North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
476-500 (537 Records)
Community interest in archaeological shipwreck sites is increasingly profound in Florida. Though laws protecting these submerged cultural resources in state waters have been in place for nearly 30 years, many people are still unaware of the importance of these resources as heritage tourism destinations, foci of archaeological research, and representatives of community identity. After award of a grant to explore the 16th-century Spanish Emanuel Point II shipwreck in 2014, the University of West...
Subsistence Strategies and Small Island Adaptations: New Evidence from the Florida Keys (2016)
Archaeological research on prehistoric settlements in the Florida Keys has been largely sporadic and diffuse. To help improve our understanding of when the Keys were settled and their relationship to Calusa and other groups regionally, we revisited the well-known site of 8MO17 on Upper Matecumbe Key in the central Florida Keys and conducted preliminary subsurface investigation. Preliminary results from the newly established Matecumbe Chiefdom Project have revealed dense, stratified midden...
Subsistence, Landscape, and Identity as Explored through Archaeofaunal Remains from Northwestern Florida (2016)
This paper explores relationships among subsistence, landscape, and identity on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida. Zooarchaeological assemblages from three Woodland-period shell midden sites (8BY1347, 8BY1355, 8BY1359), all located on a small (150 km2) peninsula in Bay County, Florida, differ in molluscan species composition reflecting proximity to varied marine and estuarine habitats. Coastal dwellers had flexible subsistence regimens, targeting local habitats rather than specific resources....
Taking High Tech Back to Basics: GIS and the Three Dimensions of Archaeology (2015)
In many ways, the Willey and Phillips’s (1958) Method and Theory in American Archaeology still sets the parameters of how we conceptualize the units of North American archaeological classification. The authors defined three types of units, in theory independently based on time, space, and material content. Integrative units juggled the three dimensions to create local sequences, which then built into larger and larger constructs. Wide use of various dating mechanisms and detailed studies of...
A Tale of Two Sites: the Connections Between Poverty Point and Tick Island (2015)
Poverty Point and Tick Island were two of the most important sites in the southeast during the Late Archaic period. Previously we have demonstrated a probable connection between the sites, which are separated by over 700 miles, through the identification of Lower Mississippi Valley loessal PPOs at Tick Island, and St Johns pottery, likely from the area of Tick Island, found at Poverty Point. In this paper we identify an additional set of artifacts that are found at both sites but are not know...
Talking Stone: Cherokee Syllabary Inscriptions in Dark Zone Caves (2016)
Caves have offered the Cherokee people concealment before and after contact with Europeans. With the invention of Sequoyah’s Syllabary a way to record these hidden activities became available. A number of caves in the Southeastern United States contain such historical inscriptions and interpreting these can tell archaeologists about who made them and when they were made. This paper considers several such inscription caves, located in the area of North Alabama, North Georgia, and southeastern...
Teaching Atlanta: Using local projects to bring digital heritage into the classroom (2017)
How do English, History, and Archaeology professors begin collaborating? In our case it was our mutual interests in the history of Atlanta and incorporating digital methods into our courses. In this paper we discuss our intertwined collaborations at Georgia State University. These involve Wharton's incorporation of archaeological materials from the MARTA archaeological collection in her Expository Writing course. Students in this course take advantage of the computing resources in the library's...
Temper, Temper: Variability in Ceramic Paste Recipes at a Mississippian/Protohistoric Village in Northeastern Mississippi (2017)
Mississippian-period pottery in the eastern United States is overwhelmingly described as "shell tempered," with occasional reference to poorly defined "paste" categories in traditional typologies. Researchers recently have begun to note a high level of variability in the kinds of additional temper added to what macroscopically appears to be shell-tempered wares. An example is provided by the ceramic assemblage from Lyon’s Bluff (22OK520), a mound and village site in northeast Mississippi dating...
