North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
401-425 (537 Records)
Underwater exploration and excavation of target loci along the inundated Paleo-Suwannee River Channel has recently focused on the Brownstone site. The western edge of the paleo-channel in the study area contains several grades of cryptocrystalline chert and dolomite. Materials recovered and attempts to access underlying stratified deposits are detailed. Further, correlation of the inundated Pleistocene landscape and known riverine features with timing of human occupation and utilization of...
Preliminary Results from Pollen Analysis of Soil Cores at Crystal River (8CI1), Florida (2016)
Environmental changes have been frequently cited as causal factors in the growth and collapse of complex societies in the American South. Gulf Coast archaeologists, in particular, have turned to generalized global paleoclimate curves in attempts to understand how ancient coastal villagers responded to environmental shifts. Archaeological palynology, a notably under-utilized resource in the region, offers fine-grained resolution and the ability to investigate local, as well as regional landscape...
Preserved Paleoindian Site Potential and Regional Geological Patterns in Florida's Karst Rivers (2015)
Hundreds of Paleoindian artifacts have been found in northern Florida, mostly by avocational archaeologists and collectors. Many archaeologists have noted the correlation between Paleoindian artifact locations and known chert outcrops. Further, many of these finds were recovered from Florida streams by SCUBA divers, often in displaced contexts or in areas with no sediment. Extensive research in portions of the Aucilla River have allowed archaeologists to arrive at some understanding of site...
Principles of Cherokee Regionalization and Material Practices of the Pisgah Phase in the Trans-Appalachian Area (2017)
This paper presents ethnohistoric accounts, ethnographic commentary, early colonial cartography, and archaeological evidence to investigate factors affecting processes of regionalization in the southeastern Appalachians. Returning to ethnohistorical theoretical and methodological roots of multi-sourced data and community co-construction to understand ethnolandscapes, we explore how central tenets of the Kituwah Way, the ethical and cultural principles guiding Cherokee practices, have observable...
Privy Perspectives: The Zooarchaeology of Urban Mobile and its 19th Century Occupants (2017)
Data recovery excavations at Site 1Mb504 in the downtown section of the City of Mobile, Alabama produced a large assemblage of faunal material relating to the 19th century occupation of the surrounding city blocks. By the 1840's, the area was occupied as a residential block including the private homes of merchants, doctors, and other professionals, as well as boarding houses for similar professional classes. In the 1910's, land use began to shift from residential to commercial. By the 1950's,...
A Procession of Faces: Considering the Materiality of Relational Ontologies in Southern Florida (2016)
Recent materiality scholarship seeks to understand the entangled world of belief and practice. The experience of the world is both cognitive and material and scholars are beginning to embrace the idea that there is no separation between the two. Understanding the intertwined nature of the cognitive and material world is at the center for evaluating the nature of groups that embrace a relational view of the world. In this paper, we consider the essential role that material culture plays in the...
Production and Provenance of Weeden Island Mortuary Effigies from the Woodland Gulf Coast (2016)
Technofunctional analysis, neutron activation analysis (NAA), and petrographic analysis were employed to map the origins of rare mortuary effigies from Palmetto Mound (8LV2) on the Gulf Coast of Florida to better understand how the production and distribution of Weeden Island (ca. AD 200-1000) religious paraphernalia was related to social interactions and emergent complex societies. Palmetto Mound is a mortuary facility composed of mounds and ramps on a small island directly west of the large,...
Project Archaeology in Florida: Teaching and Understanding Slavery at Kingsley Plantation (2015)
The Florida Public Archaeology Network was established in 2005 and within a year hosted its first Project Archaeology: Intrigue of the Past workshop. As a proud sponsor of Project Archaeology in Florida, regional center staff partnered with the National Park Service and University of Florida to publish the first Investigating Shelter investigation in the southeast. It was also the first in the Investigating Shelter series to feature a National Park site. Investigating a Tabby Slave Cabin teacher...
