North America - Southeast (Geographic Keyword)
376-400 (537 Records)
We are not unique in this agency called USDA Forest Service. Kisatchie National Forest’s Heritage Program does not get handed tons of money to perform archaeological survey to insure that the NHPA is accorded due process before the vegetation is managed and wildlife ponds are built. And sure, some of our colleagues still ask, why do we spend money on archaeology! As a manager, we look for least expensive, as archaeologists we look for great quality, and as tribal liaison we look to work with our...
Pavao-Zuckerman Fusihatchee Fauna
This project consists of zooarchaeological remains from the ancestral Muscogee-Creek site of Fusihatchee, identified at the University of Georgia. The data formed the basis of Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman's 2001 Dissertation. Site: The Ancestral Creek and Creek town of Fusihatchee (1EE191) is located on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and has both precolonial and colonial period occupations, allowing for diachronic analysis. These components include the Late Woodland (A.D. 1050-1250),...
Perishable Artifacts from the Old Vero Site (8IR009), Indian River County, Florida (2017)
Perishable Artifacts from the Old Vero Site (8IR009), Indian River County, Florida J. M. Adovasio Florida Atlantic University Despite depositional conditions inimical to the preservation of plant fiber or wood-derived artifacts, several such objects have been recovered during the ongoing re-excavations of the Old Vero Site (8IR009) in Indian River County, Florida. These include a minute fragment of charred, three ply, braided cordage with a contiguous underlying date of ca. 9,000 calendar years...
Perry Pines Sites: A Cultural Resources Phase I Survey Report (2016)
A Phase I survey was conducted in Perry Pines, Taylor County, Florida for an expansion of limestone mining of the area. The research aimed at locating and assessing potential archaeological and historical resources within the project area. Six archaeological resources were identified: a habitational site, a camp site, a bridge site and three quarry sites for stone tool making. Located in the North Peninsula Gulf Coast archaeological region, the Perry Pines sites appear to have been...
Phased Out: The Distinctive Identities of Late Mississippian Communities in Eastern Tennessee (2015)
An often-made presumption is that an archaeological phase (defined mainly by pottery or projectile point types) represents a social group with shared identity. This perspective can conceal other types of cultural variation and practices that may be more significant for presenting and representing group identity. The broadly–defined Dallas Phase in the Upper Tennessee Valley provides a late Mississippian-period example of this type of presumption. While there are broad similarities in pottery...
PIDBA (Paleoindian Database of the Americas): Long term Collaborative Research at International Scales (2017)
Compiling and making accessible primary archaeological data from multiple sources and across large areas is one of the grand challenges facing archaeology in the twenty-first century. The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA) has been operating for over 25 years to make Paleoindian data openly accessible online to all interested parties. Data from more than 100 scholars, including locational data on over 30,000 projectile points, has been made available in digital form that has been...
The Pineland Site Complex: A Southwest Florida Coastal Wetsite (2016)
South Florida is internationally known for its waterlogged sites, Key Marco and Fort Center being perhaps the best known. In 1990, the Florida Museum of Natural History was given a marvelous carved wooden bird figurehead, 27.4 cm in length, later interpreted as part of a mechanical waterbird figurehead (ca. A.D. 865-985). It had been found in 1971 in a spoil pile adjacent to a mosquito-control ditch at the southern boundary of the Pineland complex. That such an important but normally perishable...
Pisgah Archaeology in the Upper Reaches of the Tennessee Valley (2017)
Pisgah in upper East Tennessee appears to represent fluid, adaptable communities of practice in the upper reaches of the Tennessee Valley. It reflects various but limited elements of Mississippianization. Pisgah also appears to have crosscut ethnic boundaries. On the Holston, it was associated with the Dallas archaeological culture, while on the Nolichucky and Watauga, it was associated with Qualla (Cherokee) and also perhaps proto-Catawban wares. Pisgah in the region does not appear to have...
