North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (537 Records)
Previous research indicates that, following European colonization, animal husbandry did not replace hunting as the primary source of meat in the diet of southeastern Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. However, while the introduction of Eurasian domesticated animals had little immediate impact on the lives of indigenous peoples in the Southeast,the expansion of the European market economy had profound implications for the economic and subsistence strategies of Native Americans...
Defining and divining the healthy body: materialities of body and wellness in the 18th century Spanish New World (2015)
This paper explores the intersections of health, religion, race, and dress; how theories of disease and illness in the eighteenth century intersected with Spanish imperial understandings regarding race and dress of colonizer and colonized and culturally-distinct medicinal practices for treating physical and spiritual sicknesses. Colonial empires reshaped and redefined colonial bodies: physical and spiritual care, social and sexual interactions, and dress and language were just a few of the...
Defining Boundaries: An Investigation of Boynton Mounds (8PB100) (2016)
In fall of 2013 preparations began for a limited study of the Boynton Mounds (8PB100) archaeological site. This group of earthwork lies nestled between the Okeechobee basin and East Okeechobee areas in central Palm Beach County Florida. Investigations aim to reveal similarities and dissimilarities between the two areas, which, in turn, may lead to a better understanding of regional variation in South Florida. The primary objective of this study is to identify which culture region Boynton Mounds...
Defining Cumberland Lithic Technology: A Study of Biface Technological Variation and Landuse Patterns (2015)
Cumberland fluted-bifaces are recognized as being lanceolate, full-fluted points that immediately post-date Clovis in the Midsouth United States. A review of the existing literature reveals brief descriptions of morphology, preliminary explanations of production technology, and speculation about regional fluted-point chronologies. This study examines Cumberland fluted-point technology and regional landuse patterns to develop a greater understanding of human adaptive behaviors during the Younger...
Defining the Local Experience: A Distributional Analysis of Late Prehistoric Activities at the Topper Site (38AL23) (2017)
During the summers of 2015 and 2016, University of Tennessee, Knoxville field schools conducted excavations on the hillside at the Topper Site (38AL23), in Allendale, South Carolina. This work represents a shifting focus away from the Paleoindian period toward the dense Mississippian and Woodland assemblages present at the site. Maps constructed utilizing QGIS document the distribution of artifacts and the arrangement of identified features in the two excavation blocks and dispersed 1x1 m...
Destruction of Stored Food in Pre-Contact Northern Rio Grande Pueblo Communities: Food for Thought (2016)
Past archaeological interpretations of site destruction and the elimination of associated food resources, namely through burning, focus largely on conflict-based models of village warfare. This paper considers the role that food-related issues, particularly food-related toxins, might also have played in the destruction of food resources and relocation of village populations during the late pre-contact (AD 1200-1540) period in the Northern Rio Grande region.
Determining Implications of Lithic Selectivity in the Early Historic European Trade of the Central Mississippi Valley (2015)
Exchange between Protohistoric Period Native American and European traders in the Central Mississippi Valley reorganized the lithic industry to focus on hide processing. The most distinctive markers of this industry, thumbnail scrapers, increased as participation in the regional trade intensified and gradually led European-made goods replacing traditional tools. Although several avenues concerning the implications of thumbnail scrapers have been investigated, their raw material source remains...
Determining the Provenance of Suwannee Chert: A PXRF and Microscopic Analyses Case Study from Northwest Florida (2015)
This work presents results on the use of microscopic and PXRF analyses for determining Suwannee chert provenance. Traditionally, analysis of the diagnostic microfossils, fabric, and inclusions in Florida cherts has allowed for successful sourcing of lithic raw materials to a distinct quarry cluster within a specific limestone formation. Instrument analysis has not been pursued due to its prohibitive cost, and trace-elemental analysis has been discouraged because of the inherent difficulty...
Determining village extent and layout utilizing geophysical survey and excavation at the Mississippian site of Cane River, North Carolina (2015)
Geophysical techniques can help to clarify the extent of a site and show spatial relationships between structures, therefore guiding research and excavation strategies. When monuments and larger structural elements are absent, feature density can be a reliable proxy for occupation areas and village boundaries. Utilizing a combination of magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar survey at the Cane River site in North Carolina, we were able to locate borrow pits, storage pits, structures, and...
