North America: Southeast United States (Geographic Keyword)
426-450 (475 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines changes over time in the ways that fisher-hunter-gatherer communities on the central Gulf coast of peninsular Florida participated in the regional trade of specialized crafted goods. The social landscape of the greater Tampa Bay area appears to have become increasingly politically integrated between the end of the...
Transcending Borders: A New Approach to Prehistoric Contexts in North Carolina (2018)
The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology reviews information about hundreds of newly-identified archaeological sites each year and advises the State Historic Preservation Office regarding their ability to provide important information about the past. The need to synthesize accumulated data so that assessments of site significance can better reflect our potential state of knowledge is both pressing and daunting. Updating prehistoric contexts for North Carolina is a particularly challenging...
The Transformational Properties of Water and Rock Art (2018)
Water helps breach the rock surface in both physical and perceptual ways. The addition of water facilitates the production of petroglyphs not only by weakening the bond between particles in sedimentary rocks but also with the moist particles acting as an effective abrasive slurry. The addition of water to natural earth pigment powder allows the colorant to effectively enter pores and interstices. Many virtually invisible petroglyphs and pictographs "magically' appear when covered with a thin...
Tree Island Life: Late Archaic Adaptations of a Northern Everglades Community (2018)
The Wedgworth Midden (8PB16175), a Late Archaic tree island site near Belle Glade, Florida, produced large quantities of faunal remains during excavations undertaken by Florida Gulf Coast University in May of 2016. Analysis of these remains allows insight into patterns of resource acquisition and reveals ways in which people adapted to the local environment. Comparison of proportions of taxa from different occupational periods allows us to trace changes in resource use and sheds light on...
The Trouble with the Curve: Reassessing the Gulf of Mexico Sea-Level Rise Model (2018)
During last glacial episode, a massive amount of water was locked within ice sheets, resulting in a reduction in global sea-levels by 134 meters. The reintroduction of freshwater into the oceans radically changed global sea-levels and littoral landscapes. Over the last 20,000 years, approximately 15-20 million km2 of landscape has been submerged worldwide. Sea-level rise explains the rarity of glacial period coastal archaeological sites. Understanding Florida’s Paleoindians’ interactions with...
A Typology of Late Archaic Ceramic Evidence from Okeechobee Basin to Determine Regional Interactions (2018)
Analysis of ceramic sherds collected during excavations at the Wedgworth Midden (8PB16175) permits insight into regional interactions during the Late Archaic period. Saint John's Plain, a chalky ware associated with people to the north of the Okeechobee Basin, constitutes a significant proportion of the assemblage and suggests that Late Archaic communities in the Northern Everglades maintained social interactions with people living in the St. Johns River Valley. While preliminary, these patterns...
Uncovering Nashville’s African-American Heritage: The Bass Street Community Archaeology Project (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2017, the Bass Street Community Archaeology Project has been conducting excavations at the site of one of the earliest African American neighborhoods in post-Civil War Nashville. The Bass Street Community was located on the north side of Saint Cloud Hill, the site of Fort Negley, a Civil War era fort constructed by the Union forces in Nashville....
Uncovering the Mystery of the Lamar-like Clay Objects (2018)
For decades, stamped and plain clay objects recovered from post-contact Native American sites between the 1950s and 1990s in the Florida panhandle have puzzled researchers. The objects are believed to have been produced by the Apalachee Indians living in the region. However, little is known about the techniques used to manufacture them or what purpose they served. These artifacts are generally referred to as Lamar clay balls owing to some having stamped patterns similar to Lamar-like stamped...
The Under-Represented Mullet in SW Florida’s Archaeological Assemblages (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mullets (Mugil spp.), especially the striped mullet (Mugil cephalus), because of their predictable mass-schooling behavior, are obvious candidates as having been surplus food for the socio-politically complex, Calusa fisher-gatherer-hunters. Moreover, López de Velasco, writing in about 1570, stated that there was in southwest Florida waters a "great fishery of...
Understanding Manifestations of Public Ritual in Late Mississippian Pottery: A Comparison of Millstone Bluff and Dillow’s Ridge Ceramic Assemblages (2018)
This research entails the thorough analysis and comparison of two ceramic assemblages to understand whether and how ritual manifests in pottery of the Late Mississippian Southeast. The study focuses on ritual phenomena exhibited at two Late Mississippian Period (ca. late 1200s A.D. to A.D. 1500) settlements in southern Illinois, the Millstone Bluff site in Pope County (11Pp3) and the Dillow’s Ridge site in Union County (11U635). Millstone Bluff has been interpreted as a site of public ritual and...
Understanding Multi-sited Woodland Communities of the American Southeast through Categorical Identities and Relational Connections (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While communities are often considered to be isomorphic with settlements, this equivalency is ill-suited to understanding contexts in which the structure of settlement and social organization was cyclical and nested at multiple spatial and temporal scales. In the coastal plain of the American...
Understanding Patterns of Indigenous White-tailed Deer (*Odocoileus virginianus) Exploitation in the North Carolina Piedmont Using Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) Isotope Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The varied responses by Native communities within the American Southeast to European colonization resulted in a period of dynamic social, economic, and political change. One such response to the colonial encounter was the development of a robust trade in the skins of white-tailed deer. In this paper, I focus on the effects of the deerskin trade on the deer...