Plant Analysis of an Eighteenth-Century Slave Quarter: Incorporating Macrobotanical and Pollen Analysis at Monticello to Improve our Understanding of Enslaved African-American Lifeways. (2017)
This research emphasizes the value of studying plant remains recovered from archaeological contexts while contributing to our understanding of the lifeways of enslaved African-Americans from late eighteenth -century Virginia. The primary objective of this research is to identify plants selected by enslaved field laborers living on the Home Farm Quarter of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. This study incorporates both macrobotanical and pollen analysis and presents a wide variety of...
The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys of the Mid-South United States (2015)
The Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys have a rich history of archaeological research and provide a valuable dataset for exploring the relationship between climate and culture during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. In this paper, we provide an overview of available archaeological and environmental data in this area, and argue that there were significant changes in diet, technological organization, and landscape use that are most likely related to environmental change. Home to some of...
Plummets, Ritual Dance, Individuals, and Macroregional Interactions during the Woodland Period in Florida (2017)
Community making during the Woodland period in Eastern North America manifested itself in a variety of material forms, most notably in the wide distribution of elaborate artifacts dispersed as part of Hopewellian related exchange. In this paper, we examine the role that one particular class of artifact, plummets, played in community making during the Woodland period in Florida. Often interpreted as fishing gear, we suggest that instead such artifacts played a large role in community style dances...
Pluralistic Communities, Coalescence, and Population Aggregation at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (2015)
Recent ethnohistorical research on the Spanish mission communities of La Florida has done much to document and elucidate complicated patterns of indigenous population relocations. These migrations, aggregations, and dispersals—due to multiple factors such as epidemics, Spanish reducción policies, and flight from antagonistic native groups—resulted in the formation of complex and diverse colonial social networks. At Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (GA), the most pronounced of these was the...
Pochteca from Cahokia, an Evaluation of the Implications of Mississippian Period Contact between the American Bottoms and the Northern Yazoo Basin in Mississippi (2017)
Drawing primarily on data from the Carson Mound Group located in the Mississippi River floodplain of northwestern Mississippi, this paper considers the timing, duration, and nature of the substantial evidence for what appears to have been direct contact between the polity that centered on Cahokia and the people who built the mounds at Carson. Distinctive northern traits include raw material, lithic technology, projectile point styles, ceramics, and architecture. These traits appear for a very...
Points of revelation and communication: Interpreting Native American "monument" construction in the coastal American Southeast (2016)
Native American conceptions of place have only recently been drawn into archaeological interpretations of landscapes and have yet to make a meaningful impact on the study of built environments, particularly the creation of “monuments.” Drawing on American Indian philosophers and writers, this paper aims to remedy this shortcoming by (re)examining the creation of some of the oldest human constructions in the American Southeast – Late Archaic shell rings formed by hunter-gatherers more than 3,000...
Population Aggregation and Ceramic Communities of Practice at 17th Century Mission Santa Catalina (2016)
Native made ceramics are, without question, the most abundant and intensively studied artifact type recovered at southeastern Spanish colonial mission sites. In the mission province of Guale, located on the northern Georgia coast, these ceramics consist of Irene and Altamaha series wares—primarily stamped and incised grit-tempered—related to the broader Lamar ceramics of the South Appalachian Mississippian region. Many studies have thoroughly established the broad contours and temporal patterns...
The Practical and Spiritual Significance of the Lightning Whelk (2015)
We describe the biology of the left-handed lightning whelk (Busycon sinistrum) and some of the practical uses to which its shells were applied among coastal societies along the Gulf of Mexico. Then we explore the symbolic significance of sinistral snails, focusing on the lightning whelk as a metaphor of spiral/circle, fire/sun, and purification/continuity among Native Americans of the eastern North America. This particular whelk has had special spiritual value—and hence economic importance—for...
Pragmatism in Practice: Advocacy, ethics, and impediments in compliance (2016)
The practice of “compliance archaeology” within existing structures requires practitioners to constantly weigh ideals against practicalities. What we think should be done, and how, is often limited by shortfalls in budgets, labor, time, and access. It is evident that few cultural resource stewards or managers have the resources they need to sufficiently address the requirements of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, much less compliance with any other legislation, guideline,...
