North America: Southeast United States (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Blanton.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Religious traditions follow historical trajectories. Within the archaeological record, processes of cosmological reorientation may be signaled by patterned change in attendant ritual paraphernalia. This kind of evolutionary process may be tracked in the American Southeast among certain late prehistoric, Mississippian societies, specifically in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Raymond. Carl P. Lipo. Matthew Sanger. Timothy de Smet. Anna Patchen.

Poverty Point, Louisiana, is well-known for its massive architecture that includes earthen mounds and six semi-circular ridges. Geophysical surveys conducted over the past decade have revealed that the subsurface of this deposit also contains a large, extensive and diverse set of artificially constructed features. In addition, remote sensing demonstrates that features that have been often described as singular constructions are actually a palimpsest of overlapping depositional events. Here, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Mooney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Magnolia Grove is a nineteenth-century town house property in Greensboro, Alabama. It functioned as a largely self-sufficient farming operation with around 25 acres of land and multiple slaves living and working on site. Because of these features, Magnolia Grove was used as a case study in comparison with other plantation landscapes. In short, this project is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Briggs.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence demonstrates that various factors can influence kinship patterns, but among the most influential are those related to subsistence. However, such findings are rarely applied to the prehistoric American South, where researchers largely project the matrilineal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Wiewel.

This poster presents the outcomes of my efforts to make active learning activities an integral component of undergraduate courses in archaeology. For the past three years I have taken my Southeastern Archaeology course from a typical lecture-based class to a more active learning environment that includes hands-on lab activities, participation in fieldwork, field trips to archaeological sites, and service learning opportunities at our campus museum and local research station of the Arkansas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Peres. Aaron Deter-Wolf.

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Global evidence for human consumption and management of gastropods predates the Neolithic Revolution - the period noted for independent experimentation and domestication of terrestrial plants and animals. Archaeological data indicates that gastropods, terrestrial and aquatic, were vital resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Ellis.

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In traditional bioarchaeological practice, the first scientific identities fixed to skeletal remains are the labels given to them when they are excavated. From there, the basic information about the remains is built from those first identifying features associated with the site. But what happens if the remains are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemarie Blewitt. Susan Myers. Mary Beth Fitts. Lindsay Ferrante. Sam Franklin.

The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology (OSA) was created by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1973 to coordinate and implement a statewide archaeological preservation program. Central to this program is the OSA’s management of records, including those documenting the more than 50,000 archaeological sites located in the state’s 100 counties, and a library of nearly 8,000 associated reports. The OSA Research Center curates tens of thousands of artifacts and their associated records...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Davis.

This is an abstract from the "Seeking Freedom in the Borderlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Maroon Societies in Florida" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following investigations at the early nineteenth-century African/Black Seminole settlement of Pilaklikaha (“Abraham’s Old Town”), Florida has emerged as a key space for examining the complex intersections between archaeologies of marronage and Afro-Indigenous relationality. Beginning with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Grinnan. Michael Thomin.

This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the second longest coastline in the United States, Florida has a maritime past that spans at least 14,000 years of human habitation. Archaeological collections from prehistoric middens, colonial-era shipwrecks, and industrial coastal communities, among a variety of other maritime and submerged sites,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzi Baram.

This is an abstract from the "Seeking Freedom in the Borderlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Maroon Societies in Florida" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nearly erased from history, the early nineteenth-century marronage of Angola on the Manatee River is now established as part of the Network to Freedom in Florida. Recent excavations provide a view of daily life for the freedom-seeking people. Allied with British filibusters, connected to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Stevens.

Josiah Henson was an escaped enslaved individual and eventual Underground Railroad conductor, yet his life story has been historically overshadowed by the fictional character he inspired in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s internationally renowned novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC) and Montgomery Parks of southern Maryland utilizes archaeological research as one of many techniques to bring to life the narrative of Josiah Henson the individual,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Makin.

The Hatch site in Prince George County, Virginia is arguably among the most significant precolonial sites in the region. After it was excavated in the 1980s, the collection was stored away and went largely unstudied for the last thirty years. When I first began my research on this ‘orphaned’ site, I was struck by the large pit features containing evidence of ritual feasting and a wide variety of ceramic types. Adhering to the old trope that ‘pots equal people’, I initially assumed that this site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Balco.

