North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (537 Records)
Radiometric dates from the protohistoric Cane Notch Site on the Nolichucky River in upper East Tennessee indicate contemporaneous ceramic assemblages characterized by multiple traditions. Our work produced wares referable to the Qualla and Overhill series, wares directly associated with 18th century Cherokee villages elsewhere. Burke wares, from the eastern side of the Appalachians, also occur in large numbers. These “different” wares at Cane Notch share common attributes, however, that also...
Following the Shell: Pxrf Analysis on Engraved Busycon Whelk from Spiro and Cahokia (2016)
Marine shell was ubiquitous in the Mississippian Southeast. In an effort to shed light on where the shell originated, X-Ray Fluorescence analysis was done on a sample of Spiro engraved shell, and on Cahokian engraved shell. As a second line of questioning, results were separated by previously assigned styles, including Braden and Craig. At this point, sourcing with the Pxrf only points to either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Coast. However, interesting questions have arisen in the data...
Food and Religious Practices at Spiro: Implications for Understanding Social Complexity (2016)
Recent reanalyzes of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere have invoked reinvigorated, multi-dimensional research that examines symbolism, social organization, and subsistence practices. Through a reanalysis of faunal remains from Spiro Mounds, OK, this paper interrogates the presence of faunal remains and materials to better contextualize their use through a lens of concurrent religious practices at the site from CE 1000-1400. By contextualizing the remains within broader discussions...
The Forensics of Commodification: Examples from Louisiana of the Acquisition, Analysis, and Legal Problems Related to Trophy Skulls Seized from Illegal Sales (2015)
Since the inception of the Louisiana Department of Justice’s human remains acquisition program in 2007, two Tibetan kapalas have been recovered from illegal sales. This commodification of human remains constitutes technical violations of the law, but the nature of the remains makes for an awkward fit to the existing laws. The forensic, bioarchaeological, and cultural analysis of these remains are difficult due to their altered nature, leading to problems of disposition. Questions inherent in...
Formulating an Energetics Assessment of the Moundville Landscape (2016)
Platform mound building is a key indicator of sociopolitical complexity in the southeastern United States. In this presentation, the human energy employed in earthen monumental construction at the Moundville polity in west-central Alabama is quantified as a means of exploring the organizational variability of the control of surplus labor and material resources in an emerging complex society. To reconstruct the scale of sociopolitical differentiation invested in mound building, the energy...
Fort Caroline’s Legacy: surveying for a missing fort (2016)
This paper summarizes the history and archaeology of Fort Caroline, a French outpost established in North Florida in 1564, then captured and occupied by the Spanish who renamed it Fort San Mateo. To date only one French artifact has been identifed for the 16th century time period and it was recovered from a dredge spoil pile along the river. Several archaeological surveys have been undertaken both within National Park property and on adjacent private property along the south bank of the St....
Fort Center's Iconographic Bestiary: A Fresh Look at Fort Center's Zoomorphic Wood Carvings (2016)
The zoomorphic wood carvings excavated by William Sears from the mortuary pond at the Fort Center (8GL13) site in South Florida are a chronically understudied assemblage. These artifacts are generally interpreted as totems carved into a single contemporaneous dock structure built above the mortuary pond, later excavated in various states of degradation. I propose a preliminary typology through which to interpret their function. Beyond that, I discuss the form the carvings individually take and...
Fortifying A Community through Public Archaeology: The Collaboration of Public and Private Organizations to Preserve, Protect, and Promote a Spanish-American War Fort on a South Carolina Sea Island. (2017)
In a collaborative partnership among the surrounding community, local government, private non-profit groups, and professional organizations, the first archaeological investigations involving Phase III data recovery excavations were conducted at Fort Fremont in advance of the development of a local government sponsored interpretive center. Entrenched in a maritime forest along the Port Royal Sound, Fort Fremont is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and enhances the coastal...
