North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (537 Records)
Shields Mound is one of two large burial mounds that compose the Mill Cove Complex, an early Mississippian period site located near the mouth of the St. Johns River in Northeast Florida. First excavated by C. B. Moore in the 1890s, the sand mound held hundreds of burials as well as exotic goods such as copper, galena, mica and two ground stone spatulate celts. More recently, the University of North Florida has investigated nearby components of the complex, including several habitation middens...
The NHPA and the Southeast Archeological Center at 50: Reflections on Learning, Inclusion, and Stewardship. (2016)
Sharing a birth year with the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Park Service’s Southeast Archeological Center has served as steward to the cultural resources and archeological heritage for the national park units across the southeastern United States. For 50 years SEAC has overseen and conducted the majority of NHPA-related activities in these parks, provided training and education to both NPS staff and the public. This paper examines the roles SEAC has played in resource...
No Need for White-out: Building on Betsy's Work on Multiethnic Community Foodways in Spanish Florida (2016)
Elizabeth Reitz has had a distinguished career partially built on her efforts to document exchanges in foodways as groups came together to form multiethnic communities. Her research investigating animal remains recovered from multiethnic communities in colonial Spanish Florida exemplify this work. She has shown that as Native Americans and Spaniards interacted, they blended their established food traditions. Part of this blending was the introduction of novel subsistence strategies (in both...
Non-Destructive Analysis of Pictographs at Painted Bluff: Understanding Prehistoric Paint Recipes in the Southeastern United States (2016)
Analytic methods for prehistoric pigment analyses, especially for rock art, have seen important enhancements over the past decade. In particular, the development of non-destructive, field-portable instrumentation has been transformational. Painted Bluff in Alabama is one of the richest rock art localities in the Southeastern US. Initial SEM-EDS analyses there yielded results consistent with prehistoric technology, but this method is destructive and only a limited number of pictographs were...
North Woodlawn Cemetery: Remotely Sensing Jim Crow (2016)
North Woodlawn Cemetery served Fort Lauderdale’s African American community during the period of legislated racial segregation. In the 1960s, a portion of the cemetery was purchased by the State of Florida and incorporated into the new Right-of-Way (ROW) for Interstate 95. In 2012, Janus Research began working with the Florida Department of Transportation on possible improvements in the vicinity of North Woodlawn. A major part of this research involved ascertaining if unmarked graves are present...
Not Your Ordinary Models: Exploring Time and Space with Ordinal Regression and Other Methods (2015)
Advances in Archaeological Geographic Information Science and Informatics have enabled the refinement of archaeological statistics and other quantitative methods in recent years. Along the Central Savannah River of South Carolina, recent research on prehistoric site distributions and multicomponency has resulted in the development of several novel methodologies. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) enables the examination of the environmental context of archaeological sites through time....
[Not] Finding Vann’s Quarters: Landscape Dynamics and the Archaeology of the Subaltern on a 19th Century Cherokee Plantation (2016)
Historical archaeologists, to varying degrees, have long been interested in researching the lives of people from the past who left little (and about whom little was left) in the form of textual documentation. In North America and beyond, such interests most often take the form of archaeology of slavery and bondage. Unfortunately, the forces that conspired to prevent the voices of enslaved peoples from entering the historical record (i.e., colonialism, racialization, ethnocentrism, capitalism)...
The Old Vero Man Site (8IR009): Current Investigations indicate a Late Pleistocene Human Occupation (2016)
Recent work near Sellards's 1916 excavation demonstrates that the 8IR009 stratigraphy is more complex, and better preserved, than previously described. The modern excavations in 2014 and 2015 have recovered thermally altered bone and sediments along with charcoal from anthropogenic surfaces that range 14,000–11,100 cal yr BP in age. To date, 50 m2 have been excavated to mid-Holocene-age horizons, and Pleistocene-age thermally modified materials have been recovered in a ca. 28 m2 area adjacent to...