Pre Clovis at Topper (38AL23): Evaluating the Role of Human versus Natural Agency in the Formation of Lithic Deposits from a Pleistocene Terrace in the American Southeast (2016)
This paper examines the lithic materials from the presumed pre-Clovis deposits at the Topper Site (38AL23), a Paleoindian quarry and stone tool manufacture site in Allendale County, South Carolina. Prior research at Topper identified flakes and possible chipped stone tools from Pleistocene-aged sediments that predate Clovis, traditionally considered the earliest culture complex in the region. The goal of this study is to document the nature of the pre-Clovis assemblage at Topper, and to explore...
Pre-Clovis Archaeology in the Frontiers of Research:Page-Ladson and the Importance of Submerged Sites to Understanding the First Americans (2017)
Dr. Gruhn has spent her career working in locations that most Paleoindian archaeologists consider to be inaccessible and difficult, maintaining that the story of the First Americans can best be found in well-preserved localities on the geographical and chronological frontiers. Our recent work at the Page-Ladson site in Florida fits well within the spirit of her investigations. Page-Ladson is an inundated terrestrial site with sediments containing lithic artifacts associated with a butchered...
Pre-Columbian Burial Rites: Burial Practice Among Prehistoric Native Americans: Southeast Region, Volume IV (2014)
Volume IV of the PRE-COLUMBIAN BURIAL RITES series consists of a comprehensive examination and discussion of specific mortuary behaviors and characteristics utilized by the prehistoric inhabitants of the Southeast Region of North America. The study of burial practice is useful to the discussion of the complexities of population traits because on a societal scale, similarity or differentiation of patterning in the disposal of the dead has been considered one of the basic identifying "signatures"...
Precursors of Missionization: Early European Contact on the Georgia Coast, 1514-1587 (2015)
Beginning not long after the Spanish discovery of the Florida peninsula in 1513, indigenous groups along the Georgia coast were increasingly subject to sporadic maritime visits by Spanish and later French ships. By the time Georgia’s coastal chiefdoms were assimilated into the expanding Franciscan mission system of Spanish Florida after 1587, they had already experienced more than seven decades of occasional interaction with European slavers, colonists, soldiers, missionaries, traders, and...
Prehistoric Ceramics From the Boyer Survey of Lake Okeechobee in the Northern Everglades (2016)
In 2007, severe drought conditions at Lake Okeechobee, in the northern Everglades revealed 6 prehistoric archaeological sites. These were the Caleb Boyer , Ritta Island , Kreamer Island and three sites referred to as the Pelican Bay series. Since Phase 1 investigations failed to yield intact strata or datable carbon, it became necessary to assign each site’s temporal position based on their artifact assemblages. This paper presents and a detailed summary of the sites’ ceramics and concludes that...
Prehistoric Tree Island Use in the Northern Everglades: New Evidence from the Late Archaic (2017)
A season of test excavations at a late archaic tree island site in south Florida has produced several interesting, if broad, patterns in the practices of prehistoric peoples living within this landscape. Stratigraphic evidence further supported by AMS dating reveal use of the tree island spanning nearly 1000 years of periodic long-term human occupation. Evidence attests to a certain "social fabric" at the settlement, suggesting its identity as a memorable place on the landscape, a quality...
Preliminary analysis of Archaic lithic material from the Murrell Home in Cherokee County, Oklahoma (2017)
In 2016, excavations at the George M. Murrell Home, a mid-nineteenth century plantation home located in northeastern Oklahoma, yielded a number of chipped stone artifacts attributable to the Archaic period. Abandoned during the Civil War, the Murrell home is currently owned by the Oklahoma Historical Society and run as a living history museum and park. Located near the confluence of three major waterways, the site lies in an ecotone between broadleaf forests and prairie parkland. The lithic...
Preliminary Analysis of Marine Shell Artifacts in the Southern Florida Keys (2015)
The Stock Island site (8MO2), located in the southernmost Florida Keys, was a black dirt midden affiliated with the Glades tradition. Construction of the Monroe County Detention Center in the 1980s destroyed the site, necessitating the uncontrolled and uncontextualized recovery of a large quantity of ceramics and faunal (osteological and malacological) remains. Unprovenienced collections from this salvage work reside in numerous repositories across the state of Florida. In this work, we present...