The Tempest: geoarchaeological investigations into the effects of a hurricane on a submerged prehistoric archaeological site, Apalachee Bay, Florida, U.S.A. (2017)
When Hurricane Hermine made landfall approximately 5 miles southeast of St. Mark's, Florida, on September 1st 2016, it passed directly over several known submerged prehistoric archaeological sites in Apalachee Bay. This was less than one month after we had completed geoarchaeological investigations at one of them, the Econfina Channel Site, 8Ta139. The passage of the hurricane has allowed us a unique opportunity to assess what, if any, effects the storm had on the site. This study is...
Tennessee Valley Authority Conservation and Management Initiatives at Painted Bluff, Alabama (2015)
Located in northeastern Alabama, Painted Bluff contains motifs similar to ones found on Mississippian ceremonial objects, and an associated charred river cane dating to between AD 1300 and 1440. Approximately 80 images were recorded on the limestone cliffs of the bluff, most of which are red ocher paintings, a few done with yellow pigment, one containing white, and at least three separate thinly-plastered surfaces with fine-line incisions. Following initial recording of the site by Simek,...
Terminal Prehistoric and Protohistoric Hide Processing in the Central Ohio Valley: Synthesizing Microwear and Metric Data to Evaluate Endscraper Function and Use Intensity (2017)
As "beachheads of empire" 16th -17th century European colonies in eastern North America vigorously pursued trade relations with Natives to secure raw materials for export to an emerging global market. Exchanges of furs and hides, slaves and other commodities stimulated economic activity throughout eastern North America. Production of hides for exchange was widespread among native groups located on colonial peripheries. To contrast, relatively little research has evaluated the degree to which...
Terraforming a Middle Ground in Ancient Florida (2016)
All societies face contradictions between the perception of how the world was in the past or should be in the future, and the material realities of the present. Changing social and ecological contexts are catalysts for intervention by communities hoping to restore or assert structure during turbulent times. Terraforming is one mode of intervention in which large-scale modifications to land reference ancient times, events, and persons to create new opportunities for the future. At the landscape...
Terrestrial Laser Scanning: a methodology for documenting existing and extrapolating past setting on archaeological sites (2016)
The Jupiter Inlet I (8PB34) site is one of the most investigated prehistoric sites in Palm Beach County, Florida. Like many of the ancient shell works sites across the state it was partially destroyed for road fill during the first half of the 20th century. Only a sketch map of the site from 1883 depicts what the site looked like prior to destruction. Since then there have been attempts to reconstruct the mound form but these relied on verbal accounts and limited stick and scope survey...
Testing for Evidence of Paleoindian Responses to the Younger Dryas in Georgia (2015)
For the Southeast, Meeks and Anderson (2012) propose Younger Dryas climate changes triggered a human population crash and/or substantial reorganization. We use the Georgia point record in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas to test for evidence of changes in landscape use through the Paleoindian period and consider these changes in the context of the Georgia paleoenvironmental record spanning the YD. Based on differences in point frequencies, distributions, stone types, and transport...
These are the pearls that were his eyes: interpretive frameworks for submerged Middle Archaic sites in the Big Bend of Florida and the Georgia Bight, U.S.A. (2015)
Sedentary occupations and monumental architecture first appear during the Middle Archaic (8,000 BP to 5,000 BP) in Florida at sites where marine, estuarine, and riverine resources were exploited, spreading to the coast of Georgia by the Late Archaic, around 4,500 BP. However, the coastline did not reach its modern position until around 5,000 BP, leaving many sites submerged. Fieldwork was initiated in June of 2014 in order to relocate, excavate, and interpret Middle Archaic sites submerged in...
Things that Queer: Disorienting Intimacies in Late Nineteenth Century Jooks (2015)
This paper examines late nineteenth and early twentieth century jook joints as sites that generated queer African-American intimacies and animacies. Emerging in the 1880s throughout much of the rural United States, jook joints crafted a performatively queer medium within African-American communities. Particularly in the rural south, these jooks offered a haven for black music, dance, gambling, prostitution, and alcohol consumption that disoriented expectations of temperance and frugality. ...
