North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (537 Records)
The later Late Woodland period (A.D. 1200-1650) in Southwest Virginia saw the development of circular palisaded villages as the common settlement type. Two of these villages – 44PU8 and 44PU72 – are located 300 meters apart along the floodplain of the New River in Pulaski County, Virginia. Survey and limited test excavations of these sites between 2011 and 2014 defined the site boundaries and resulted in the identification of several features and the recovery of substantial samples of lithic and...
Comparison of Surface Data Collection Methods at Freshwater Mussel Shell Rings in the Mississippi Delta: When is Enough, Enough? (2016)
For the most part, freshwater mussel shell rings in the Mississippi Delta have not been systematically tested to determine whether they are contemporary, what their function may have been, how they were created, etc. This is in part due to the massive undertaking it requires to pull the necessary data from the field. Controlled surface collection is one of the methods that have been used to do this, and while it is labor-intensive, it can provide a wealth of information about a site. This paper...
The Complex Story of Complex Beads: Elemental Analysis of Some Early Types from the Southeastern US (2015)
Glass beads are one of the most important artifact types on colonial archaeological sites, providing insights into colonial trade networks and helping address critical chronological issues. In this paper, using a sample of 16th to 17th century beads from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (GA), the Glass Site (GA), and Jamestown (VA), as well as a comparative sample from Venice, we use LA-ICP-MS and XRF analyses to examine elemental variability within and across these assemblages. Primarily...
Complying with NAGPRA at the Largest Public Utility: It’s Complicated (2016)
The Tennessee Valley Authority has control of approximately 8,000 human remains and 100,000 funerary objects stored in multiple major research Universities in the southeastern United States. It also manages 293,000 acres of land with 11,000 known archaeological sites. The successes, pitfalls and unexpected discoveries resulting from complying with NAGPRA over the last six years are evaluated in light of the future of prehistoric archaeology in the southeast U.S.
Connestee and Pisgah contexts in the Tuckaseegee Valley of Western North Carolina (2017)
This paper considers the stratigraphic evidence for Connestee series and Pisgah series components in the Tuckaseegee Valley of Western North Carolina.
Conquistadores, Colonists, and Chiefdoms in Northern La Florida: Artifacts and Architecture at the Berry Site in Western North Carolina (2015)
From 1566 to 1568, the northern frontier of the Spanish colonial province of La Florida was situated in western North Carolina. Members of the Hernando de Soto expedition traversed the province of "Xuala," in the upper Catawba Valley, in 1540, en route to towns on the other side of the Appalachians, in eastern Tennessee. Expeditions led by Juan Pardo between 1566 and 1568 visited many of the same places and provinces in the Carolinas and eastern Tennessee as the Soto expedition, including...
Constructed Spaces and Managed Species: Niche Construction Theory and "Wild" Turkey Management during the Mississippian Period in the Southeastern United States (2017)
Pre-Columbian peoples of the Southeastern United States systematically altered their environment through forest clearing, gardening, terraforming, and urban planning. The end result of these activities encouraged certain native animals like the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) to occupy these constructed and managed environments, especially forest-edges and agricultural fields. The sustained daily interactions between species resulted in a special and complex human-turkey...
Contextualing Cahokia's Collapse (2016)
The wide scale abandonment of Mississippian towns in the lower Midwest by the beginning of the fifteenth century has been the focus of interest for the last four decades beginning with the work of Stephen Williams. The largest urban center, Cahokia, is one of the earliest to be abandoned before the end of the fourteenth century. Recent evidence has been presented on a massive flood in the twelfth century as perhaps an important factor in this process, that occurs over a century later. This...
Continuity and Change in the Pisgah Built Environment (2016)
Previous studies of Mississippian towns and villages have extensively detailed the various elements of community organization and built environment that reflect the incorporation of widely shared Mississippian ideas and beliefs. How these towns were built and rebuilt over time demonstrates how regional processes of expansion and integration played out at the presumed edge of the Mississippian world. This paper examines the evolving built environment during the Pisgah period in western North...