Development and Applications of a Minimally Destructive Method of Sourcing Shell via LA-ICP-MS (2015)
Shell artifacts and shell-tempered ceramics can be chemically sourced to point of origin because shellfish are in approximate chemical equilibrium with the waterways they inhabit. Analyzing artifacts or shell temper via Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry is attractive due to the minimally destructive nature of the method. A pilot study in Mississippi funded by the NCPTT verified the potential of the method for sourcing shell-tempered pottery. Subsequent work includes the...
DEVELOPMENT AND INTEGRATION OF CULTURAL RESOURCE DATA IN A GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM FROM NUVAKWEWTAQA, CHAVEZ PASS, ARIZONA: A MODEL FOR SPATIAL DATA MANAGEMENT (2015)
The six year Chavez Pass Archaeological Project (Arizona State University - Chavez Pass Project 1976-1982) consisted of survey and excavation at the large Puebloan site of Nuvakwewtaqa. The burial assemblages that resulted from this project were recently reanalyzed in cooperation with the Coconino National Forest, as part of ASU’s Forest Service sponsored NAGPRA Documentation project. The initial project recorded and documented all features identified across the site. However, a comprehensive...
Devil’s Den (8LV84), Florida: Rare Earth Element (REE) Analysis Suggests Comtemporaneity Between Late Pleistocene Fauna and Human Skeletal Material (2015)
In the early 1960s, human remains of several individuals were found in association with late Pleistocene mammals during an excavation at Devil’s Den sinkhole in Levy County, Florida. The rarity of this occurrence in Florida and across the Americas is well-known. Very little has been published about the Devil’s Den site, and the human remains were not available for study until 2003. Neither the human or animals bones can be dated by the radiocarbon method due to a lack of sufficient surviving...
A Diachronic Perspective on Colonoware from the J. Joyner Smith Plantation (2016)
Recent work on SC DNR’s Fort Frederick Heritage Preserve, once part of the J. Joyner Smith Plantation in Beaufort County, South Carolina, offers an opportunity to study changes in ceramic consumption through time. Utilizing archaeological samples from several distinct occupations on this Sea Island cotton plantation, we chart changes in colonoware abundance, in particular, and relate them to larger socio-economic changes taking place across the region during the early 19th c. In addition to...
Diet Breadth Narrowing at the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition: Faunal Evidence from Dust Cave, Alabama (2015)
Paleoenvironmental data from the Younger Dryas and Early Holocene indicate that plant and animal communities in the southeastern United States changed substantially between these periods. These reconstructions indicate that during the Early Holocene, climatic amelioration and changes in forest composition may have led to increases in populations of large-bodied animals that were depressed during the Younger Dryas. Based on these data, I hypothesized that there would have been a narrowing of diet...
Differential Diagnosis of an Unidentified Skeletal Anomaly: a Case Study of Mandibular Resorption from the Smith Creek Site, Mississippi (2016)
The Smith Creek Site (22WK526), located in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, is principally a Coles Creek Period site (AD 700-1400). Human remains were recovered from this site in the 1960s by avocational archaeologists. Although the Smith Creek human remains are fragmentary and commingled, and the records related to their collection are nonexistent, these remains still present a significant data source for this region and time period. Of particular interest is an isolated adult mandible that...
Differentiating burial contexts at Russell Cave, Alabama: pXRF and dental analyses (2016)
The 1956-8 National Geographic funded and Smithsonian sponsored excavations within Russell Cave and the nearby stone mound uncovered six cave and twelve mound burials, respectively. During the 2011 osteological inventory, two burials comprised of maxillary and mandibular fragments were found labeled "A" and "B" with neither cave nor mound context identification. This study employs elemental analysis of soil associated with individual burials as well as dental comparisons to identify the contexts...
