North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (537 Records)
In 1984, Goodyear and Charles conducted a survey of an area adjacent to the Savannah River encompassing the Allendale Chert quarries, which includes the multi-component Topper Site (38AL23) in Allendale County, South Carolina. During the summer of 2015, Mississippi State University revisited a 102-acre area included in this survey. The survey revealed a near continuous scatter of lithic debitage throughout the project area, at varying depths across different geomorphological settings....
25 Years of Digital Archaeology - Updating the Past to Plan for the Future (2016)
Beginning in the late 1980s, the University of West Florida Archaeology Institute began making extensive use of digital technology to aid in archaeological research. The past 25 years of research have left a plethora of data on a variety of digital media. Current work on developing a new interpretive plan for downtown Pensacola, Florida made it necessary to update and combine as much of this data as possible. Updating this information required the use of a variety of hardware and software...
Absorbed Residue Evidence of Datura Use in Mississippian Contexts (2017)
We recently identified residues indicative of the preparation of Datura in ceramic and shell vessels dating to the Mississippian period (900-1600 CE) of the southeastern United States in the collections of the Gilcrease Museum. Datura is a genus of flowering plants whose seeds and flowers contain tropane alkaloids that produce hallucinogenic effects when consumed by people. The use of Datura for a variety of medicinal ritual practices is well established among Native Americans today and in the...
The Age and Distribution of the Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris ) in Tennessee and the Southeastern U.S. (2016)
Arriving after AD 1000, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) was the last domesticated plant to be adopted in the prehistoric Eastern Woodlands. Beans were combined with corn and squash to create the "three sisters" agricultural system. Recent scholarship has argued that the earliest beans entered the eastern US from the lower Plains and through the Great Lakes. When and how beans entered into the southeastern U.S. is not clearly understood because very few beans have been directly dated. New...
All methods, no madness: Making sense of burial orientations using GIS (2016)
Mapping the excavations at the Fallen Tree Mortuary Complex, St. Catherines Island, GA, effectively consolidated nearly sixty burials and hundreds of features into a cohesive view of the site. Similarity of burial orientation and bodily positioning jumps out immediately. At a glance the norm is that individuals face east with their heads to the south. Examining this pattern more closely called for a more advanced utilization of GIS. Techniques used to quantify burial orientation of the large...
Ambiguous Iconography: Queering the Shell Game (2015)
This paper queers archaeological interpretation by unpacking and destabilizing underlying assumptions in Southeastern iconography. While not focusing expressly on sexuality or gender in these representations, this research discusses the ways ambiguities in engraved shell iconography, more broadly, have been dismissed, glossed, and deemphasized. In part, this exclusion is unintentional and results from the amount of research that remains to be conducted on the vast body of images, but we need to...
Analyzing Historically Significant Archeological Sites to 1800s Survey Plats of Southeast Florida (2016)
The landscape of southeast Florida has been dramatically altered over the past 150 years due to anthropogenic influences. The earliest, most detailed surveys of this region were conducted by the US Surveyor General Land Office from 1846-1870, with an extended survey and map production caused by the American Civil War. These land plats were surveyed along the township and range to be used as the fundamental legal record for real estate for southeast Florida. However, southeast Florida has been...
Analyzing the Use of Inter-Structure Space at Ames, a Mississippian Town in Fayette County, Tennessee (2016)
Ames (40FY7) is an Early-Middle Mississippian period town with two dozen structures, four mounds, and plazas enclosed within a palisade located in Fayette County, Tennessee, which dates to A.D. 1050-1300. Very little research has been done on Early-Middle Mississippian settlements in West Tennessee; this has resulted in very little being known about the social life history of these sites. Recent research at Ames has utilized multiple lines of evidence such as magnetometry data, surface...
Ancient Dogs of the Tennessee River Valley (2017)
Skeletal remains of domestic dogs, particularly dog burials, are common from prehistoric archaeological sites in the Southeastern United States. Efforts to describe these ancient canines have traditionally focused on body size and cranial morphology, however, more recently paleopathology has played a key role in understanding ancient canine lifeways and the interactions between humans and domestic dogs. Mortuary analysis can also bolster interpretations of life histories and dogs’ roles within...
