In my quick search for symbols and meanings for these specific tribes, I found nothing. 

I did learn that UNC Chapel Hill has a dig site in Hillsborough of at least one Occaneechi village. This is close to the Eno. They definitely found pottery and some old, European goods, but there were no twig spirals from what I could find. 

When I did another search for the spiral symbol and indigenous people, sites came up connected to tribes in the south west. The symbol is found on cave walls and pottery – there were no spirals on the pottery found in Hillsborough, only on the pottery out west.

This was mostly from jewelry sites so I don’t know how true it is, but they listed Navajo, Zuni and Puebloan. The spiral according to these sites seems to represent wind in one legend. Water and creatures from the water in another.

Since these south west tribes never lived near the Eno River, I decided to look up more about the spiral symbol in general. Turns out the symbol is thousands and thousands of years old and appears in every culture all over the world!

On a tiny scale, it’s the double helixes of our DNA. On a huge scale, it’s the shape of the Milky Way galaxy. Our fingerprints are even spirals.  There’s an Egyptian hieroglyph spiral, a Celtic spiral and they found one that was carved in ancient Greece. Those bizarre Nazca lines in Peru that you can only see by plane have a spiral in them. They were even found at a Paleolithic site. Japanese rock gardens, ancient Mayan designs, labyrinths… they’re everywhere.

No one knows exactly what they mean, especially in the really old versions of it. Indigenous people seem to connect it to either wind or water legends — basically things connected with the forces of nature. Some think it’s the cycle of life, death and rebirth. There are carvings of women that place the spiral on her stomach, representing the womb. Whatever it is, they all seem to connect humans to the natural world. 

I’m not a big reader and I was never good at school so I’m not going to spend endless hours trying to research spirals in everything. I guess nature of some sort makes sense since I found them deep in the woods by the Eno. But why were they there? Any idea? 

Then I found the Fibonacci Sequence. I’m totally shit at math so maybe this is just me being stupid, but this stuff blew my mind. I do think those twig spirals were shaped just like that.