Copper and Bone: Craft Labor and Aesthetics in the Early Creole Faubourgs of New Orleans, 1790-1865 (2017)
The early residents of the Creole faubourgs have long been recognized as contributors to the development of New Orleans’s unique aesthetic traditions. Indeed many of the city’s most iconic architectural forms and cultural practices were forged in these neighborhoods—semi-peripheral spaces where people from a variety of local and trans-Atlantic backgrounds came together to re/define and embody the meaning of "Creole" in the nineteenth century. But much of the details about the labor that built...
The Copper Trade of Hatteras Island (2015)
Excavations at the early contact Native American site on Hatteras Island, Outer Banks, North Carolina has yielded a number of copper artefacts in the course of the past six years of excavation. The excavations were run in conjunction with the University of Bristol and the Croatoan Archaeology Society in order to examine historic environment and settlement patterns of the island, as well as analyse the site’s material culture of both the local Croatoan natives and the European imports. Analyses...
Costly signaling and the dynamics of consumption in the early-modern Atlantic world:the case of clay tobacco pipes. (2015)
For sixty years archaeologists studying the early-modern Atlantic world have relied on the decline in the stem-hole diameters of clay-tobacco pipes to date their sites. But they have been incurious about the causal dynamics responsible for the ocean-spanning secular trend and variation around it. In this paper I draw on costly signaling theory to a build a simple model of change in marketing strategies of producers and the signaling strategies of consumers that might account for the trend. I...
Courtyards, Plazas, Paths: Empty Spaces Full of Meaning (2015)
In recent years, geophysical survey techniques have allowed archaeologists to identify subsurface cultural features—a dataset that has filled previously empty spaces on our site maps and made our interpretations of ancient landscapes all the richer. Significantly, geophysical datasets reveal not only features, but also the empty spaces in between those features. This paper explores the spaces between geophysical anomalies—the courtyards, plazas and paths that are common yet rarely investigated...
Craft, commerce, and community at Kolomoki: domestic craft producers in the Woodland period of the American Southeast (2017)
Archaeological considerations of craft production and specialization in the American Southeast has often focused on elaborate prestige goods crafted from exotic materials. Less frequently studied is the potential for specialized production of mundane household goods. Recent research from the Southeast suggests that intensive production of such items was occasionally practiced at the household level among Middle and Late Woodland period (ca. 200 B.C. – A.D. 1000) societies, which generally lacked...
Creating a Discovery Model for Submerged Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Sites on the Northern Gulf Coast (2016)
Between 13,000 and 12,300 BP, sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico increased rapidly. For the next 2,300 years, however, sea levels both rose and fell by centimeters per year, producing significant shoreline movement observable within a human lifetime. Because of continental shelf’s topography, however, shorelines in different areas did not shift at the same rate. Areas with minimal movement would have seemed more stable and attractive for repeated occupations over generations. This paper models of...
"THE CREATION OF SILENCES": Medical Officers & the Morton Collection (2016)
Official historic documents proclaimed nineteenth-century medical officers as heroic for administering to the inflicted during wars that defined and expanded the United States’ national borders. Military doctors were especially welcomed by U.S. soldiers and Euro-American settlers on the Florida frontier where life was precarious. Yet, their activities were often far from benevolent; many advanced necropolitical conditions. Rather than humanitarian crisis, medical officers regarded the...
Cremation Mortuary Ritual among the Classic Period Hohokam and Trincheras Traditions (2017)
Cremation and related fiery rituals performed by Phoenix and Tucson Basin Hohokam in Southern Arizona and Trincheras Tradition populations in Northern Sonora are examined and contrasted in order to understand different regional spheres of social interactions. These were done by examine biological profiles and posthumous treatments of individuals to better understand who they were and how they were treated at death in the Classic Period (A.D. 1150-1450/1500). These data were compared between...