Ancient Watercraft on Changing Landscapes (2016)
This poster is a summary of the results of a multiyear study of drought-exposed dugout canoes, oral histories, steward-preserved dugouts, and revisited extant canoe collections, coupled with many new radiocarbon dates on these heretofore unstudied canoes. Along with dugout dates, location and quantities have revealed additional insights about mobility, paleoenvironment, waterscapes, settlement change, economies, and overall significance of these underrepresented yet unique artifacts. Modern and...
Animate landscapes and the transference of authority: resistance to hierarchy among hunter-gatherers of the Eastern Woodlands (2015)
Traditional conceptions of power, hierarchy, and inequity focus on the relations between and among human communities. To a certain extent, objects and places are considered important aspects of human relations, but they are largely framed as inanimate tools wielded by human actors. This prevalent view is threatened by a rich body of research among non-Western societies that shows non-human things, places, and animals are often considered to be powerful beings imbued with agency and efficacy....
Answering Chronological and Regional Interaction Questions via pXRF and LA-ICP-MS Analyses in the Interior Southeast (2015)
Native American inhabitants in the interior Southeast did not experience direct and prolonged European contact until the late 1600s, however European trade goods still managed to filter their way into the area. While trade goods are present, site chronology has not been clearly defined in many areas. Both pXRF and LA-ICP-MS testing on glass trade beads from East Tennessee and surrounding states has revealed trends in their chemical composition which can be correlated to date ranges. This method...
Anthropogenic Fire Management and Changing Land-Use Strategies in the Mammoth Cave Plateau and Sinkhole Plain, Central Kentucky, USA (2015)
In the Mammoth Cave Plateau and the Sinkhole Plain of Central Kentucky, caves and rockshelters are the primary site type. The Plateau contains little arable bottom land, but cliff overhangs, caves, and perennial streams and springs are abundant. The Sinkhole Plain has abundant arable land, but surface water is quickly diverted to underground streams and permanent water sources are limited to caves and karst windows. We compare the archaeology of two important cave sites—Salts Cave in the Plateau...
The Apalachee in a Cultural Borderlands: A Discussion of Hybridized Ceramic Practice in the 18th century (2016)
By the 18th century the Central Gulf Coast of North America was a complex of cultural borderlands, a result of constant Native American migrations and violent European power struggles. The Apalachee, a group of Floridian Indians, was one of many groups caught up in the rapid changes of culture contact. After the Spanish mission system inhabited by the Apalachee disintegrated, they dispersed across the Southeast, settling in small groups among other splintered Indian nations. As the Apalachee...
Apalachicola Ecosystems Project Fauna
This project presents the results of zooarchaeological analysis of faunal specimens recovered from two sites (1RU18 and 1RU27) excavated as part of a multidisciplinary NSF-funded Collaborative Research Project titled the “Apalachicola Ecosystems Project”, as well as a reanalysis of a zooarchaeological assemblage from the nearby site of Spanish Fort. The Apalachicola Ecosystems Project was co-directed by Thomas Foster, Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, and Roger Brown. The objectives of the...
An Application of Geospatial Technology to the Collection and Analysis of Human Skeletal Remains (2017)
Documenting the spatial distribution of scattered and commingled skeletal elements is an important aspect of forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology. While existing methods of documentation may effectively represent scattered and commingled human skeletal remains, they do not facilitate further spatial analysis that may be useful in reconstructing taphonomic processes. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have recently been leveraged as a method of inventorying human remains, but their capacity...
An Approach to Fitting Transmission Models to Seriations for Regional-Scale Analysis (2015)
At scales where individual copying events are not measurable but the regional archaeological record is rich enough to support models more detailed than phylogenies, seriation can play a unique role as a diachronic measurement tool for linking cultural transmission models to data composed of assemblages of artifact class frequencies. As a first step towards fitting cultural transmission models to regional-scale transmission scenarios, we develop a iterative deterministic seriation algorithm. We...