On The Waterfront...Or Not: Investigating the Relationship Between Late Archaic Landuse Patterns and Hafted Biface Curation in the Midsouth (2015)
During the Late Archaic period in the Midsouth United States people appear to have practiced seasonal landuse patterns. Warm weather aggregation sites were located along major rivers in the region, while upland site locations reflect occupations of dispersed populations during colder periods. To understand how people organized biface technology within such a seasonal mobility pattern, we analyzed the relative curation rate of hafted bifaces from multiple sites. Magnolia Valley (40RD314)...
On the Zooarchaeology of Bears in Southeastern North America (2016)
Ever since Irving Hallowell's classic 1926 study of the special mythic status of bears in the Subarctic, anthropologists are generally aware that many peoples throughout the world have treated bears as something more than a straight forward subsistence resource. Hallowell attributed that special relationship between Subarctic humans and bears to some striking parallels between bear and human behaviors and physiologies. If that were indeed the case, then one would expect to see similar...
One Site, Multiple Histories: A Study of the Numerous Phases of Habitations at Fort Caswell (2017)
This study explores the archaeology of tourism through an examination of the multiple habitations of Fort Caswell, situated on the southwest coast of North Carolina. The brick fortification was built in the 1830s. Subsequently, it served as a U.S. Army installation from 1861 to 1945. The site has undergone extensive reconstruction due to its strategic geographic location at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, changes in function and ownership, and damages due to severe weather and war-related...
Opposing Views in African-American Archaeology: Use of Resistance or Risk Management to Explain Cultural Material of the Enslaved (2015)
This paper argues that theories in favor of resistance as the primary cultural response of enslaved African-Americans do not offer a complete picture of the diasporic experience but rather theories in risk management offer a better explanation for the variation inherent in slave responses and material culture. Risk management theories suggest resistance as only one of a myriad of responses a slave community might choose in reaction to their environment. When investigating the residential spaces...
Organic Analysis of Residues from Noded Vessels from the Lower Mississippi Valley (2016)
Analysis of organic residues in ceramic vessels obtained from archaeological excavations has the potential to identify the substances Native Americans stored in ceramic pots of various shapes, sizes and designs. In this study we analyzed residues extracted from a particular type of vessel that has unique designs covering the outer surface. It was recently proposed that these noded pots were used specifically to process Datura for religious ceremonies. Datura contains tropane alkaloids that have...
Organic Analysis of Smoking Pipe Fragments and Residue Scrapings (2017)
Chemical analysis of organic residues from archaeological artifacts is shedding new light on past human activities. Here we report on the residue analysis of smoking pipe fragments and residues scraped from pipe sherds. Our goals were twofold: 1) to ascertain whether nicotine was present in the residues, thereby providing a positive indication for tobacco use; and 2) to identify the presence of other biomarkers that would allow us to establish which other plants were smoked, furthering our...
The Original (Affluent) Cooperative: Property Rights and the Foraging Mode of Production (2017)
Property-rights require fundamental forms of cooperation. On a global scale, foragers maintained open-access property regimes, in which no one is excluded from using resources. In the most basic form, foragers cooperate simply by avoiding conflict—agreeing to share. These conditions will hold as long as the cost of excluding others from a resource exceeds the benefits derived from that resource and because cooperation increases reproductive success under conditions of low population density—in...
The Original Spaghetti Junction: Using Canoe Locations to Trace Routes of an Ancient Transportation Network in Florida (2016)
This paper presents results of spatial analysis on Florida’s 400 dugout canoes recorded in the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research’s canoe database. Patterned concentrations of canoes located at the edges of basins suggest that prehistoric people had a system of drop-off points, where canoes were left for later use. Such a system is consistent with ethnographically recorded canoe-use practices among indigenous peoples in Florida and beyond. Drop-off points represent important places on the...
OSL Dating and Chronology in Pensacola, Florida’s Contact Period (2017)
New research on the history of the Pensacola Bay region from the late Mississippian to the Protohistoric period is clarifying previous understandings of cultural sequences. Two recently discovered sites have created opportunities to apply new dating technologies to culture historical questions. The first site is in an incredibly dynamic area of sand dune formations on a barrier island. The second site is associated with the Luna Settlement of 1559-1561 and survives partially intact despite...
