North America: Southeast United States (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Cochran.

This project uses geospatial landscape theory to explore how enslaved people living in settlements on the Sapelo Plantation signaled their African and Caribbean roots through overt and covert materials and landscape patterns in Bush Camp Field and Behavior settlements. Enslaved people at the Sapelo Plantation were likely granted higher levels of relative independence, resulting in a different relationship with the landscape than enslaved people at contemporaneous lowcountry plantations. I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Rainville. Asa Randall.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The landscape of the Silver Glen Springs Archaeological Complex has been extensively modified for at least 9000 years, including the construction of shell mounds and wooden post structures. The focus of previous research at this complex on reconstructing the massive Shell mounds and monuments along the spring run has left the non-mounded areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Elliott. Michael Seibert.

Archaeologists with the LAMAR Institute and the National Park Service collaborated in an ambitious undertaking to characterize the elemental composition of round ball ammunition from early historic sites. Researchers used portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) technology to sample the elemental content of over 500 round balls from more than 17 different archaeological sites in eastern North America. These include samples from Native American and Euro-American settlements as well as French and Indian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Horvey Palacios. Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Little Salt Spring mortuary pond is located in south central Sarasota County, Florida. It has been the subject of numerous significant discoveries that have challenged our understanding of the earliest occupations of the Americas. Two green stone pendants recovered from the basin, and dated to the Middle Archaic period (700-500 BP) also test current models ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Manzano. Renee Bonzani.

This is an abstract from the "Broader Impacts and Teaching: Engaging with Diverse Audiences" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Active participation and hands-on analysis and activities in college-level classes can draw students with diverse interests into classes of archaeology. To move away from straight lecturing about archaeological principles, the authors developed a class on paleoethnobotany and zooarchaeology that actively involves students...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne Sullivan. Kevin Smith.

By 1300 CE, the people of the Middle Cumberland region were on the move, a migration related at least in part to climatic instability including multiple drought episodes. Numerous types of evidence suggest that some of these migrants went to East Tennessee. We discuss possible material culture evidence for this migration from several East Tennessee sites, but with an emphasis on the Long Island site, now located in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar reservoir and near the base of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bobi Deere. Jesse Nowak.

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cave art is amongst the earliest evidence of art in the North American Southeast, and was instrumental in establishing Early Mississippian period iconographic styles. Exploring the imagery found in caves across different cultural regions provides alternative contexts to understand distinct belief systems and ritual practices....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Claassen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An exploratory look at Helmet shell use during the Woodland period and Busycon columella "wind jewels" in the Mississippian period. The investigation is informed by Mesoamerican shell symbolism.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Parker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the end of the Civil War, plantation landscapes in the South Carolina Lowcountry underwent dramatic changes that broke up massive, generational landholdings and upended centuries of exploitative economic systems. Moonshining provided a means for some former plantation owners to maintain possession of core properties, while providing a narrative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Kangas. Sarah Miller.

Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS) Florida, a program created by the Florida Public Archaeology Network, is designed to teach the science of climate change and pragmatic problems it poses for cultural resources. Beyond just learning about climate change science, projections, and increasing impact we can expect to see over the next 50-100 years, HMS Florida is specifically designed to give individuals a way to make a difference. Responding to threats posed by climate change, weather, and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Ruhl.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees as a metaphor conveys that we sometimes cannot assess situations while we are in the midst of them. Archaeobotanists often report that the most ubiquitous plant type at a site is charred wood. But have we really assessed what these once trees represent: fuel, building remains, indirect evidence of food, or something...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Loubser.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long Ridge Road is the most complicated of 20 high elevation sites with similar-looking circular and meandering petroglyphs along the South Carolina/North Carolina state line. With the aid of drone photography a minimum number of 1,043 petroglyph motifs were recorded. Based on motif style and stratigraphy the site most likely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only August Costa. Jonathan Lohse. Stephanie Orsini.

