North America: Southeast United States (Geographic Keyword)
676-700 (714 Records)
This paper presents pollen data as a proxy of past vegetation at Poverty Point, a large Archaic mound site in northeast Louisiana. The paleoecological focus of this presentation revolves around the rate and nature of change over time. Patterns and changes in taxonomic diversity are presented and discussed in light of environmental productivity. The rate of vegetation change is calculated and related to ecosystem stability. Additionally, changes in individual taxonomic representation are examined...
Vegetation Survey Methods at Inland Shell Mound Sites (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The New Normal: Approaches to Studying, Documenting, and Mitigating Climate Change Impacts to Archaeological Sites" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconnaissance and initial phase fieldwork for the Gulf Resilience COPE Research HUB began in 2022 and continued in Summer 2023. Experimental investigations into potential variations in vegetative vigor, abundance, diversity, and density at a local archaeological site...
Vertebrate Fauna from Fusihatchee (1EE191) (1997)
Vertebrate evidence for animal use by native groups of the interior southeastern United States during the Protohistoric and early Historic periods are rare. Additional data for this time period from the Fusihatchee site are reported here. Fusihatchee vertebrate remains are from two Protohistoric structures (Structures 6 and 8) and a Historic feature (Feature 320/335). Data from two other features (Features 390 and 2232) are commented upon briefly. The Protohistoric component includes 4,218...
Vibrancy of Place and Cahokia's Emergence (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The city of Cahokia sits in a landscape occupied by bodies of water, distinctive biota, and unique stone and mineral deposits. This flood plain landscape of the Mississippi River served for millennia as home to Indigenous peoples who lived in semi sedentary communities...
Vicksburg before the Siege: Paleoenvironment, Population Expansion, and a Delayed Woodland to Mississippian Transition in the Lower Mississippi Valley (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. Based on recent archaeological work at Vicksburg National Military Park, the Late Woodland to Mississippian transition in the Lower Mississippi Valley extended beyond the traditionally defined end of the Woodland period, with evidence suggesting the Coles Creek-Kings Crossing...
Village Aggregation and Native Subsistence Practices at a Middle Woodland Mound Center, Gulf Coast Florida, USA (2018)
Current research at Garden Patch (8DI4), a Middle Woodland mound center with circular village construction in northern peninsular Gulf Coast Florida, provide quantitative insights into the timing and temporality of monument construction and village aggregation. Here, we combine previously modelled radiocarbon assays with new isotopic data on season of collection and habitat of exploitation. The four-phase model of site occupation when combined with the new isotopic data provide new insights into...
Violence or Funerary Ritual? Performances of Life and Death in the Middle and Late Archaic Period of North Alabama (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 takes a holistic biocultural approach to re-conceptualize the forms and patterns of violence taking place at two neighboring Archaic Period shell mound sites on the Tennessee River in North Alabama, Mulberry Creek (1CT27) and Little Bear Creek (1CT8). Bioarchaeological documentation was supplemented by archival records in an attempt to...
Violence, Dislocation, and Social Transformation in the Chesapeake, AD 1300–1500 (2018)
Beyond the Mississippian frontier in Southwest Virginia, Algonquian and Siouan societies in the Chesapeake pursued their own culture histories, evidently independent of developments in the American Midcontinent and Southeast. And yet, between AD 1300 and 1500 a set of social changes cascaded from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay which may correspond with developments highlighted in this symposium. How did the late precolonial collapse, social fragmentation, and violence of the...
The Volunteer Spirit: "Archaeology Volunteer Day" at the Archaeological Research Laboratory at UT-Knoxville (2018)
In January 2015, we instituted a monthly "Volunteer Day" at the Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. Originally conceived as a way to increase outreach to the general public as well as prepare a large number of artifacts for curation, this activity has developed into a "citizen science" opportunity, where participants help collect data. Here we reflect on the positives and negatives of the program as we have implemented it over the past two years, with feedback from...
The Wade Site: Evidence for Long-Distance Trade Networks in the Southern Piedmont of Virginia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the southern region of the Virginia Piedmont, the Randy K. Wade site (44CH62) is identified as a Late Woodland, Amerindian community which exhibits expected pit storage technology, boundary features, and material culture (Dan River Series ceramics, diagnostic lithics, dietary remains). However, high-status mortuary treatments and the village’s...
War of Jenkins Ear: Battle of Gully Hole Creek (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 280 years since July 7th, 1742, the exact locations of Gully Hole Creek and Bloody Marsh have been speculated and debated without resolution until now. Fort Frederica National Monument partnered with the Frederica Baptist Church regarding private metal detecting finds found on a property near Gully Hole Creek on St. Simons Island, Georgia. National...
War, Power, and History in the Mississippian Period Central Illinois Valley (2023)
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. This paper considers the impact of warfare-induced settlement nucleation on the sociopolitical organization of the thirteenth-century Central Illinois River Valley. Concurrent with the beginning of a period of intense warfare, Mississippian groups in the region abandoned their small, dispersed farmsteads and aggregated into the region’s...
