North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (537 Records)
From 2006 to 2012, an extensive community-based archaeology program operated throughout the Greater Orlando area that was comprised of a team of researchers associated with regional colleges. In conjunction with local governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private property owners, the efforts of the team led to the documentation and study of new and existing archaeological sites and the development of local museum exhibits. The poster will visually convey the scope and success of...
Big Data/Big Picture Research: DINAA (The Digital Index of North American Archaeology) and the Things Half a Million Sites Can Tell Us (2015)
The DINAA project allows archaeologists to explore archaeological questions at a large scale, facilitating big picture research. Information from >500,000 archaeological sites in 15 states in Eastern North America is used to examine the effects of climate and vegetation change on human existence, in the past as well as in the future. Distribution maps illustrate where people were concentrated on the landscape at various times in the past, as well as areas they avoided, and environmental factors...
Big Meat Feasting in the Pisgah Phase of Western North Carolina. (2017)
Animal remains from three late prehistoric Pisgah phase sites in mountainous western North Carolina are described and compared. The sites include a mound (Garden Creek Mound No.1) and adjacent village, and a village with no mound (the Cane River Middle School site). Deer, black bear, turkey, and box turtle remains dominate all three assemblages. Three large bones from the mound, previously reported as bones of Bison, are definitively Elk. Whole large mammal bones, recovered almost exclusively...
Bioarchaeological Analysis of Human Skeletal Remains from Site 15Wa916, Warren County, Kentucky (2016)
Site 15Wa916 is a prehistoric burial ground in northern Bowling Green is located immediately south of the pumping station on Barren River along Highway 957 opposite Beech Bend Park. Dr. Jack Schock of Western Kentucky University excavated several prehistoric grave features at the site in May 1973. One uncalibrated radiocarbon date of 910 BC indicates the site dates to the early part of the Early Woodland period. Schock’s excavation yielded, among other artifacts, hundreds of human bones and bone...
Bioarchaeological evidence for matrilineal descent in a 13th century Native American village (2015)
The 13th Century Late Woodland Shannon site (44MY8), located near Blacksburg in Montgomery County, Virginia, was excavated in the 1960s. Excavations identified palisade lines, several circular structures, refuse-filled pits, and over 130 burials. Most burials were single, primary interments located around structures or between structures and palisade lines. Researchers have assumed that individuals buried close to one another around structures were genetically related, or at least shared clan...
The Bioarchaeology of None: Recovery and Analysis of an Historic Coffin from Fort McAllister State Park, Georgia. (2016)
In the spring of 2013, the office of the Georgia State Archaeologist was contacted by personnel from Fort McAllister State Park in Richmond Hill, GA, concerning what appeared to be an historic coffin eroding out of the marsh edge. Emergency salvage excavation was conducted to recover the remaining portions of the coffin. Initial field analysis indicated a sharp shouldered, hexagonal style coffin. Neither the lid nor any mortuary hardware was recovered. The coffin’s location is within the...
Black Bear Use through Time in the Southern Appalachians (2017)
Historic accounts of Fort San Juan, a Spanish garrison built near the native village of Joara in the late 1560s in western North Carolina, inform us that chiefs from neighboring towns brought "meat and maize" to the soldiers on various occasions. Based on the high proportion of bear in the fort faunal assemblage, it seems likely that the foods gifted to the Spaniards included bear meat. A recent zooarchaeological study suggests that native peoples provisioned the soldiers with some prime bear...
Bone Tool Production and Use in the Interior of Southern Florida (2016)
This poster discusses patterns of bone tool production and use in light of results from recent testing at six sites in the interior of southern Florida. More than 100 worked bone tools and production wastage were identified from the six sites dating from the Archaic to the Historic periods. The artifacts reveal patterns of bone tool production from various elements of Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes), Reptilia, Aves, and Mammalia. Functional interpretations of the bone tools and...
