North America: Southeast United States (Geographic Keyword)
501-525 (714 Records)
Florida’s terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene archaeological sites form interesting settlement patterns when projected upon various geographic representations. Probably many unknown Paleoindian and Early Archaic sites still remain hidden and unstudied, as more than half of Florida’s landmass was inundated during these cultural periods. Due to constraints in visibility and access, the practical limits of traditional survey hinder progress in discovering additional sites around the state. With...
Preliminary Assessment of Recent Research at the Old Vero Site (8IR009), Vero Beach, Florida (2018)
Intensive excavations and attendant analyses conducted at the Old Vero Site (8IR009) from 2014-2017 have revealed a long and complex stratigraphic succession which dates from ca. 30,000 B.P. to the present. The excavations have documented not only 195 species of plants and animals but also a human presence which extends back to at least 11,000 B.P. and, perhaps, earlier. Terminal Pleistocene extinction dates are provided on several taxa as well as observations about the environments within which...
Preliminary Data for Developing a Fine-Scale Model of Socioecological Change on Ossabaw Island, Georgia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research project examines the history of human-environment interaction on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Archaeological collections for Woodland (ca. 1000 BC–AD 1000) and Mississippian period (ca. AD 1000–1700) occupations of the island are combined with environmental data synthesized from the analysis of sediment cores taken from five freshwater ponds on...
Preliminary Results of 2022 Excavations at Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will provide an overview of the 2022 excavations at Spiro by the University of Oklahoma field school, which involved work at two areas of the site. The poster will discuss the geophysics results that lead to excavating these areas, the preliminary results from the 2022 excavations, our preliminary interpretations that the two areas represent...
Prelude to the Protohistoric: Late Mississippian Settlement Dynamics in the Central and Upper Tombigbee River Drainage (2018)
This paper examines settlement patterns of the late pre-Contact era (1300-1500 C.E.) in the central and upper Tombigbee River, with a focus on the Blackland Prairie portion. Mississippian and Protohistoric settlement strategies and chronologies are overviewed with an eye toward understanding the coalescence of Contact-era polities and the abandonment of the Tombigbee floodplain. Climatological, sociopolitical, and demographic factors are evaluated. Decentralization as a bottom-up response to...
Prepared Floors on Mound A Revealed through Near-Surface Geophysics (2018)
Mound A is the largest earthen construction at Poverty Point and the second largest mound in North America. Limited excavations on the mound have documented the construction history of the deposit, but have failed to find evidence of how the mound was used. Recent geophysical surveys (including resistivity, ground penetrating radar, and magnetometry) reveal specialized use areas – including prepared floors that we interpret as dance and presentation platforms. The discovery of these platforms...
Production Matters: Organic Residue and Iconographic Evidence for Late Precolumbian Datura Making in the Central Arkansas 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. Recent absorbed residue studies have confirmed that ceramic and shell containers were used for consuming Datura in precolumbian times. Until now, no one has identified what tools precolumbian people used to produce a concentrated hallucinogenic concoction. In this study, we used mass spectrometry to...
Promoting Engagement and Interaction: How Local Museums Can Use Digital 3D Models (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the increasing accessibility of digital technologies, photogrammetry and digital modeling have grown in popularity and applicability as archaeological tools. Recently, archaeologists have used digital models of sites and artifacts for various teaching and research purposes, with specific emphasis on 3D-printed replicas and augmented-reality content....
A Proposition to Extend the Kings Crossing Phase in the Lower Mississippi Valley to 1200 CE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Vicksburg Is the Key: Recent Archaeological Investigations and New Perspectives from the Gibraltar of the South" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic data and radiocarbon dates from site 22Wr814, a newly recorded precontact lithic and ceramic artifact scatter along Mint Spring Bayou within Vicksburg National Military Park, show that the Kings Crossing phase (1000–1100 CE) extended to the end of the twelfth century...
A Provenance and Stylistic Study of Formative Caddo Vessels: Evidence for Specialized Ritual Craft Production and Long-Distance Exchange (2018)
Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis is used to determine whether Formative Caddo finewares (A.D. 850 -1150) were made locally in the Arkansas River Basin or produced by their Gulf Coastal Plain neighbors to the south. The preliminary INAA results, in concert with a stylistic study that indicates very few potters had the knowledge and skill to produce them, show that Formative Caddo finewares were made in the southern Caddo region and exported north to Arkansas River Basin mound centers for...
Public Outreach and CRM: A Successful Partnership at Old Cahawba Archaeological Park in Dallas County, Alabama (2021)
This is an abstract from the ""Is There Gold in that Field?" CRM and Public Outreach on the Front Lines" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the summers of 2016 and 2017, two divisions within the University of Alabama Museums Department helped create successful outreach programs in Dallas County, Alabama, with the support of some strategic partners, namely the Alabama Historical Commission, among others. The Office of Archaeological Research was...
Purposeful Unpatterning: Investigating Maroon Site Distribution In Colonial Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the colonial era, Spanish Florida built a reputation as a refuge for self-liberated people escaping from slavery in the Carolinas and Georgia. However, following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Florida was passed from one government to another and the Maroons’ freedom was under constant threat. Florida Maroons were constantly on the move and their...
