North America: Southeast United States (Geographic Keyword)
401-425 (714 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within a hundred years of Cahokia’s Big Bang around AD 1050, warfare becomes evident in the construction of defensive structures, especially massive, bastioned palisades. The first of these palisades at Cahokia dates to ca. AD 1135 and stands as the earliest Mississippian fortified community. This signaling of intensive and organized...
The Mississippianization of Women in the Black Warrior Valley of Alabama, A.D. 1120–1250 (2018)
By A.D. 1120 in the Black Warrior Valley of west-central Alabama, a Mississippian identity, predicated on the dissemination and subsequent adoption of maize, had firmly begun to take root at what would become the ritual-ceremonial center of Moundville. Traditionally, researchers have modelled the origins of Moundville within a political-economic lens: the growing aspirations of elites, who are implied to be male, are supported and fueled by stores of and feasts of maize, which is treated...
Misuse and Abandonment of African American Cemeteries: How Social Inequalities Persist in Death in the Post Civil War Southeast (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores how African American cemeteries in the Southeast have faced environmental and human threats, which makes it difficult for descendant communities to piece together their backgrounds. American law offers some protections against the intentional desecration of cemeteries, yet the maintenance and landscaping of individual cemeteries is left...
Mixing and Moving Earth: The Geoarchaeology of a Newly Rediscovered Middle Woodland Earthen Enclosure in Central Kentucky (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earthwalker Circle is a small Middle Woodland era (ca. 200 BCE–CE 500) ceremonial ditch and embankment enclosure located on privately-owned land at the border of Kentucky’s Bluegrass and Knobs physiographic regions. This enclosure was recently rediscovered as part of a regional assessment of LiDAR-derived visualizations and drought-based aerial...
Modeling the Cosmos: Making Sense of "Rim Rider" Effigy Bowl Iconography in the Central Mississippi River Valley (2021)
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. Symbolically charged ceramic rim-effigy bowls, characterized by figural head and tail adornments, are hallmarks of the Late Mississippian period in the central Mississippi River valley (CMV). Hundreds of whole rim-effigy bowls, most often depicting serpents, birds, or humans, have been collected at sites...
Modeling the Impact of Anthropogenic Sea-Level Rise and Storm Surge on Coastal Archaeological Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes the impact of projected sea-level rise as a result of anthropogenic climate change on coastal archaeological sites in the state of Georgia. Coastal sites and environments are at increasing risk of erosion, inundation, and submersion due to projected sea level rise of 0.25-0.30 meters by 2050 and up to 2.1 meters by 2100, along with...
Molding Community: Compositional Insights into the Organization of Mississippian Pottery Production on the Central Gulf Coast of Florida, USA (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technological innovations can have profound social consequences. Alterations to a given potting network change the pacing and tempo of interactions between experts and apprentices, effectively restructuring intergenerational relationships within a community. For this reason, experienced potters may...
More Hands Make Light Work - A Collaborative Leadership Approach for Successful Public Archaeology Field Schools (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In today’s climate of budget cuts and decreasing enrollments, the importance of publicly engaged projects cannot be understated as they demonstrate our value to the public in a tangible way. Archaeological field schools represent obvious opportunities for public engagement and increased visibility for both archaeology programs and their host institutions....
More Than a Footnote to History: Rediscovering the Maroon Community at Prospect Bluff (2023)
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. The fort at Prospect Bluff was not only a post held by the British during the War of 1812 but also, and perhaps most importantly, one of the largest maroon communities in North America. The British proclamation offering freedom to enslaved people in the United States in exchange for service in...
The More the Merrier: Using a Suite of Analytical Techniques to Arrive at Reliable Chert Ascription (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Determining the provenance of Florida cherts has been a major goal of archaeological researchers in the state for decades, and inquiry has largely focused on refining the existing petrographic and microscopic methods. When these methods of provenance were first developed, geochemical approaches using X-ray...
Morphometric Analysis and the Investigation of Communities of Stone Toolmakers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will explore the usefulness of morphometric analysis when investigating how communities of stone toolmakers are embedded in and help construct their social landscape. Utilizing the concept of communities of practice, I intend to examine the culturally and historically situated nature of stone toolmakers through the analysis of their products....
Mortuary Spaces as Social Power: Ceramic Exchange and Burial Practice at Safford Mound (8PI3) (2018)
Mortuary spaces often served as gathering points for disparate communities in the pre-Columbian past. The deep temporal associations of many burial mounds across the southeastern United States linked living societies to the ancestral landscape, thus creating a sense of social memory that penetrated both quotidian and ritualized social practice. Safford Mound (8PI3), a burial mound located near modern Tarpon Springs, Florida, embodies some of these characteristics. In this study, we qualitatively...
