Recent Considerations of Coastal Subsistence Practices in the Southeastern USA

The American Southeast boasts thousands of miles of crenulated shoreline that has been home to coastal dwellers for millennia. As such, the rich traditions of maritime adaptations and lifeways have been the focus of archaeological research in the Southeast for decades. Specifically, subsistence research in the region has revealed the antiquity and diversity of southeastern coastal subsistence strategies and contributed to global understandings of resource seasonality, habitat use, and human mobility and settlement. This symposium builds on these foundations by focusing on the recursive relationships inherent to human-environment practices, including resource procurement, subsistence strategies, and sociocultural interactions.

The diversification of method and theory in the past few decades has inspired researchers to engage a broad range of topics of anthropological interest. Issues of labor, technology, knowledge, tradition, place, identity, gender, religion, and ritual are being addressed with subsistence data. The papers in this symposium focus on these research themes in a turn from strictly ecological interpretations of subsistence data. This session aims to highlight the diversity and complexity of southeastern subsistence practices in order to encourage discussion both across and outside the region.