Digital Archaeological Data in All the Classrooms: Case studies using the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) for Teaching Digital Methods in Graduate and Undergraduate Curricula (2017)
This paper presents case studies in developing information literacy about archaeological methods and heritage resources, involving use of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) in graduate and undergraduate programs at Adams State University and Indiana University. DINAA is a linked open data hub which uses archaeological site definitions as a core from which to explore further information, including excavation and collections data, scholarly publications, and related...
Digital Archive of Archaeological Dog Burial and Metric Data of the Americas (2016)
Integrating large amounts of data into streamlined, coherent datasets is a popular trend among archaeologists today, as these large datasets allow for the recognition and analysis of regional temporal and spatial trends. This paper presents an overview of a large dog burial dataset for the Southeastern US, where dog burials have been encountered on archaeological sites dating from about 8,000 years ago through the historic period. The information recorded includes contextual information...
Digital Solutions in an Imperfect World: Digital Asset Management, Outreach and the Crisis in Curation (2015)
Difficult realities have set in for some cultural resource professionals. Space (and funding) to protect cultural materials is at a premium, causing some curators and archaeologists to think about heritage preservation and site conservation in new ways. Using the presenter’s experiences developing an archaeology outreach website, this paper explores how digital asset management has become a useful addition to traditional methods of artifact and site conservation in Louisiana, a state with a rich...
DINAA and Bootstrapping Archaeology’s Information Ecosystem (2015)
Data management is fundamental to the practice of archaeology in the 21st century. As such, archaeological data management requires wide engagement and capacity building across our discipline. Archaeological data management increasingly involves the choreography of diverse data, software, Web-based services, and communications channels deployed and curated by a host of actors, ranging from individual researchers, to open source projects, libraries and archives, publishers, and commercial...
Discoveries in Hatteras: a zooarchaeological study of native American consumption patterns. (2016)
The Cape Creek site has been an area of continuous archaeological focus since the inception of the Croatoan Archaeological Project in 2009. This paper will discuss the zooarchaeological methodologies implemented to study Native American use of their immediate landscape and the natural resources of the area during the period before European contact and subsequent consumption adaptations. This will focus on the exploration and analysis of faunal data recovered during the 2012-2015 excavation...
Discoveries in Hatteras: embedding sustainability thinking into community engagement (2016)
In 2015, University of Bristol students elected to join a sustainability education pilot project run in conjunction with the Croatoan Archaeology Society. The project was embedded into existing excavations at the early contact Native American site on Hatteras Island, Outer Banks, North Carolina. It focused on the larger environment, culture and ecosystems of the region and how they were affected by cultural exchange and the introduction of new technologies from the seventeenth century. Students...
Discoveries in Hatteras: European and Native American Cultural Contact and Assimilation. (2016)
Excavations at the early contact Native American site on Hatteras Island, Outer Banks, North Carolina has yielded an incredibly varied material culture that displays all aspects of early Native/European contact in the area. Our collection of newly discovered early European expansion period artefacts, found at the Cape Creek site, a major Croatoan town and trade hub, hints at intense contact between the natives and the first European settlers. This paper is the first academic release of results...
Discovering Plies in Back and Then, Just About Everywhere: Perishable Artifact Studies from the Eastern U.S. Beginning with Tennessee (2016)
The Tennessee State Museum has several collections of perishable artifacts from dry rock shelters and caves on the Cumberland Plateau containing varieties of cordage, basketry, textiles, footwear, worked hide, wood, feathers and other items that appear to date between the Archaic and Mississippian periods. Preliminary analyses explore the origin, distribution, and fusion of styles that became the enduring traditions of the indigenous peoples of the American Southeast. Ethnographic and...
Diving into the PAST: public engagement with Florida’s historic shipwrecks (2017)
Florida’s historic shipwrecks are a natural draw for divers from all over the United States and the world. Many are located in warm, clear water, and all are home to an amazing variety of aquatic life. Capitalizing on the popularity of shipwrecks with sport divers, the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research developed the Florida Underwater Archaeological Preserve program of interpreting historic shipwrecks for divers and snorkelers. Now numbering twelve shipwrecks, these "museums in the sea"...