This is an abstract from the "Broader Impacts and Teaching: Engaging with Diverse Audiences" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Engaging students, landowners, the public, and policy makers in the scientific process of archaeology is an essential component of our discipline and creates opportunities to impress upon these groups the value of historic preservation. Doing so demonstrates that archaeological and historic resources are limited and fragile,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Rainville. Asa Randall.

The middle St. Johns River valley in northeast Florida was occupied more-or-less continuously beginning at least 9000 years ago. Regional inhabitation by hunter-gatherers involved extensive terraforming of the landscape, including the construction of earthen and shell mounds, in addition to many non-mounded places. Many locations were repeatedly occupied over the millennia, with successive generations modifying or otherwise interacting with existing, often ancient, places. Earlier research took...

DOCUMENT Citation Only S. Margaret Spivey-Faulkner.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence at the Fort Center archaeological site in south Florida indicates that rooftop statuary depicting animals were treated as members of the community. This evidence is found in the watery interment of these sculptures alongside human community members over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Carlson. David Pollack. David Breetzke. Deborah Parrish. Heather Byerly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sumac Terrace site (15Ls141), located in the Cumberland Plateau, was primarily occupied during the Middle Archaic (6000-4000 CE). The recovery of a large number of exhausted chipped stone tools and debitage from tool maintenance, and the presence of rock-lined hearths and cooking pits, and sheet midden within a relatively small area (20 x 30 m)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Meeks. Jacob Lulewicz. Shawn Patch. Kevin Smith. Lynne Sullivan.

This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on artifact styles, regional archaeologists in the 1940s first proposed movement of Mississippian people from the Middle Cumberland Region to the Great Valley of East Tennessee. Lacking absolute dating techniques, these researchers had limited understanding of the timing or contemporaneity of the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz.

This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper introduces the symposium "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture ca. A.D. 1050-1400." I provide a brief history of migration and climate change research in the archaeology of Mississippian societies. These earlier research efforts -- the theoretical contexts in which they occurred,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Johns. Jay Stephens. Virginie Renson. Keith Ashley.

This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long-distance movement of copper across North America is often noted by archaeologists but little studied, with its provenance typically assumed to be the Great Lakes region. Such claims need to be tested, and recent studies have approached this problem using laser-ablation instrumentation to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Newman.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While it has been established that the Natives of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere employed a number of magical plants toward entheogenic ends (Barrier 2020; Rafferty 2021; Simon and Parker 2018), e.g., Nicotiana spp., Datura spp., Ipomoea spp., etc., the general consensus has been that the use of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, in the forms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cayla Colclasure.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 17th century the Mission de Santa Catalina de Guale was established on St. Catherines Island, GA, creating a pluralistic community of aggregated indigenous populations and Spanish missionaries. Previous discussions of the effects of Guale-Spanish interaction and the resulting redirection of indigenous labor upon traditional foodways on St. Catherines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel LaDu. Sean McCraw.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1986, Sam McGahey published the first compendium of Mississippi dugout canoes. He listed the attributes of eight watercraft including recovery location, date of manufacture, wood type, method of construction, and dimensions. McGahey also included a composite drawing to better facilitate comparison. While dugouts are only infrequently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian and Oneota entanglements were often violent, typically resulting in intercommunity conflict, loss of life, and population displacement. However, Mississippians in the northern Lower Mississippi Valley may have comprised a sufficiently large territorial bloc to have successfully thwarted Oneota...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Krus. Charles Cobb.

Bayesian chronological modeling is used to investigate the chronology for a large-scale human depopulation event during the Mississippi period (A.D. 1000–1700) known as the Vacant Quarter phenomenon. The Middle Cumberland Region (MCR) of Tennessee is within the Vacant Quarter area and six villages from the final phase of Mississippian activity in the MCR have been subjected to radiocarbon dating. Complete radiocarbon datasets from these sites are presented within an interpretative Bayesian...