The Most Inhospitable of Environments: Enslaved Life in the Rice Fields of the Santee Delta (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located between Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the Santee Delta is a unique wetland habitat characterized by tidal marshes and low-lying barrier islands. Situated between the North and South Santee Rivers, the delta is a critical stopping point for a number of migratory birds and is also a popular duck hunting destination. However, historically,...
Mounds at the Margins: The Effect of Temporal Frontiers on Archaeological Interpretation (2018)
The practice of building earthen mounds has tremendous time depth in the American South, and the variation in these monuments across time and space continues to spark debates regarding their functions and social significance. A great deal of attention has been focused on the shifting functions of mounds during Terminal Woodland / Emergent Mississippian times, when platform mound-and-plaza complexes become commonplace, corn agriculture becomes the norm, and higher levels of institutionalized...
Movement and Animacy of Bodies in Pre-Columbian Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-Columbian Florida burial mounds exhibit multiple modes of burial, including extended, flexed, mixed (and mass) bundles, skull only, and cremation, as well as emplaced objects in various conditions and configurations. These different forms often occur within a single mound, and have been explained...
Movement and Interaction in the Appalachian Summit circa 1300–1500 CE (2018)
The Appalachian Summit is the southernmost and highest part of the Appalachian Mountain system, extending across western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. Beginning in the early 1300s, evidence for Mississippian practices appear within Late Pisgah phase communities in the central portion of the Appalachian Summit. These settlements include small farmsteads, palisaded villages, and sites with platform mounds. In addition to the Pisgah culture, the late Mississippian Qualla phase (1450 -1838...
Movement and Places Between: The Power of Raccoons (2018)
Informed by ethnographic accounts, iconography has helped clarify how people materialized otherwise intangible aspects of their realities. In this paper, I examine the use of raccoons in imagery from Mississippian archaeological contexts. By considering placement of independent raccoon motifs in iconographic scenes, as well as raccoon motifs associated with figures, I identify use patterns of raccoon imagery. Considering these iconographic data alongside faunal data generated from Spiro,...
Moving Earth at Poverty Point: Investigating "Perforators" as Specialized Basket Making Tools (2018)
Studying the development of technological specialization in cultural groups has been an interest of archaeologists for many years because specialization lends itself to the development of specialized labor. Technological specialization was a necessary factor in the building of the mounds and ridges at the late Archaic site at Poverty Point. Yet most of the research done to this point has been focused on the symbolic significance of the mounds and ridges, leaving our understanding of the...
Multi-Plied Research Methods: Choctaw Traditional Textiles and Collaborative Research on Southeast Fibers, Cordage, and Garments (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2018, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Historic Preservation department has worked to reawaken pre-European contact knowledge of fiber technologies. Drawing on archaeological and ethnographic sources, this applied archaeology work is approached through both collaborative models of research and...
Multilayer Networks and Relational Plurality: The Scales and Sources of Social Capital across Southern Appalachia, A.D. 1150–1350 (2018)
The scale and structure of the relationships through which social capital is generated, amassed, and controlled must be understood if we are to evaluate the emergence and evolution of organizationally complex social, political, and economic institutions. At any one point in time however, actors or entities are undoubtedly embedded and engaged in a number of distinct, yet overlapping, relational fields. In this paper I interrogate three networks, representing three separate sets of relationships,...
A Multiscalar Analysis of Piedmont Village Tradition Settlement and Demography, 1200-1600 CE (2018)
This research uses settlement area of Piedmont Village Tradition (PVT) sites from the four major river valleys in the North Carolina Piedmont to describe demographic trends on multiple scales during 1200-1600 CE. It uses surface survey results and artifact styles to establish sizes and dates. Spatial data and radiometric dates from excavated sites in each valley are used to refine these data. Given the limitations of using surface survey data for estimating demographic characteristics, this work...
NAGPRA Data Management Plan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been over three decades since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was signed into law on November 16, 1990. NAGPRA was passed in a different information environment than the one at present; electronic documents are...
NAGPRA Training for the Next Generation of Archaeologists: The Keowee-Toxaway Re-curation Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty years beyond enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), there is still much to be done. The growing curation crisis and renewed efforts by Tribal Nations and archaeologists at the South Carolina Institute of...
A Native American Music Replication Project: An Ethno-archaeomusicological Perspective (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper chronicles an instrument replication and composition project, using archaeological materials, historic and ethnohistoric documentation, and interviews with archaeologists, music consultants, project commission personnel, craftspersons, composer, and others with a vested interested. Three instrument...
Native American Responses to Spanish Contact and Colonialism in the American South (2018)
As it did elsewhere around the world, early Spanish exploration and colonization of the American South led to diverse forms of engagement, entanglement, diplomacy, and resistance by Native American groups. Community identity persisted in some places and in some instances, and it was transformed in others. Geopolitical relationships among towns and chiefdoms were altered in diverse ways, both because of colonial exploration, trade, settlement, and missionization, and because of Native American...