Bones, Beads, and Birds: Determining cultural affiliation of skeletal remains and artifacts from Casuarina Mound, Brevard County, FL (2017)
Efforts to repatriate Native American human remains and artifacts are of immediate importance to American archaeology. Excavated in the early 20th century, Casuarina Mound (8-Br-0122) was first dated to the Malabar II period (750-1565CE) by Irving Rouse in his 1951 publication A Survey of Indian River Archaeology, Florida. Historical accounts describe the removal of at least 112 skeletons and numerous funerary objects from three successive interments. A small subset of this material was donated...
Breaking New Ground: Archaeology of Domestic Life at the Weedon Island Site, Florida (2016)
The Weedo(e)n Island site is well-known among archaeologists in the southeastern US as the type site of the Weeden Island culture, a mortuary complex shared by geographically wide-spread cultures ca. AD 200-900. Recent research (survey, excavation, artifact and faunal analysis, radiocarbon dating) by multiple institutions focusing on the domestic sphere have added new details about the site’s history and use during the Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods.
Bringing Visitors to State Historic Sites: Remote Sensing and Hands-on Research (2015)
North Carolina’s Department of Cultural Resources is pressed by state legislators to justify keeping Historic Site’s properties open, and its Office of State Archaeology (OSA) staff gainfully employed. The state university system has also seen its share of cuts. By pooling research interests and resources, OSA and University of North Carolina Greensboro archaeologists and geography professors and students could highlight potential below ground features and excavate at two sites. The project...
Brother Bear: The Role of Ursus americanus in Cherokee Society (2017)
Archaeological sites in the Southeastern United States often contain remains of the black bear (Ursus americanus), which, upon excavation, are placed into one of two general categories for further analysis: food or modified. The confines of these categories precondition interpretations of the bear remains, and limit possible crucial understanding of the roles of bears in the social life of the people who interacted with them. While the category of "food" can be further divided into quotidian or...
Building on the Vertebrate Data: Invertebrate Analysis Offers New Insights on Southeast Coastal Subsistence-Settlement Systems (2016)
Mollusc shell is often the most conspicuous component of coastal archaeological sites in southeastern North America. The shear abundance and bulk of the material presents logistical challenges during all stages of investigation, from excavation and recovery to analysis and curation. These challenges, combined with the assumption that molluscs were low-ranked resources, result in the tendency for zooarchaeological analyses of the coastal Southeast to focus on vertebrate remains, and to exclude...
Burial and kinship during the St. Johns: A Bioarchaeological study of the Ross Hammock site (2016)
Many aspects of St. Johns lifeways have been studied, but kinship, the most fundamental unit of human organization, has rarely been addressed beyond identifying vaguely defined "lineages" or "kin groups". Some have argued that burial mounds represent kin groups, and this paper investigates St. Johns period kinship systems using the biological affinity of individuals from Ross Hammock Mound, a burial mound at Canaveral National Seashore in Florida. Biological distances between individuals are...
Burial Diversity at the Angel Site: How Many People and How Many Ways? (2016)
The Angel site is a Middle Mississippian civic-ceremonial center that sat on the northeastern periphery of the Mississippian world. Excavations at the site, especially during the WPA era and a series of archaeological field schools just after World War II, created a collection representing several hundred human burials. Previous studies of this collection have emphasized relatively intact burials, either primary fleshed inhumations or easily identified secondary burials of single individuals....
Caddo Interregional Warfare or Local Burial Practice: Using Strontium Isotopes from Outlying Sites to Assess Origins and Settlement Patterns of a Skull and Mandible Cemetery at the Crenshaw Site (2016)
The 352 individuals from a skull and mandible cemetery at the Crenshaw site (3MI6) in southwest Arkansas have been argued to represent non-Caddo victims of warfare from other regions. Strontium isotopes taken from 80 individuals were processed as part of a NAGPRA grant and have been used to claim they supported evidence of interregional warfare between the Caddo and the Southern Plains. This paper demonstrates that sampling small animal teeth from surrounding sites can be used to test the...
