North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
276-300 (537 Records)
The recognition of chronologically synchronous paleosols along the Cody Scarp in north Florida reflects broad patterns of deposition, pedogenesis, weathering, and climatic stability at the Pleistocene – Holocene transition. These paleosols, or stratigraphic "marker horizons," formed during rapid burial of A-horizons under mesic forest conditions. Marker horizons are best understood from the framework of genetic stratigraphy because they contain temporally diagnostic Early Archaic Bolen points....
Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Adaptations in the Lower Mid-South, United States (2016)
The Lower Mid-South has a rich history of archaeological research and provides a valuable dataset for exploring the relationships between climate and culture. Here, we provide an overview of the available paleo-environmental and archaeological data in this area, and argue that there were significant changes in diet, landscape use, and technological organization. The possibility that localized territories are established in the Southeast prior to the onset of the Holocene is critically evaluated....
Leadership Specialization Among the Caddo and Their Neighbors of the Southeast (2017)
One of the remarkable aspects about the Hasinai Caddo is the nature of their specialized leadership roles. This paper is going to take a comparative approach using ethnohistoric documents to examine the differences between the Caddo and their neighbors with regard to the types of specialized roles that exist, the types of divisions and circumscriptions on authority that exist for leaders, and the level of formality or informality in leadership function. The goal of the paper is to highlight what...
Learn by Doing: Sharpening Understanding of Archeologists and Sites Among Diverse Publics with Hands On Activities in Arkansas (2015)
Most people have unformed ideas about what archeologists really do; collector of stuff, oddball academic, dinosaur hunter, rock expert, 'save the planet' enthusiast, expert about dead people and dead societies. Poor understanding breeds scatter shot ideas about the 'values' of archeological sites for science, history, or heritage. In Arkansas, hands-on collaboration showing how archeologists learn things, and how ancient people made a living, tried out with replicas of archeological specimens,...
Learning From Ancestors: A New Interpretation of an 11,100 year old San Patrice Double Burial from Horn Shelter, No. 2, Central Texas (2015)
Recent Smithsonian study of belongings placed with a 40 year-old man and an eleven year-old girl suggests that the adult may have been a healer. A bundle lying beneath his head includes turtle shell bows, antler pestles, red ochre, a deer bone stylus, sandstone abraders, and an Edward's chert biface. Perforated shell beads and coyote teeth, non-perforated badger claws and Swainson's hawk talons, and other items accompanied this Elder. His participation in body painting, scarification, and...
Learning From Ancestors: A New Interpretation of an 11,100-year-old San Patrice Double Burial From Horn Shelter No. 2, Central Texas, U.S.A. (2016)
Belongings placed with a 40-year-old man and an eleven year-old girl suggest that the adult may have been a healer. A bundle placed beneath his head includes turtle shell bowls, antler pestles, red ochre, a deer bone stylus, sandstone abraders, and an Edward’s chert biface. Perforated shell beads, coyote teeth including a scarifier, non-perforated badger claws and Swainson’s hawk talons, and other items accompanied this Elder. His participation in body painting, scarification, and incision is...
Learning from Disturbance: A Late Woodland-Early Mississippian Site in the Georgia Piedmont (2015)
Between 2012 and 2014, the University of Georgia field school in archaeology undertook investigations at Raccoon Ridge, a highly disturbed Late Woodland-Early Mississippian site in the Georgia Piedmont. Systematic surface collections and shovel tests were used extensively to define the site’s geographical footprint. Geophysical survey, including shallow magnetic gradiometry and susceptibility, together with phosphate analysis were also utilized. Anomalies detected with these methods were...
Lesesne Colono Ware (2016)
As part of the analysis of the colono ware from Lesesne and Fairbanks Plantations on Daniel Island, South Carolina in the mid 1980s, a class of colono ware called Lesesne Lustered was described and offered as a variety of colono ware likely present in colonial Lowcountry South Carolina. Subsequent research since the Daniel Island study and a recent re-look at colono ware from selected Lesesne Plantation contexts support an interpretation of Lesesne Colono Ware as a rural as well as an urban...