Through a Mirror, Darkly: Using Multi-Sensor Imaging Surveys as Basic Data for 3D Spatial Analysis of Cave and Open-Air Rock Art (2016)
This paper explores and compares how quantitative spatial analysis of cave and open-air rock art can be derived from high-resolution, multi-sensor 3D digital reconstructions. For this project, three different types of survey data were collected at four prehistoric cave and rock art sites within the southern Cumberland Plateau of eastern North America. The project survey methods include close-range photogrammetry, high-density laser scanning, and near-infrared (NIR) multispectral imagery. The...
Time, Place, and Community: Visualizing the Living Cherokee landscape (2017)
First Landscapes is a digital conservation project with two major goals: to protect and preserve First Nation/Native American heritage in culturally situated manner, and to make information accessible and usable in ways determined by stakeholders. This project organizes and presents results of several seasons of archaeological fieldwork as well as historical documents, maps, ethnographic records, and imagery by and about Cherokee people curated in several institutions across the United States....
‘Totem’ owls, otters and pelicans: 14C dating central Florida’s prehistoric sculptures (2016)
Florida’s wealth of prehistoric wood sculpture includes three large zoomorphic ‘totems’ dredged in the 1950s and 1970s from the banks of Hontoon Island, along the St Johns River, and a stylistically unusual anthropomorphic figure from the Tomoka River. Some, like the Hontoon owl, have had a long history of museum conservation, display and interpretation. These central Florida sculptures form a unique corpus that can inform on the diversity of artistic expression within a region long dominated by...
Towards a Deep History of Southern Appalachian Copper Mining: New Agendas and Approaches (2017)
Copper was an important raw material throughout the prehistory of the Eastern Woodlands of North America. The role of southern Appalachian copper in social, economic, political, and ideological systems across the Eastern Woodlands has received little attention from anthropological archaeologists, particularly compared with copper from more famous procurement zones in the Great Lakes region. In this paper, we present the first steps of a new collaborative research project designed to understand...
Towns and Household Groups during a Period of Urban Transition in Native North America: A Case from the Early Mississippian Era in the Cahokia Region (2017)
The development of large, complex settlements and the organization of associated institutions and social groups are major topics of research for anthropological archaeologists. The realization that pre-Columbian inhabitants of the central Mississippi Valley instigated complex social arrangements at urban scales makes Native North America a site of research that can contribute to the comparative study of urbanism. In this paper, previous and ongoing work near the site of Cahokia is discussed. A...
Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Coral Reef Small Islands: A History of Human Adaptation in the Florida Keys (2016)
The Florida Keys have been largely overlooked in models of social interactions within both Florida and the greater Caribbean. Environmentally and culturally distinctive, the more than 1700 islands that make up this coral reef archipelago are consistently viewed from the mainland in models of human-environmental dynamics over time. This paper synthesizes available archeological data on the prehistoric human occupation of the Florida Keys with attention to the island landscapes of these sites that...
The Transect Survey at 30-something (2015)
In 1977, an American Museum of Natural History team lead by David Hurst Thomas began an ambitious survey of St. Catherines Island, Georgia. The intent was to systematically survey 10% of the island following a series of transect lines using a research design from plant ecology. The survey collected hundreds of small vertebrate samples, none of which met zooarchaeological standards for adequate sample sizes and analysis. These hundreds of small samples, however, proved invaluable because they...
Transformation by fire: Human cremation, metalworking, and the transmogrification of bodies by flame in the Late Archaic American Southeast (2015)
A copper band recovered from a Late Archaic burial located on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, demonstrates the earliest use of metal objects in the region. This discovery shows that copper usage in the American Southeast, largely thought to relate to Hopewellian and Mississippian influences, has a greater antiquity and distribution than previously assumed. A reassessment of the copper found within the burial dates to the Archaic throughout the Eastern Woodlands; chemical analysis shows the...
Travels and Traverses, Pilgrimages and Passages: Alternative Concepts of Interaction (2017)
When confronted by the presence of non-local ceramics and stone tools, variations in artifact styles, the spatial distribution of settlements and settlement hierarchies, and evidence thought to indicate intergroup conflict, archaeologists typically turn to the general concept of "interaction" to explain these material residues. Furthermore, interaction scenarios sometimes are premised on the notion of inequities in resource access. When cultural behemoths like Cahokia are implicated in scenarios...