From Distributed to Place-Based Communities: The Ceramic Social Geography of Late Archaic Stallings Societies (2016)
North America’s oldest pottery-making societies belonged to the Late Archaic Stallings culture of Georgia and South Carolina. The basic culture history of Stallings archaeology is relatively well-known; however, the types and scales of communities constructed by Stallings people, along with the nature of the connections between them, remain poorly understood. This poster presents preliminary results of research that uses compositional data from Stallings fiber-tempered pottery to investigate the...
From Excavation to the Laboratory: A Multi-faceted Analysis of the Emanuel Point Shipwrecks (2016)
The first Emanuel Point Shipwreck was discovered in 1992 and the second, Emanuel Point 2, was discovered in 2006. Both of these vessels have been firmly associated with a 1559 colonization attempt of what we know today as Pensacola, Florida. In addition to the archaeological excavation and historical research given to both vessels, many specialized types of analyses have been undertaken to paint a more complete image of this 16th-century Spanish endeavor to gain a foothold in La Florida. These...
From Habitat Exploitation to Monument Construction: Exploring the Nature of Shell Deposits at Crystal River and Roberts Island through Stable Isotope Geochemistry (2016)
Debates centering on the monumental nature of shell mound sites have often failed to provide direct empirical evidence for interpretation of monument construction and or simple midden accumulation. Our research in the Crystal River region illustrates the complexity of such sites. Through our research at Crystal River and Roberts Island Shell Mound, we aim to offer better quantitative assessments of the temporality of shell deposit construction, Native subsistence practices, and mobility...
From Households to Communities and Back Again: Bridging Analytical Scales in Search of Conflict, Coalescence, and Communitas (2016)
Archaeological examinations of households and communities have increased dramatically over the past decade. These studies explore the ways people define themselves while simultaneously shaping the social interactions, physical spaces, and material objects that comprise their daily existence. Despite the considerable insights generated by such studies, it is often difficult to bridge analytical scales when research is primarily focused at either the household or community level, with little to...
From Jake's Point to Bay Point: Investigations of a 19th century lumber mill. (2016)
Located along the western bank of the Blackwater River in Santa Rosa County, Florida, lie the remains of a once active and flourishing lumber mill and associated company town, known as Bay Point Mill of Pinewood, Florida. The abundance of yellow pine lumber and multiple waterways necessary to produce water power and provide a means of transport for timber allowed the region of Northwest Florida to become an ideal location for the development of the lumber industry; growing to comprise over one...
From Microstratigraphy to Ritual Behavior: the study of Earthen Monuments in Eastern North America. (2015)
Traditionally the study of prehistoric earthen monuments has focused on their staged surfaces and the buildings and artifacts recovered there. Mound construction was simplified to volume, and the type of labor and oversight necessary to move basket loads of dirt. With rigorous attention to stratigraphy, there is a new interest and awareness of these earthen monuments as complex constructions. Selection, preparation, placement and maintenance of earthen materials allowed the establishment of...
From Pots to Pits: Ritual Use of Waterbirds on the Northern Gulf Coast of Florida (2016)
The archaeological record of Hopewell cultures of the Eastern Woodlands demonstrates the ritual importance of birds in the form of effigy pipes, copper and mica cutouts, and mortuary vessels. Bird motifs continue to be prevalent beyond the Hopewell period in peninsular Florida, during Weeden Island times (A.D. 200-900), when representations of waterbirds, among other avian taxa, appear on pottery, often in the form of effigy vessels. Because of their ability to traverse worlds—air, land, and...
The Functional Analysis of an Expedient Flake Tool Industry:Preliminary Results (2016)
Expedient technology, which may appear to be indiscriminant from non-utilized flakes and flaking debris, likely constitutes larger components of most lithic assemblages. Both retouched and minimally modified flakes were examined using different methods of lithic analysis. The preliminary results of both a low and high power microwear analysis of the expedient flake artifacts from the Mussel Beach site are reported in this study. The microscopic examination of these artifacts may offer an...
Further Studies in Raman Spectroscopy of Fire-Cracked Rock (2017)
Biomolecular organic residue analysis is an increasingly popular avenue of archaeological investigation. It is most frequently performed on pottery, though other substrates such as groundstone and chipped lithics are common. Recently, these methods have extended to fire-cracked rock (FCR). FCR features such as earth ovens are an excellent potential application: a) botanical evidence is not always preserved in the features and b) cracks that form in the FCR during the cooking process may protect...