A Cross Comparison in 3D Modeling: The Potential for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Digital Collections (2016)
Previous research on the 3D digitization of fossil cast collections using photogrammetric reconstruction has indicated that a negligible margin of error exists when comparing 3D digital measurements to those obtained by precision instruments. The ability to collect both quantitative and qualitative data using low cost, time efficient digitization methods presents multiple possibilities for digital curation and open-source data access in addition to mitigating potential risks to the...
Cuban Heritage Understanding through Guided Surveys (CHUGS): Establishing a public workshop and database (2016)
Washed up on the Florida shore, the boats that survive the voyage from Cuba are more than a means of transportation; they represent the refugee’s stories of ingenuity and courage. Known as "chugs" due to the sound they make, these boats can be anything from fishing yachts or skiffs, to vernacular vessels that almost defy categorization. These chugs are the physical artifacts of the struggle for political and economic freedom that has propelled thousands to make the dangerous journey over more...
Culture Contact and Subsistence Change at Fusihatchee (1EE191) (2001)
Archaeological evidence from Colonial period Native American sites in southeastern North America document dramatic changes in many aspects of Native American life. In contrast, studies of zooarchaeological remains from the Colonial period indicate that subsistence systems changed very little in spite of the introduction of domestic animals. However, few zooarchaeological assemblages from sites with both precolonial and colonial occupations have been studied. The pre-Creek and Creek site of...
Cuts to the Bone: Using Scalping Evidence to Examine the Relationship Between Warfare and Gender in Pre- and Proto-Historic North America (2015)
Stories of brutal cranial de-fleshing terrorized European settlers throughout colonial North America for centuries. Scalping was simultaneously dreaded by common settlers and promoted by European military leaders. In this context, scalping has often been viewed from a western, etic perspective. However, recent bioarchaeological studies of prehistoric scalping provide an opportunity to examine the cultural contexts of scalping and trophy-taking within American Indian culture, both before and...
Cyberfeminism, Virtual Worlds, and Resisting the Feminization of Digital Archaeology (2016)
In feminist technoscience, feminist technologies are those which are good for the oppressed. Cyberfeminists view online worlds as one such technology; although many question how they can support social transformation. The answer to this dilemma for many cyberfeminists requires that we resist embedding new technologies with entrenched hierarchies of power. After a brief review of how hierarchical thinking is embedded in some familiar technologies, I examine the possibilities virtual technologies...
Dating a Tree Island: A Comparison between Faunal Bone, Shell, Pottery, and Coprolites (2017)
South Florida’s tree island hammocks are islands that were once completely surrounded by water and used as habitation areas from the Archaic period and beyond. Although many islands along the coast can be dated using marine shell, interior tree islands (such as those found on Seminole Tribe of Florida reservation lands) generally lack these artifacts making for a difficult dating strategy. This paper will focus on a comparison of dating material, including shell, pottery, faunal bone, and...
David Hurst Thomas and the Guale Problem: Rethinking Late Prehistoric Mobility along the Georgia Sea Islands (2015)
In his research along the Georgia Coast, David Hurst Thomas identified the "Guale problem" as one of the key issues for late prehistoric research in the region. The problem centers on the relative degree of Guale mobility and subsistence during the pre- and postcontact eras. One view is that these were highly mobile, moving seasonally as they exhausted resources. Alternatively, others posit a more sedentary existence where the rich estuarine environment supplemented by maize agriculture...
A Deeper Look at Lake Jackson: New Insights into Settlement Patterns and Ritual Space at a Florida Mississippian Center (2015)
This poster presents the results of magnetometer and ground penetrating radar surveys as well as excavations conducted in 2014 at the Lake Jackson site located in northwest Florida. The geophysical and excavation results augmented with previously recorded site data provide a new view of occupation and architectural placement in and around the mound complex. Evidence from the remote sensing survey reveals several anomalies that represent probable Mississippian-style structures, while shovel test...