Osteoarthritis and Implications for Economic Lifestyle Change in Two Prehistoric Skeletal Populations (2017)
Numerous studies have been conducted regarding the influence of activity-related stress on postcranial elements such as the upper and lower limbs, but few studies have considered the vertebral column in relation to inter-populational variation. This study examined the vertebral columns of two prehistoric skeletal populations. The Indian Knoll site (n=98), representing a population of hunter-gatherers, is located in Ohio County, Kentucky along the Green River and is dated between 2558 and 4160...
Oyster Mariculture on Florida’s Northern Gulf Coast: The Intensification of a Ritual Economy (2016)
Subsistence intensification among small-scale societies results from myriad circumstances, some of which involve demands that go beyond the scale of household production and consumption. The creation and use of ritual facilities, for instance, often entail large gatherings of persons that require provisioning. On the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, civic-ceremonial centers with elaborate mortuary facilities were established at about A.D. 200. A well-established subsistence economy of fish,...
Paleoenvironmental Change and Megafaunal Extinction at Page-Ladson, Florida (2015)
Sporormiella sp. is a coprophilous fungi associated with large herbivore dung that can be used as a proxy to track megafaunal extinctions. The data is based on its abundance or absence within dated sediments, which is often presented as a percentage related to the total pollen sum. This poster presents the results of a fossil pollen and Sporomiella analysis from a sediment core extracted from the Page-Ladson Site, located in a sinkhole in the Aucilla River, Florida. The 5 meter core spans the...
Paleoenvironmental Change During the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition at Sloth Hole (8JE121), Northwestern Florida: A Palynological Perspective (2017)
This paper presents the preliminary results of a palynological investigation of sediments from Sloth Hole (8JE121), a site in the Aucilla River. The Aucilla River in Northwestern Florida creates a unique preservation environment that has produced rich cultural, faunal and botanical records from the Late Pleistocene to the present. Archaeologists and recreational divers alike have recovered probable Paleoindian-aged bifaces and a possible butchered mastodon fibula from Sloth Hole. In addition, an...
Paleoenvironments and Paleoindians in the Lower Mississippi River Valley (2016)
Throughout much of the last Ice Age, the Mississippi River, along with its tributaries, served as a key outflow conduit for glacial meltwater, funneling and depositing vast amounts of sediments south towards and into the Gulf of Mexico. During and after the Younger Dryas, this geomorphic system underwent significant changes caused by meltwater drainage fluctuations and sea level oscillations. In this paper, we review how paleoenvironmental changes associated with the Younger Dryas affected the...
Paleoindian Responses at the Younger Dryas Boundary: A Case Study from the Carolinas (2016)
The onset of the Younger Dryas stadial is thought to have occurred during the Clovis period. The cause of the Younger Dryas and the near simultaneous disappearance of the Clovis techno-culture in North America continues to be a set of events that are not well understood. Debates exist regarding the cause of the Younger Dryas and its possible affects on climate, plants and animals as well as humans. The archaeological record stands apart from these disciplines as an independent source of data and...
Paleoindian Use of the Western Ouachita Mountains, Oklahoma (2015)
At present, the archaeological record of eastern Oklahoma reflects abundant evidence of prehistoric occupation in the region’s river valleys, from the Paleoindian period onward. Conversely, little archaeological work has been done in the upland environments of the Western Ouachita Mountains. Yet these uplands are notably rich in resources, ranging from high quality lithic sources, lush plant-life, diverse animal species, and many streams and rivers providing water throughout the year. I...
Palisaded Enclosures and Political Complexity in the Eastern Woodlands of North America (2015)
Earthworks and enclosures have a long history of construction and use in the eastern Woodlands of North America. However, the development of palisaded enclosures around permanent settlements occurs concomitantly with the transition to maize horticulture, the transition to settled village life, and an increasing concern with boundary maintenance. In this paper, we employ data from Northeastern and Southeastern North America to examine how processes of enclosure transformed the relationships...