It looks like an ordinary piece of reddish-brown pottery, but to archeologists, the bowl fragment tells a fascinating story.

Discovered on Georgia's St. Catherines Island, the bowl was made of molded clay strengthened with plant fibers. It wasn't strong enough to be placed directly over a fire, so Native Americans would have used it for "hot rock cooking" — they heated rocks and dropped them into a bowl of food, says Dennis Blanton, curator of Native American archeology at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History.

BEN GRAY / bgray@ajc.com (ENLARGE)
This plain pitcher is a piece made by native Americans on St. Catherine's Island for trade to Europeans. It will be one of the many priceless artifacts that date back thousands of years to be displayed at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in the fall.
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And, at about 5,000 years old, it's the oldest piece of pottery ever discovered on this continent, he said.

"Georgia is the place where pottery was invented in North America," he added."

The fragment will be displayed along with about 40 other pottery items from St. Catherines at the Fernbank this fall, probably in late October or early November. It will be the public's first glimpse of a priceless collection of about 1 million artifacts donated to the museum four years ago.

The Fernbank plans a much bigger exhibit after all of the objects are studied and catalogued, probably in early 2010. This year's display "is a little bit of a tease," Blanton said. "We're eager to get it before the public."

This fall's exhibit will focus on the story told by pottery discovered on the island. The display will include both native and European-inspired bowls, pitchers and decorative objects, including a mysterious clay face covered with a red film, possibly a mineral-based pigment.

Other items found on St. Catherines include glass and gold trading beads, European-inspired pottery and handmade religious medallions thought to have come from the Vatican. Many artifacts were found in or near the ruins of what is believed to be the oldest church in Georgia, the Mission Santa Catalina de Guale.

The gift, by the Edward John Noble Foundation, is expected to put the 15-year-old museum on the map of research institutions, Blanton said.

"Fernbank, being the young museum it is, has not traditionally been a collections-based museum. Most often, what you see here is traveling exhibits," he said. "For the first time now, we've got material that other museums will clamor for. We're already entertaining all kinds of request from researchers around the world."

When the gift was announced, David Hurst Thomas, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, called it "one of the premier archeological collections in the country."

Thomas led digs on the private island, which has been an archeological site for over 30 years.

The undeveloped island, about 50 miles south of Savannah, was used in recent history as a retreat and hunting preserve for the wealthy. In 1943, Edward John Noble, a New York businessman who made his fortune with the Life Savers Candy Company, purchased St. Catherines and had a Black Angus cattle operation there. A few years after he died in 1958, the island was transferred to the foundation bearing his name. It is now owned by the nonprofit St. Catherines Island Foundation, which promotes conservation of natural resources and preserves historic sites.

Because it has been virtually untouched by the modern world, the island is an "archeological eden, a preserve," Blanton said. "You can study the full sweep of human experience over 5,000 years."

The St. Catherines collection reveals much about the life of the Guale Indians, the first indigenous people met by Europeans on the shores of what is now the United States, and also provides valuable insights into the earliest Spanish efforts to convert Native Americans to Christianity, he said.

"This is the story of colonization that we see everywhere, but it's also a Georgia story," Blanton said. "It's a universal story. Here's how it played out in our back yard."