Weeden Island Shell Rings from the Bottom-Up: The View from Old Creek (2018)
The transition to Weeden Island mortuary and ceramic expressions along the Florida Gulf Coast also coincided with a shift in settlement. During this interval, around A.D. 600-750, earlier Swift Creek shell rings were abandoned and Weeden Island rings established nearby. In many cases, these Weeden Island shell rings were substantially larger than their predecessors, however, some anomalously small, isolated Weeden Island rings have also been recorded, such as the Old Creek Shell Ring (8Wa90) in...
Were the Fiber-Tempered Sherds from Claiborne (22Ha201) Made at the Site? (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. This presentation discusses the preliminary results of our study concerning fiber-tempered sherds from six loci in the Southeast in order to determine if any of the fiber-tempered pottery found at Claiborne, a Poverty Point culture site in coastal Mississippi, were made locally or imported. We analyzed...
Wetlands and Woodland Period Settlement on the Florida Gulf Coast (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most prominent Woodland period ceremonial centers along the Gulf Coast are located near wetlands, which provided access to a wide variety of resources for the hunter-fisher-gatherer populations who built them. Researchers investigating these sites often suggest that these rich environments created the conditions for increasingly settled lifeways, complex...
What Happened at Joara, Cuenca, and Fort San Juan: Archaeological Finds from the Berry Site in Western North Carolina (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 1566 and 1568, expeditions led by Captain Juan Pardo sought to establish permanent Spanish colonial towns and forts along an overland route connecting Santa Elena, the capital of La Florida, in coastal South Carolina, with New Spain and the rich silver mines near Zacatecas, Mexico. Written accounts chronicle the movements of...
What Is Going On with the Younger Dryas in Florida? Late Pleistocene Perspectives from the Aucilla Basin (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aucilla River basin in northwestern Florida contains 92 recorded sites with components predating 9000 cal BP, making it an excellent area in which to examine terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene landscape use. More importantly, some of these sites, all drowned terrestrial localities, contain strata with...
What to Do with All Those Digital Data: Examples from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) (2018)
The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. The goal of DAACS is to facilitate research that advances our historical understanding of the slave-based societies that evolved in the Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this paper we argue that the digital methods encapsulated within...
What’s For Dinner: An Examination of Animal Resources Utilized in the Okeechobee Basin Area of Florida. (2018)
In order to gain a better understanding of the faunal diet composition of Native Americans in south-central Florida, an examination was conducted to determine which types of animals appeared most frequently within tree island assemblages. Of the 19,149 bones examined from a 2016 excavation, all were identified to at least an animal’s taxonomic order, although identification to the species level was usually not possible due to the fragmentary nature of the sample. This information was compared...
When is a Living Shoreline Erosion Control Project Suitable to Protect a Coastal Mound Site? Establishing Preliminary Suitability Criteria Based on a Case Study, Adams Bay (16PL8) Mound 1, in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many archaeologists studying coastal archaeological sites are weighing the costs vs. benefits of implementing erosion control structures to protect sites threatened by sea level rise and/or land loss. However, little literature is available about the types and applicability of erosion control structures, such as living shorelines, as protection measures...
When Walls Talk: Rodent-cached Botanical and Ceramic Assemblages from a 19th-century Charleston Kitchen House (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster focuses on the context of urban enslavement in the South Carolina Lowcountry, examining botanical and ceramic assemblages as mechanisms to create visibility for populations often who lived in close proximity with and are thus materially rendered less visible by their enslavers. The rodent-cached botanical and ceramic assemblage of the Nathaniel...
Where are the Boot Marks? Evaluating the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail (2018)
The Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail is a Revolutionary War route used by an estimated 1,040 patriot militia during the Kings Mountain campaign of 1780. It totals approximately 272 miles from the mustering point near Abingdon, Virginia, to Sycamore Shoals (near Elizabethton, Tennessee); from Sycamore Shoals to Quaker Meadows (near Morganton, North Carolina); from the mustering point in Surry County, North Carolina, to Quaker Meadows; and from Quaker Meadows to Kings Mountain, South...
Where Is the Waterline? Integrating Terrestrial and Underwater Investigations in the Aucilla River, Florida (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decade, research in the Aucilla River of northwestern Florida has focused upon understanding the geoarchaeological context of numerous formerly terrestrial, now inundated sinkhole spring sites and the landscapes surrounding them. Dozens of terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene-aged diagnostic artifacts have been...
Where the Devil Don’t Stay: The Role of Moonshine Production in the Mountains of North Carolina (2018)
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of local whisky production has been unregulated and illegal. Both production and distribution of illicit liquor moved underground with the passing of the 18th Amendment – known as the Prohibition – in 1919. This economic shift occurred in tight-knit mountain communities where knowledge has been vigilantly guarded. This continuous whisky production cycle has resulted in the deep social, economic, and cultural ties that persist in the Cataloochee...
"Where’s the Beef?" and Other Meat-Related Questions: Pre- and Post-Emancipation Foodways on James Island, South Carolina (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence, historical documentation, and oral histories are used to compare the diet of individuals enslaved on Stono Plantation with those of the tenant-era population of James Island. Pre-emancipation data indicate a high level of livestock consumption supplemented primarily by fishing, but also by some degree of trapping and/or hunting....