Fusihatchee Faunal Data (2015)
An Access database of zooarchaeology data from the Ancestral Creek Fusihatchee site (1EE191) The data were reported in a 2001 dissertation by Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman entitled "Culture Contact and Subsistence Change at Fusihatchee." The database was created in 2015 by Nicole Mathwich and uploaded to tDAR by Andrew Webster in 2018. The database was created from handwritten data cards created from 1997-1998 at the University of Georgia. These original cards have been scanned and are included in...
Fusihatchee Faunal Data Paper Copy Scans (1998)
This file is a PDF scan of the original handwritten cards of zooarchaeological data for Fusihatchee that were compiled from 1997-1998 at the University of Georgia. In 2015, this data was digitized into an Access database entitled "Fusihatchee Faunal Data" which is included on tDAR with this project. Although the PDF is text searchable, in practice this will only pull up the UGA number, not the handwritten data. The OCR does not recognize every UGA number. The PDF is mostly in the order of...
Gateways and Gatherings: Economic, Ideological, and Social Networks of Southeastern Hopewell (2016)
The existence of the Hopewell Core – the concentration of remarkable ceremonial assemblages and geometric earthworks in the Ohio River Valley – presupposes the existence of a Hopewell Periphery, a social space that includes large swaths of the American Southeast. Often, archaeologists have attributed Hopewellian material culture at southeastern sites to their role as gateway centers facilitating the exchange and transfer of special raw materials through the Hopewell Interaction Sphere....
Gathering Relations in an Aqueous World: Monumentality, Ontology, and the Belle Glade Landscape (2016)
Recent research on Pre-Contact South Florida has reinforced the notion that the peoples dwelling in the region inhabited a past material world much different from our own and from neighboring areas. In particular, the hydrologic characteristics of a subtropical landscape centered on the Lake Okeechobee basin are one of the central features of both the epistemology and ontology reflected in the earliest monumental architecture in the region. Yet these worldviews and worlds were not static...
Gathering Shells and Time: A Bayesian Approach to Shell Mound Formation in Southwest Florida (2017)
Archaeologists have longed grappled with how to effectively date shell mound deposits in Florida. Interpreting radiocarbon dates from shell samples has been a dominant method; however, these interpretations have not fully assessed the possibility that radiocarbon samples might not truly date their corresponding archaeological context. For example, recent research on Mound Key demonstrates that shell from middens was likely used to construct shell mounds, therefore the redeposition of old shells...
Gauging Style: A Stylistic Analysis of Arkansas and Red River Valley Earspools (2017)
Archaeologists have theorized that earspools functioned as symbolic adornments of high social status. However, earspools may also indicate the localized cultural practices of smaller communities within a larger region and highlight the role of specific individuals. By focusing on the sizes, material types, and decorative elements, I discuss the stylistic variations found within the temporal and spatial distribution of earspools in the Arkansas and Red River Valleys. These variations may indicate...
A Gendered Approach to Assessing Differences in the Hominy Foodway in Central Alabama (2017)
Between A.D. 1000-1120, groups living in the Black Warrior Valley of west-central Alabama adopted maize agriculture and began practicing an ancestral hominy foodway that not only included nixtamalizing culinary steps, but also included the use and production of a new ceramic technology, the Mississippian standard jar, as well as a new cooking technique, hot coal cooking. Curiously, while groups to the east of the valley also adopted maize and began cooking hominy, they forewent other material...
A Geoarchaeological Review of the Guest Mammoth Kill Site (8MR130) in the Silver River, Florida (2015)
The first field school on an underwater prehistoric site in the United States was conducted on the Guest Mammoth site in the Silver River, near Ocala, Florida in the 1970s. This site was touted as a Columbian mammoth kill site, the first found east of the Mississippi River. The excavators presented evidence of this in the form of a single fluted point, six direct percussion flakes, and several pressure flakes found associated with the remains of an adult and a juvenile mammoth. In addition,...