The Pros and Cons of "Public Archaeology Days" (2015)
The Florida Public Archaeology Network is tasked with educating Florida's public about the state's rich archaeological heritage. One method that has been used to do so is what we call "Public Archaeology Days". These days mainly consist of identifying artifacts that the public has legally collected on private land, usually their own backyards or farms. There has been much debate surrounding this method of public outreach and much discussion on how to properly host these events. Often we partner...
Protohistoric Social Dynamics in the Central Arkansas River Valley (2015)
The Protohistoric period in the southeastern United States is known for being a time of social upheaval and transformation. Groups living in the Central Arkansas River Valley during the early seventeenth century had to contend with the aftermath of the De Soto entrada, severe drought conditions associated with the Little Ice Age, and perhaps widespread population movement accompanying the dissolution of chiefdoms in the Mississippi Valley. Societal coalescence is one strategy that many later...
Quantum archaeology: Raman spectroscopy of FCR in south-central North America (2016)
Macrobotanicals, usually in the form of identifiable charcoal, have formed the basis of our archaeological evidence of what was cooked in earth ovens, and microbotanicals such as phytoliths, pollen, and starch grains are expanding that knowledge. There are, however, still limitations: for example, inulin does not have a microbotanical proxy. Inulin is the primary carbohydrate for many important plant foods such as onion, camas, agave and sotol. Raman spectroscopy, a type of vibrational...
Queering Historical Worlds: Disorienting Materialities in Archaeology (2015)
This essay draws from contemporary strands of affect and materiality in queer theory to discuss approaches to queer materialities in archaeology. This attempts to move beyond privileging sexual acts and orientations as defining queerness (Blackmore 2011), towards vast assemblages of human and material convergences that queered social norms (Chen 2012). The provocative capacities of bodies, both human and non-human, to disorient social norms offers archaeologists alternative perspectives on...
Raw Material Provisioning and Tool Rejuvenation Practices: Environmental Change and Technological Tensions in the Middle Archaic of the North Carolina Piedmont (2016)
Flaked stone artifact assemblages from stratified contexts in central North Carolina reveal a significant shift in lithic technological organization during the Middle Archaic period. Important changes in raw material provisioning, biface production strategies, resharpening techniques, and stone tool discard behaviors broadly correlate with regional environmental shifts attributed to the mid-Holocene Optimum. Technological and site organizational changes may arise out of an emerging strategy of...
Re-Placing the Plantation Landscape at Yulee’s Margarita Plantation, Homosassa, Florida (2017)
Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins Historic State Park (CI124B) contains the remnants of a nineteenth-century sugar mill, associated with Margarita plantation located in Homosassa, Florida. At present, documentation of the plantation boundaries is limited and locations of various associated buildings, including slave quarters, are unknown. To address this issue, a reconnaissance survey is underway in the vicinity of the mill to identify associated plantation structures and boundaries. Preliminary results...
Reading between the Lines: A Contextual and Processual Approach to Social Interactions in the Woodland Period of the American Southeast through Integrated Analyses of Complicated Stamped Pottery (2016)
Archaeologists have turned increasingly to Social Network Analysis (SNA) to visualize and understand the structure of regional social networks, but their analyses frequently sacrifice context and process for synchronic, macro-scale patterning. We compare SNA with a more contextual and processual network approach to the case of Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, a ubiquitous class of material culture In the Deep South of the American Southeast during the Middle and Late Woodland periods...
Recent Excavations and Current Research at Spiro Mounds (2015)
Geophysical survey at Spiro provided evidence for dozens of contemporaneous structures near the well-known Craig mound. Over the last year, four of those structures were excavated by University of Oklahoma field crews. This paper will discuss the results of those excavations and discuss whether the evidence supports James A. Brown's recent interpretation of an early 15th century 'Event' at Spiro. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and...
Recent Investigations of Subsistence at the Garden Patch Site (8DI4): A Study of Faunal Remains from a Platform Mound and Adjacent Midden (2015)
In summer 2013, a platform mound and newly identified midden deposit were tested at the Garden Patch site, a Woodland multimound center located on the northern gulf coast of Florida. The subjects of this research study are the faunal remains from the dense midden of Area X and adjacent Mound II, a platform mound constructed of shell midden. Results indicate a highly marine based diet focused on the nearby marsh and shallow Gulf waters. A series of dates suggest the Area X village midden...