Caddo Salt Production in Northwestern Louisiana (2016)
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, northwestern Louisiana was known as a major hub of the salt trade. However, recent excavations at the Drake's Salt Works Site Complex suggest that this reputation may have been earned relatively late. These excavations have also raised the possibility that many of the salt producers at this saline were non-locals who visited northwestern Louisiana primarily for its salt resources. While the salt makers at Drake's Salt Works would have...
Carolina's Cattle: Eighteenth-Century Livestock Production at Drayton Hall (2017)
Utilizing faunal evidence from two assemblages from Drayton Hall, this paper explores the changing cattle husbandry strategies employed in the eighteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry. Before colonists had perfected rice production in the region, they worked with the varied terrains and natural resources of the Lowcountry to create a very successful livestock industry in the early eighteenth century. Cattle remains from the Pre-Drayton assemblage (circa 1730s) reflect this thriving livestock...
The Catechism of Time Discipline in the Franciscan Missions of La Florida (2016)
Franciscan missions in La Florida have been characterized as struggling between an unresolved duality between their Christian obligations and their mandated support functions for the larger colony. We suggest that there was a dialectical symmetry between these demands. Catholicism introduced a new set of rhythms into the daily life of Indigenous communities centered on prayer, study, the sacraments, feast days, and other ongoing religious observances. This periodization of time and behavior...
Causes and Consequences of Pre- and Proto-historic Social Network Connectedness in Coastal Georgia (2017)
This poster considers social networks derived from artifact assemblages and interment types from early-Irene and late-Irene and protohistoric mortuary contexts on the Georgia (USA) coast. Network analysis can be used to evaluate potential interactions between community members represented in mortuary contexts. The R statistical program is used to model social networks according to multiple parameters and generate statistical indices of network connectivity. I propose that these indices are a...
Cautious vs. Interesting: Cultural Interpretation of Absorbed Organic Pottery Residues (2017)
Absorbed organic pottery analysis is a technically easy but interpretively difficult branch of archaeometry. Given the complex interaction between organic chemistry, pot use, pyrolytic effects, depositional effects, and modern contamination, it is often difficult to balance interpretations between appropriately cautious and culturally and anthropologically useful information. This issue is illustrated through the analysis and interpretation of a suite of absorbed organic pottery residues...
Celebrating Partnerships in Preservation: The Southern Region of the U.S. Forest Service and the 50th Anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act (2016)
The Southern Region of the U.S. Forest Service encompasses fifteen national forests in fourteen southeastern states and Puerto Rico. For decades, the important work of investigating and protecting significant cultural resources on these national forests has depended on partnerships with universities, Native American tribes, and non-profit organizations. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, this presentation highlights some of these key partnerships...
The Ceramic Assemblage from Washington Mounds: A Caddo Site in Southwestern Arkansas (2017)
The Washington Mounds site is an Early to Middle Caddo period (A.D. 800-1300) mound site with 11 mounds, some of which contain burials; two village areas are associated with the site surrounding the mounds. It is located in southwest Arkansas between the Red River and Little Missouri River Basins. Some level of ritual activity occurred at the site, but the types or scale was previously unknown. Two excavations have been done at the site: first in the early 20th century by M. R. Harrington, and a...
Ceramic Investment by the Enslaved Community at The Hermitage, TN (2016)
For the first time, archaeological data from excavations at The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s nineteenth-century cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee, are being made available to researchers through the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). These assemblages are associated primarily with enslaved laborers who lived in three Antebellum quartering areas on the plantation. Building on previous research about slaves’ acquisition of non-provisioned goods, this poster...
Ceramic Petrography and Woodland Period Social Interactions in Florida and the Southeastern United States (2015)
Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery found throughout much of the lower Southeastern U.S. is arguably the premier material for the systematic study of Woodland interactions. The unique impressions of individual carved wooden paddles are often found on pottery at multiple sites, lending an unparalleled level of detail and spatial resolution to social connections. Furthermore, the distribution of vessels potentially reflects a broad range of interactive practices among a large proportion of...