Lessons Learned Along the Way: The Florida Public Archaeology Network after 10 years (2015)
The Florida Public Archaeology Network delivers programming through public outreach, assistance to local governments, and assistance to the Florida Division of Historical Resources. The general goal of FPAN is to achieve preservation gains through raising the awareness of Florida archaeology to the public and governmental officials. Authorized by statute in 2004, the Florida legislature funded FPAN in 2005. The program is administered by the University of West Florida but operates in a...
The library is on fire, now what? Assessing the damage and how to approach it: A case study from the Chesapeake Bay. (2017)
The Chesapeake Bay, one of the largest marine estuaries in the world, serves as a microcosm of the forces of shoreline environmental change such as sea level rise, land subsidence and erosion and the impacts that such change has on the archaeological record. Using shoreline analysis, empirical observations and predictive modeling of four counties along the Bay, this project seeks to establish an understanding of the impacts on known archaeological sites in the study area as well as to assess...
Life Among the Tombstones: Forensics Crosses Paths with Hoodoo (2016)
African magic rituals among the graves of the recently dead in the South and elsewhere may not be as rare as one might think. This paper is an exploration of a case wherein the author was called in as a forensic archaeologist and consultant to law enforcement investigating a case of cemetery desecrations with supernatural overtones. Further, during the course of this investigation, possible connections between the author's historical archaeological research excavation of a slave street on a...
Life and Death among the Late Fort Ancient: Injury Recidivism and Perimortem Trauma at Hardin Village, Kentucky (2017)
Hardin Village is a Fort Ancient site located less than half a kilometer from the south bank of the Ohio River. It was excavated under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s. The skeletal remains from the Late Middle and Late Fort Ancient Periods (A.D. 1450–1675) represent more than 300 individuals, both male and female, aged neonate to 60+ years. Adult individuals presented a range of possible cranial and post-cranial trauma, including blunt force, sharp force, and...
Like Blood from a Stone: Teasing Out Social Difference from Lithic Debris at Kolomoki. (2016)
Early phases of Kolomoki’s occupation have been characterized as relatively egalitarian, with little evidence for status differentiation. However, patterned variability in lithic raw material use and intensity of production in domestic areas suggests heterogeneity in the community at multiple scales. In light of Kolomoki’s emphasis on communal ceremony, internal divisions between groups of households highlight the tension between public and private expressions of status and social solidarity....
Lines and Legacies: Ceramic Assemblages from the Weeden Island Site (8PI1) (2015)
The Weeden Island site (8PI1) is perhaps best known for its connection to the eponymous Woodland period culture, found in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, and characterized in part by the use of a specialized class of decorated mortuary wares. In the Tampa Bay area, both the regional movement and local production of pottery contributed to the adoption of new ceremonial practices in the late Woodland period. I present here a study of ceramic collections from early 20th century work at the Weeden...
Linking Beads, Linking People: A Social Network Approach to Exploring Identity in the Colonial Southeast (2017)
Beads and other ornaments were important objects involved in early colonial entanglements between Europeans and Native Americans, with the color, texture, and physical properties of these objects fostering the embodiment of new social roles within changing colonial worlds. In this paper I discuss how such objects were involved in the material manifestation of social identities as pluralistic native communities aggregated in the Spanish missions of La Florida. Looking specifically at the...
Lithic Material Use in the Upper Yadkin River Valley and Its Implications for Southeastern Late Woodland Exchange Networks (2017)
Mississippian and Piedmont Village Tradition (PVT) communities contemporaneously occupied the North Carolina and Virginia Piedmont and adjacent areas from AD 1100-1600. Discussions of trade and exchange, however, tend to focus on Mississippian political economies. Previous work at PVT sites has identified non-local lithic materials, some moving between Mississippian and PVT areas, suggesting a regional network that included both cultures. Our work focuses on the fourteenth-century Redtail site...
Lithic Procurement Patterning as a Proxy for Identifying Late Paleoindian Group Mobility along the Lower Tennessee River Valley (2015)
The Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys boast some of the highest concentrations of diagnostic Paleoindian artifact finds in the Americas. However, many of these finds are from secondary contexts void of associated deposits. The study utilizes chert provenance data, obtained using reflectance spectroscopy, on a large sample of Late Paleoindian diagnostic bifaces from sites along the Lower Tennessee River Valley. The objective of the study is to visualize group mobility at the close of the...