Bison and pronghorn are taxa that have relatively high visibility in the archaeological record of the southern Plains. Understanding when bison and pronghorn were present in regions located in the southern Plains periphery is important for our general knowledge regarding bison/pronghorn ecology, climate, and environmental change in North America, as well as providing insights into human responses during these periods. Previous studies of the extent and timing of bison expansion into the southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Broughton Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-nineteenth century, Spicy Baxter and siblings were emancipated by their father, George White, a freedman in Madison County, Kentucky. The family moved south, away from their northern Madison County farm to a rugged, isolated, parcel in the south of the county. Here, Spicy and her female siblings lived until the early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Rainville.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lake Okeechobee Basin in Central South Florida was intensively modified by Belle Glades (1000 BCE–1700 CE) communities. The hunter-gatherer-fisher people engaged with complex landscape interactions and alterations, including terraforming in and around wetland sinks and tree islands through pit digging, mound construction, and more, forming an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fraser Neiman.

This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades archaeologists have used optimization models to puzzle out how artifacts served the fitness interests of their makers and users. This paper offers a simple optimization model to clarify how selective pressures (e.g. household size and occupation span) shape the maintenance of space on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorothy Lippert.

The NMNH Repatriation Program is charged under the NMAI Act to use the "best available scientific and historical documentation" to identify the origins of the human remains and objects in its collections. The nature of the museum means that the office can rely on the scholarship of Smithsonian curators for assistance. In addition, copious records in the National Anthropological Archive and in the Smithsonian Archives are present that relate to the collections. However, the records sometimes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Morgan.

Wilderness is often interpreted to mean areas of pristine nature lacking evidence of human activity. But how realistic is this view given the length of human occupation where many endeavored to mold the landscape to suit their needs? The Francis Marion National Forest is positioned at the northern end of the Sea Islands Coastal Region of the South Atlantic Slope and contains four designated wilderness areas. Given the size and condition of the two largest wilderness areas the Forest Service...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Domenique Sorresso. C. Trevor Duke. Charles Cobb.

This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to investigate ceramic manufacturing in the Nashville Basin of Tennessee during the Mississippian period (AD 1000–1500) at the macroscopic and microscopic levels. Our vessel lot and petrographic studies analyze 73 shell-tempered pottery sherds from seven Middle Cumberland archaeological sites. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Ritchison.

Following the abandonment of the Middle Savannah River Valley at the end of the 14th century, communities on the neighboring Georgia Coast adopted a new settlement system. At the scale of the region, this appears as a dispersal of settlement and an increase in size of the largest population centers that had previously existed. This paper presents the results of the first systematic intra-community survey of a large site on the Georgia Coast. Results show how residents of the site spatially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Krueger. Jon Wittig. Michael Savarese. Kylie Palmer. Antonio Arruza.

Recent research has demonstrated that overharvesting of Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) by Calusa Native Americans was severe enough during the Caloosahatchee cultural period (500 BC–AD 1500) to have influenced the population demography of the shellfishery (Savarese et al., 2016). A shift to smaller individuals without a change in oyster growth rate was documented from the Late Archaic into the Caloosahatchee when Calusa population size increased considerably in the region. Modern oyster...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asa Randall.

"Persistent places"—natural or terraformed locations that draw repeated human action—are unique resources for archaeologists investigating deep-time phenomena. Not only do they allow us to track social and ecological changes anchored in space, the repeated tending to such places set in motion historical path dependencies for descendent communities. However, at the human scale persistence is never a taken for granted, but is produced by the projects of communities who incorporate places into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Schneider.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Florida Keys present a unique ecological and archaeological setting in the United States, but one which has traditionally been discounted as too marginal of an environment to support year-round occupation by Indigenous communities prior to colonization. Anecdotal accounts of “Spanish Wells” reliably employed for freshwater during the colonial and early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Pluckhahn. Kendal Jackson. C. Trevor Duke.

Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI41) are neighboring mound and village complexes on the central Gulf Coast of Florida, occupied mainly sequentially across the first millennium AD. Stratigraphic excavations, coupled with extensive radiocarbon dating, permit relatively fine-grained observations regarding the prevalence of fauna over time. Oyster dominates faunal remains from all periods, but higher relative frequencies of small gastropods are evident in Midden Phases 2 and 4. Sponge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sherwood. Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

This presentation reports on a new rock art site from Kentucky, brought to the authors' attention by local citizens. Inside a large sandstone rockshelter, more than a dozen black pictographs show several anthropomorphic characters. These images bear distinctive features and regalia associated with the "Redhorn Cycle" hero narrative reported by Paul Radin in 1948 from his ethnographic work among the Ho-Chunk. The rock art from this "Morning House" strongly resembles well-known Mississippian...