Archaeobotanical Analysis from the Cane River Site (31Yc91) (2017)
In this paper, we present the results of archaeobotanical analysis from the Cane River Site in Yancey County, NC. Thirty-three samples were collected during the 2013-2014 field season from features associated with different spatial contexts such as household architecture and palisades. Our results show that corn, beans, and squash are ubiquitous in the assemblage, indicating that Cane River has unexpectedly high amounts of domesticates given its higher elevation and lack of lowland floodplains....
Archaeological Collections at the University of West Florida (2016)
The Archaeology Institute at the University of West Florida in Pensacola includes a regional archaeological museum and curation facility. Approximately 450 archeological collections and associated project archives from terrestrial and underwater sites are available to researchers and students. Projects conducted by the Institute along the northern Gulf Coast since the 1980s, and more recently by the Department of Anthropology, include Prehistoric through Industrial era archaeological sites...
Archaeological Excavations at the Early Historic Creek Indian Town of Fusihatchee (Phase 1, 1988-1989) (1990)
Waselkov, Cottier, and Sheldon 1990, "Archaeological Excavations at the Early Historic Creek Indian Town of Fusihatchee (Phase 1, 1988-1989)" is the site report prepared for the NSF for the Fusihatchee site (1EE191), where the zooarchaeological remains included in the Pavao-Zuckerman Fusihatchee Fauna project were originally excavated. The report authors are named as Waselkov, Cottier, and Sheldon. Other authors listed on tDAR are contributors to a chapter. This is a report to the National...
Archaeological Inference and the Concept of Culture (2016)
To anthropologists (as most North American archaeologists consider themselves to be), the ultimate goal of anthropology is the understanding of human cultures. Archaeologists define past cultures through the repeated clustering of specific sets and types of material objects and features in space and time. However, are archaeologists (and cultural anthropologists, for that matter) truly able to reconstruct and "see" that "complex whole" that Edward Tylor defined as culture in the 19th century? In...
Archaeological Investigation and Relocation of a Slave Cemetery at the Nashville Zoo, Davidson County, Tennessee (2015)
Excavations on Nashville Zoo property, once part of the Grassmere Plantation established ca. 1810, identified and removed 20 individuals from an unmarked cemetery. Evidence from coffin and clothing remains indicates the cemetery dates from the early to mid-nineteenth century. The absence of elaborate coffin hardware common of the time, the cemetery location, and the known slave-holding history of the farm indicate this was a slave cemetery. Most of the wooden coffins were hexagonal with few...
Archaeology and augmented reality: applications and advice (2017)
Digital technology has made archaeological sites and artifacts much more accessible to the general public. Augmented reality (AR) allows visitors to "handle" artifacts and view archaeological features in their exact locations even after the units have been backfilled. Implementation of AR comes at a cost; not just in the planning process but long after the site has been backfilled, the artifacts analyzed and conserved, and the site report written. The discussion will focus on an archaeological...
Archaeology As The CRO Flies, 2002-2014: A Retrospective Of Twelve Years Of Powered Parachute Aerial Archaeology (2015)
After considering a number of alternatives for acquiring aerial images, in 2002 the Cultural Resource Office at Northwestern State University of Louisiana received a National Center for Technology and Training Research Grant to assess the suitability of the powered parachute as an archaeological aerial reconnaissance vehicle for site discovery, for detailed site investigation, and for cultural landscape studies. Since that time, this unique aerial platform has been successfully employed to...
Archaeology in your Backyard: Successes and Lessons Learned from FPAN-Led Community Archaeology Projects (2016)
Over the past 10 years, staff from the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) have developed curricula, programs, and trainings that educate both the general public and land managers about archaeology and Florida's unique past. While many of these initiatives might take place in a classroom or lecture hall, FPAN archaeologists also get out in the field to organize community archaeology projects that engage the public with the discovery of their own pasts. This presentation will highlight some...