The Recognition of Hafting Traces on Native American Stone Tools (2017)
As Keeley (1982) pointed out some time ago, the recognition of microwear traces due to hafting is an important source of information not only about how stone tools were prepared for use, but how their differential discard affects the recognition of site structure and site function. This is because the economy of different hafting arrangements and the act of "retooling" is different for hafted versus unhafted tools. In an effort to consider the variable range of hafting traces among Native...
Recognizing Ritual in the Elaboration of Earthwork Construction at Jaketown (2017)
Elaborately constructed earthworks indicate monumental behavior requiring unique social processes to produce. This paper presents new subsurface data on the Late Archaic Poverty Point earthworks at the Jaketown site in the Mississippi Yazoo Basin. Unit excavations and soil coring demonstrate detailed and complicated internal architecture standing in contrast to earlier mounded landscapes in the eastern United States. Challenging traditional agrocentric models for socially complex societies, this...
Reconsidering Mass-Capture Fishing Practices: Methodological and Theoretical Implications (2016)
The term “mass-capture” is widely used in archaeological and zooarchaeological discourse to connote any form of capture that results in the simultaneous collection of multiple organisms. However, mass-capture as an umbrella term obscures critical variation among diverse techniques that have implications for anthropological interpretation. Nowhere does this limitation have more of an impact than in coastal settings, where fishes and shellfishes constitute the majority of subsistence prey items. ...
Reconsidering Mississippian Communal Food Consumption: A Case for Feasting at Moundville (2017)
Consuming food as a large group in a ritual context generates and reaffirms the social obligations of the participants and the sponsors of the ceremony. This paper evaluates models for feasting from the Mississippian center of Moundville, located in west-central Alabama. Feasting has not been documented in midden assemblages from the site because a wide range of ceramic vessel sizes and a diverse range of faunal species have been recovered. This indicated that the consumption of symbolic species...
Reconstructing the Culture-History of Squires Ridge (31ED365) (2017)
Until recently, the prehistoric culture-history of the coastal plain has remained the least understood in North Carolina due to a lack of known sites with stratified context and dateable components. Sites, such as Barber Creek (31PT259) and Squires Ridge (31ED365) situated along the Tar River, have archaeological data that can test the previous model (Moore and Daniel 2011; Phelps 1983). The excavations at these two sites have established the presence of archaeological sequences of four...
Recording and Interpreting Mississippian Rock Imagery at Painted Bluff, Alabama (2017)
As part an overall effort by the Tennessee Valley Authority to conserve, manage, and present Middle Mississippian era pictographs and petroglyphs to a visiting public, Stratum Unlimited recorded 101 motifs from 47 panels at Painted Bluff, a steep south-facing limestone cliff overlooking the Tennessee River in northeastern Alabama. Results from the recording include an assessment of pictograph and petroglyph techniques, types and numbers of motifs, stratigraphic overlap and sequencing of...
Redefining Cahokia: City of the Cosmos (2017)
By the early 19th century the group of mounds we now recognize as Cahokia mounds was called the Cantine mound, with Monks Mound referred to as the "Great Cahokia" mound. Actual boundaries for the site were not established until the 1950s. For the inhabitants, the site was probably without bounds and our definition of Cahokia is to a large extent fulfills our society needs that relate to legal aspects of ownership and historical significance. The natural landscape is a palimpsest of features...
A Reexamination of Human Remains from Late Prehistory in the Alabama River Valley (2015)
The late prehistory of central Alabama in not yet well understood, particularly when compared to contemporaneous occupations elsewhere in the Southeast. Previous excavations of Durant Bend (1Ds1), a late Mississippian/Proto-historic, single mound site in Dallas County on the Alabama River, resulted in a number of artifacts, including lithics, pottery, faunal remains, and human remains that enhance our understanding of late prehistoric and protohistoric occupations in the Alabama River Valley....