Put What? in Your Pipe and Smoke It (2018)
Holly Bend, a prolific and successful early 19th century plantation owned by Robert Davidson in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina has seen multiple excavations and research over the past several years. In particular, a collection of ceramic tobacco pipe fragments that have been excavated are analyzed to better understand the local smoking culture. Several methods are used, including X-ray fluorescence spectrometer analysis to determine local sourcing of the ceramic elements, residue analysis...
The Quaker Farm that Wasn't: Archaeology at the Smith Farmstead (2018)
During archaeological field work at a North Carolina central Piedmont farmstead (~1870-1940) researchers collected information on numerous landscape features, a standing structure, and remnants of other log buildings. The site contained unusually well-preserved leather goods, metal artifacts, and metal trash piles; however very few ceramic or glass artifacts were discovered in spite of the volume of earth moved and sifted. Oral history, documents, and archaeological evidence will be explored to...
Radical Cosmological Ritual Intervention at Poverty Point (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana is unique—in size, monumental architecture, artifact content, and history—and the site defies standard functional explanations for hunter-gatherer settlements. In contrast to existing concepts arguing that the site’s monumental constructions were built over...
Ramey on the Frontier: A Pilot Study of Select Ramey Incised Technology from Cahokia’s Southern Neighbors (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia’s influence on the archaeological cultures of the upper Central Mississippi River Valley (CMRV) has often been described as less prominent than processes taking place in the northern hinterlands. Although few examples are found at each site, Ramey Incised jars are found in many early and middle...
Rare Animals at a Mississippian Chiefly Compound: The Irene Mound Site (9CH1), Georgia, USA (2018)
The Irene site (ca. AD 1150 - 1450) was a small, prestigious community occupied by a chief and his lineage. It was located on the Savannah River, a few kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The presence of animals rare in the region and animals rare or absent in other coastal assemblages distinguishes the Irene collection from other tidewater collections. Many of these animals exhibit atypical, even dangerous, behavior. Rare animals, and other attributes, provide a standard for assessing...
A Re-Evaluation of Moundville's Collapse (2018)
The disruption of social traditions in ancient societies is often described as the collapse of complexity, but persisting or resilient practices are often ignored, limiting archaeological interpretations of social continuity and change. This paper addresses these historical processes during the terminal occupation of Moundville, a multiple mound Mississippian civic-ceremonial complex occupied from A.D. 1200-1550 and located in west-central Alabama. The collapse of ancient complex societies has...
A Re-evaluation of Surface-Collected Projectile Points or Knives from the Poverty Point (16WC5) Site Using Reflectance Spectroscopy (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. Nondestructive reflectance spectroscopy (VNIR-FTIR) was applied to 845 chert projectile points/knives (ppks) from the Poverty Point site (16WC5) in order to characterize the toolstone lithic networks utilized by the Late Archaic (4000–2500 BP) inhabitants of that site. This was the first systematic application...
Recent Investigations at 41AN162, a Middle Caddo Site in East Texas: Implications for Late Mississippian Settlement-Subsistence Behavior and Precision Dating (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations at 41AN162, sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation, exposed and documented several features associated with Caddo ceramics in an upland, non-aggrading landform. Historic-period plowing and extensive bioturbation has resulted in substantial reworking of site sediments and associated archaeological remains. However,...
Recent Investigations at the Musgrove Shell Ring (9LI2169) on St. Catherines Island, Georgia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present the preliminary findings on recent fieldwork at the Musgrove Shell Ring. Due to the ring’s low topography and dense vegetation coverage, archaeologists did not identify the ring prior to the review of new LIDAR data, which showed an anomaly approximately 60 m in diameter. Fieldwork consisted of a shell density survey and multiple...
Recognizing Variation in Pisgah Identity Across Space and Time (2018)
The late Mississippian Pisgah culture, dating from 1200- 1500 CE, is found across a wide geographic area including western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia. Pisgah sherds are often recognized by the presence of distinct rectilinear and later curvilinear stamped decoration with sand, grit, and/or mica temper. Excavations by Dickens (1976), Keel (1976), and Moore (1981; 2002) better defined changes over time in Pisgah ceramics while simultaneously showing the...
Reconsidering the Impacts of Late Mississippian Chiefdoms on Early Spanish Entradas: A View from Western North Carolina (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Mississippian world was populated with several chiefly polities competing for regional dominance in a constantly shifting socio-political landscape. In the mid-sixteenth century, two Spanish entradas, led by Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo, would become entangled in this competitive landscape, attempting to bring late Medieval...
Reconstructing Seasonality at the Burns Site (8BR85), Cape Canaveral, Florida using δ18O Stable Isotope and Zooarchaeological Analyses (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding patterns of localized environmental change in the past can provide valuable insight into modern environmental patterns, as well as comparative options for modern day environmental planning. This research analyzes Donax variabilis associated with the Burns Mound Site (900 to 1600 CE), located on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station along the...
Reconstructing the Habitual Workspaces of a Middle Caddo Period Structure at Site 41FN244 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bois d’Arc Lake archaeological project was carried out by AR Consultants in coordination with the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, the Texas Historical Commission, and the Tulsa District of US Army Corps of Engineers. These investigations were to determine the National Register eligibility of Site 41FN244. Funded by the North Texas Municipal Water District,...