastern Siouan linguistic group, along with Tutelo, Saponi, Catawba, Occaneechee and Keyauwee of piedmont Virginia, North and South Carolina.

Hanging out on the right bank of the Dan River, above its confluence with Town Fork Creek, it is easy to feel what the museum’s exhibit suggests: that the Saura “had it all”. If, as pre-scientific philosophy taught, the “four elements” are earth, air, fire and water, the Saura had mastered these: for food, shelter, clothing and even tool-making, medicine and personal adornment.

Early on, the Saura built high on the ridges. Later, perhaps to be near their plantings on the rich alluvial soil of the flood plains, they built nearer the river. Their houses , according to one writer, were “arbor-like”, of sapling poles that were “bent at the top and tied with white oak thongs, giving a curved roof; all then was covered with bark and mats, which kept out the wind and rain perfectly.” Smoke went out through a hole at the peak.

In the rich alluvial soil the Saura raised many varieties of corn, peas, beans, pumpkins, cymblings (or cymling, a type of squash), watermelons, muskmelons and potatoes. They settled near fresh water and, no doubt, like William Byrd and other early travelers, drank directly from the streams. Stream water was easily carried home to make tea and puddings. Flooding replenished the soil, and the river supplied the fishy portion of the Saura diet: brown bullhead, catfish, longnose gar, silver redhorse, sucker, yellow perch. All of these have been identified from remains at the Belmont and Koehler archaeological sites near Martinsville. The river also supplied mussels and turtles. The Saura were skilled at making nets, spears, traps and hooks (from deer ulna and phalanx and turkey leg bone).

Clay was used for house-building and pottery. Daub (clay mixed with twigs and grass) was used to seal and insulate. Quartz was used to temper pottery. Other minerals were used as well. Tools of chert and jasper have been found at Stokes County sites (not in Virginia). Talc was fashioned into bowls. Salt was a seasoning. The supplies of these were apparently controlled by the Monocan and Mannahoac of northern Virginia. Diabase, an igneous rock used for large stone tools, is found around Martinsville. Quartzite was used for tools but wouldn’t keep a decent cutting edge.

Even holes in the earth were useful for cool storage and as trash bins.

With their snares and their arrows the Saura must have pulled from the air a variety of avian food, judging from the list of birds' remains identified at the Koehler and Belmont sites:
bob white
passenger pigeon (it wasn't native Americans who did in this species)
hawk
snow goose
thrush
common crow
Canada goose
whistling swan
wild turkey
Bird parts were used for food, for bone tools and for personal adornment.

In the earliest times the ancestors of the Saura probably had to carry with them the gifts of fire bestowed by lightning. Later, the Saura could make their own fire using the "pump drill" and the "bow drill" (exhibits in show what these looked like and how they worked). The Saura used stones to contain campfires.

They heated chert to make it easier to chip when making tools. They used fire in making pottery. They carried out "prescribed burning" in areas which they frequented to reduce undergrowth and to "open" the forests, making it easier to travel, to spot game and to speed an arrow to its target. They used repeated and controlled burnings in making dugout canoes. They practiced "slash-and-burn" agriculture, using fire to clear for planting. According to both early evidence (from archaeology) and late testimony (from William Byrd, who had Indians in his survey party), "fire-surround" hunting was used by the Saura when they were desperately in need of meat.

But to speak merely of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water doesn't do justice to the sophistication of the Saura. We have to say a bit more about their uses of plants and animals before we leave this village site.

Aside from the beans, squash and gourds found at the Saura village sites as evidence of their diet and kitchenware, the following plants were in evidence at "Lower" Sauratown:
acorn, bedstraws, purge, bramble, chestnut, ragweed, grape, hazelnut, poke, may-pops, walnut, hickory, persimmon

Among condiments found at "Lower" Sauratown to enhance the flavor of foods were colts-foot, salt cakes, calcified bones and wild honey. Archaeologists found evidence that the Saura practiced herbal medicine: snake root (e. g. prenanthes ser-pentaris) as an antidote for rattlesnake bite; balsam root for stomach ache and infection; sassafras (sassafras albidum) poultice to reduce swelling-and as tea; elm root bark, pounded and dried, to cure cuts and wounds that were not infected; pine-pitch smoke: good for the eyes! And emetics such as cassine vomitoria and ilex vomitoria carefully pounded in a mortar, smoked, sun-dried and made into tea. Plants for personal use included hair dyes, body grease and paint and tobacco. Plants had other uses: for arrows, quivers, traps, mats, baskets, bedding, nets, sewing, ropes, tools, ladles, bowls and bottles.

We can conjure up images of many of the animals they hunted, but we might have trouble with others. Puppies were kept not because they were cute but as emergency delicacies. And you may assume that the Saura must have been desperately hungry if they took the trouble to cook up anything as tiny as a meadow vole (microtus pennsyl-vanicus) or a white-footed mouse (peromyscini leucopus) or woodrat (tribe neotomini) or as -ugh! disgusting as muskrat (ondata zibethicus), opossum (didelphis virginiana), raccoon (procyon lo-tori) or (gasp!) -spotted (spilogale putorius) or striped (mephitis mephitis) skunk!

Zooarchaeologists have learned that animal butchering was a fine art as practiced by native Americans. The cuts and scratches which archaeologists have found on animal bones can reveal whether the creature was being skinned for its hide; cut up for carrying home from a "long hunt"; deboned for a lighter load; or stripped for its tendons. Cuts on hoof bones may indicate hoofs' use in making soap, glue, ornaments or rattles.

The Saura used amphibians and reptiles for medicines, food and many other functions: snake fangs as combs; snake venom as an antidote for poisoned arrows; venomed splinters slowed enemy pursuers; a rattle-snake tooth comb and poultice could cure a sprain; and rattlesnake rattles were used for personal adornment.

Now we have to recall an area of human life in which the native Americans, the Sauras included, were not so clever: diplomacy. One could argue that it was the Europeans' superior technology (read firepower and firewater) and their willingness to use it in less than ethical ways that did in the "Indians." They were driven first to the southern edge of the Dan drainage, thence out of the watershed entirely, joining first the Keyauwees on the Pee Dee, near Cheraw, South Carolina; and then the Catawba, near present-day Charlotte, North Carolina-and not (probably) by the European explorers, traders and finally settlers-in fact at a time just prior to the European incursion. They were driven southward because pressed (about 1400-1500) by raids of the Pennsylvania Seneca along the "Warriors' Path"; those rivals harassed not only the Saura but also the Saponi and the Occaneechee.

In the case of the Saura, it was apparently a matter of "We'd rather move than fight" or "Rather move than negotiate." After all, the world was large and so they moved on down south. The last survivor may have been seen in Germanton (then the county seat) in 1836.