Litter Burials from Spiro’s Great Mortuary Reconsidered (2016)
Artifact color has both chronological and symbolic significance at Spiroan burial sites in the Arkansas River drainage of eastern Oklahoma. In this paper, we examine litter burials from the Great Mortuary and the Brown mound at Spiro. Ethnohistoric descriptions are used to suggest color symbolism in Spiroan ritual displays. These data are compared with color usage in earlier burials at Spiro and mounds elsewhere in the drainage. We wish to determine whether the Great Mortuary was the culmination...
Lives in Transition: Impacts and Adaptations in the Georgia Bight (2015)
The St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project, now more than 40 years in duration, has provided a wealth of data for addressing questions and hypotheses about native adaptations in the Georgia bight. Owing to the rich archaeological context and robust research design, the project has provided opportunities to document and interpret key developments and adaptive transitions in ways not dreamed of when fieldwork began in 1975. The bioarchaeological arm of the investigation, viewed in its rich...
Local Politics and Site Ownership: Archaeology in the Age of Lawfare (2015)
Heritage management encompasses a tremendous range of activities and concerns, including stewardship of the archaeological record. The ethical responsibilities of conservation and protection require recognition of the competing interests involved in the property ownership. This paper reflects on the implications of the dynamics involved in a recent case in Florida. A location containing a significant early 19th century archaeological record became caught up in legal battles. The dynamic is part...
Local scale cultural transmission: how are neutral artifact traits manifested at neighborhood boundaries? (2017)
Archaeologists are paying increasing attention to prehistoric social organization using learning theory, social networks, and the distributions of artifact variation. A starting assumption is that artifact variation will present an isolation-by-distance distribution, a concept developed by Sewall Wright to explain population genetic distributions. Here we extend Wright’s work and adopt his neighborhood model as an analog to explore the small scale interactions between two groups making different...
Locally-Made or Transported Heirlooms?: XRF Source Analysis of Post-Removal Choctaw Ceramics from Southeastern Okahoma (2015)
This paper explores the benefits of using compositional analysis in order to investigate whether post-removal Choctaw-made ceramics were locally made in southeastern Oklahoma and/or were transported from their original homeland in east-central Mississippi. A total of 20 sherds were analyzed using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) to determine their chemical composition. 10 sherds are from two post-removal Choctaw sites, 34MC544 and 34MC399 and were compared with 10 sherds from the Pevey...
Locating and identifying submerged prehistoric sites as part of CRM (2015)
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires Federal agencies like the US Army Corps of Engineers to make a reasonable good faith effort to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. The Jacksonville District of the Corps of Engineers has been conducting underwater cultural resource surveys since the 1970’s. While the potential for prehistoric sites has always been considered, technological advances have allowed us to improve our ability to evaluate...
Locating Events in Process: A Multiscalar Examination of Early Pottery in the Southeastern U.S. Using Bayesian Statistics (2015)
One of archaeology’s unique strengths is the ability to construct cultural histories that span vast spatiotemporal scales. It is imperative, however, that these so-called "big histories" be balanced with consideration of the actual events through which they were experienced and contributed to by real people occupying diverse contexts. In the southeastern U.S., the initial adoption of pottery technology has been variously portrayed as either a protracted diffusionary process with few discernable...
Location, Location, Location: Multi-scalar Investigations into the Unexpected Timing and Length of Occupation of a Late Woodland and Early Mississippian site in the Lower Mississippi Valley (2015)
Site 22HO626 is a multicomponent site located along an abandoned meander loop of the Yazoo River, Holmes County, Mississippi. Due to the presence of surface collected exotic lithic materials and a close proximity to the Poverty Point center of Jaketown, 22HO626 was expected to represent a Late Archaic settlement within the lower Mississippi Valley. However, work by the University of Tennessee’s Archaeological Research Laboratory and Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research indicates a more...