Unidentified Oddity of the Petrous Portion of the Temporal Bone: A Case Study from a Historic Cemetery in Louisiana (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While there are several commonly tracked non-metric and pathological features of the temporal bone, rarely are they found on the internal petrous portion. In this case study, the bilateral presentation of perforations located on the internal, superior aspect of the petrous portion of the temporal bone are discussed. The lesions are laterally placed near to the...
The Use of Geophysics to Image Structures at Broyhill Mound (31CW8) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geophysical surveys were conducted at the Broyhill Mound, a protohistoric late Burke village in the foothills of the Southern Appalachians ~30 km northeast from Fort San Juan/Berry (1566-1568), to guide investigations. The site was first discovered by John Rogan for Cyrus Thomas in 1883, and then rediscovered by Richard Polhemus in 1964 and Appalachian State...
Use of Plants by Enslaved Laborers at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1804 until 1865, The Hermitage was home to Andrew Jackson, his descendants, and over 130 enslaved men, women, and children, often invisible in the historical record, who labored in the fields of Jackson's cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee. After emancipation, freed households continued to live in the former domestic quarters. For three decades...
Using Digital Data for a Landscape Approach at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and Tennessee (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fort Campbell has a robust dataset for cultural resources following decades of survey, testing, and monitoring projects. Recent surveys of thousands of acres have included the collection of digital data. Coupled with the complete survey coverage of large areas of the installation, this data was used for a landscape...
Using Digital Technologies to Enhance Public Interpretation and Increase Access at Booker T. Washington National Monument (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Booker T. Washington’s birth and enslavement in Hardy County, Virginia, has been honored since 1945 when the farm was purchased to serve both as a memorial and a school. Eventually incorporated into the National Park system in the 1950s, this site has been the focal...
Using Microartifacts to Investigate Prehistoric Cooking Methods at the Archaeological Site of Dust Cave (2018)
Microartifacts - generally considered to be artifacts measuring less than 6.35 mm (¼ inch) - have traditionally received little attention in North American archaeology. We argue that microartifacts are not simply smaller versions of larger artifacts, but rather provide different and complimentary data. This study investigates microartifacts from the archaeological site of Dust Cave (10,650-3,600 BCE), located in northwest Alabama, in order to better understand prehistoric diet and cooking...
Using XRF Analysis on Historic Choctaw Ceramics from Chickasawhay Creek, Kemper County, MS (2018)
In partnership with Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research (TVAR), this poster presents the results of an x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) analysis of ceramics recovered from historic Choctaw (Late 17th - Early 19th century) contexts at sites (22KE630 and 22KE718) located along Chickasawhay Creek, Kemper County, MS. In the fall of 2017, a sample of ceramic sherds was selected for chemical sourcing at the University of Alabama. XRF was used to non-destructively identify ceramic...
The Utility of Public LiDAR Data for Detecting and Documenting Low-Relief Archaeological Sites: A Case Study from the Pockoy Island Shell Rings, Charleston County, South Carolina (2018)
This paper evaluates the utility of high-resolution LiDAR-derived elevation data for remotely surveying difficult-to-access coastal areas to identify possible archaeological sites, which can then be targeted for further investigation. To determine the effective limits of the elevation data to visualize low-relief structures, locations of previously-recorded Archaic and Woodland-period shell rings along the lower Atlantic coast were examined. Thirty-four rings were identified, including two...
The Value of Legacy Collections for Recognizing and Reducing Error in Artifact Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All data accumulated in field studies directed at the determination of formal variation in the archaeological record contain a source of variation that results from analytical error. This type of error, if of sufficient magnitude, may significantly affect interpretation. Recent ceramic and faunal analyses from the Southeast have identified important...
Vegetation Change at Poverty Point, Louisiana (2018)
This paper presents pollen data as a proxy of past vegetation at Poverty Point, a large Archaic mound site in northeast Louisiana. The paleoecological focus of this presentation revolves around the rate and nature of change over time. Patterns and changes in taxonomic diversity are presented and discussed in light of environmental productivity. The rate of vegetation change is calculated and related to ecosystem stability. Additionally, changes in individual taxonomic representation are examined...
Vertebrate Fauna from Fusihatchee (1EE191) (1997)
Vertebrate evidence for animal use by native groups of the interior southeastern United States during the Protohistoric and early Historic periods are rare. Additional data for this time period from the Fusihatchee site are reported here. Fusihatchee vertebrate remains are from two Protohistoric structures (Structures 6 and 8) and a Historic feature (Feature 320/335). Data from two other features (Features 390 and 2232) are commented upon briefly. The Protohistoric component includes 4,218...
Village Aggregation and Native Subsistence Practices at a Middle Woodland Mound Center, Gulf Coast Florida, USA (2018)
Current research at Garden Patch (8DI4), a Middle Woodland mound center with circular village construction in northern peninsular Gulf Coast Florida, provide quantitative insights into the timing and temporality of monument construction and village aggregation. Here, we combine previously modelled radiocarbon assays with new isotopic data on season of collection and habitat of exploitation. The four-phase model of site occupation when combined with the new isotopic data provide new insights into...
Violence, Dislocation, and Social Transformation in the Chesapeake, AD 1300–1500 (2018)
Beyond the Mississippian frontier in Southwest Virginia, Algonquian and Siouan societies in the Chesapeake pursued their own culture histories, evidently independent of developments in the American Midcontinent and Southeast. And yet, between AD 1300 and 1500 a set of social changes cascaded from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay which may correspond with developments highlighted in this symposium. How did the late precolonial collapse, social fragmentation, and violence of the...