Investigating Interaction from Tunnacunnhee to Talaje: Papers in Honor of Richard W. Jefferies

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Spanning the Middle Archaic to the Mission periods, the wide-ranging work and research of Richard W. Jefferies is united by a common theme of interaction. From the study of bone pins among hunter-gatherer groups throughout eastern North America to his work on the Spanish missions of San Jose de Sapala and Santo Domingo de Asao/Talaje, a core theme of Jefferies’s work has been the examination of how individuals and groups engaged with one another through material culture and what that meant for larger cultural processes. In particular Jefferies’s study of carved bone pins was foundational in that it took a neglected artifact category and used it as a proxy to examine regional questions of interaction at multiple scales. Papers in this session take as their inspiration the work of Richard W. Jefferies and engage with the theme of interaction across the Eastern Woodlands.

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  • Documents (10)

Documents
  • Aspects of Carved Paddle Stamped Designs from the Middle Mississippi Period (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Stephenson.

    Complicated stamped pottery vessels, and the carved wooden paddles used to stamp them, were produced in Southeastern North America beginning early in the first millennium AD and continued in some quarters well into the 19th century. Much of the research on paddle designs has focused on the highly decorative and diverse Woodland Period expressions, with little attention given to later, more repetitive paddle stamps. In this paper, I bring the methods of analysis used to study Woodland paddle...

  • Exploring Different Facets of Early Hunter-Gatherer Interaction in Selected Ecotonal Boundary Areas of North and South America (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kary Stackelbeck.

    This paper examines the influence of Richard Jefferies’ research into early hunter-gatherer interaction on my own work in the mid-Continental U.S. and Central Andes. The material expressions of social interaction among terminal Pleistocene to mid-Holocene populations in these disparate regions vary substantially. However, interesting observations may be made when placing those expressions in a broader context of understanding the ways in which early populations navigated their social and...

  • Hopewellian Connections in the Midsouth—Tunacunnhee and Yearwood (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Butler.

    In 1976 Richard Jefferies published on a Middle Woodland burial mound complex in northwest Georgia called Tunacunnhee. The previous year, Brian Butler salvaged an unusual Middle Woodland ritual and mortuary site on the Elk River in southern Middle Tennessee, called Yearwood, published in summary fashion in 1979. At the time, radiocarbon dating was too limited and primitive to get an accurate read on the age of these two sites, and the then available dates suggested a considerable difference in...

  • Interacting in Cramped Spaces: Material Culture and Identity at the Mission San Joseph de Sapala (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Moore.

    Accounts by 16th- and 17th-century explorers, missionaries, and government officials clearly illustrate the considerable amount of variability in indigenous cultures, ethnicities, and traditions found throughout the Southeast at contact. Beginning in the mid-17th century, many of these formerly dispersed groups began to coalesce around mission communities in modern Georgia and Florida. The historical narrative of the contraction and eventual destruction of the Spanish mission system in Florida...

  • Native American Interaction during the Spanish Contact and Mission Period on the Central Coastal Plain of Georgia, USA, A.D. 1540 to A.D. 1700. (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Hensler.

    This paper examines how interaction between Native American groups living in areas of indirect contact changed during the Spanish colonization of the Southeastern United States. The project area, the Big Bend Region of the Ocmulgee River Valley in the central coastal plain of Georgia, had ties to the Spanish mission region in both prehistoric and historic periods, though there was little direct interaction between Spanish missionaries and Native Americans. Using technological style as a...

  • Plummets, Ritual Dance, Individuals, and Macroregional Interactions during the Woodland Period in Florida (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Thompson. Thomas Pluckhahn. Matt Colvin. Jacob Lulewicz. Brandon Ritchison.

    Community making during the Woodland period in Eastern North America manifested itself in a variety of material forms, most notably in the wide distribution of elaborate artifacts dispersed as part of Hopewellian related exchange. In this paper, we examine the role that one particular class of artifact, plummets, played in community making during the Woodland period in Florida. Often interpreted as fishing gear, we suggest that instead such artifacts played a large role in community style dances...

  • Pochteca from Cahokia, an Evaluation of the Implications of Mississippian Period Contact between the American Bottoms and the Northern Yazoo Basin in Mississippi (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Johnson. John Connaway.

    Drawing primarily on data from the Carson Mound Group located in the Mississippi River floodplain of northwestern Mississippi, this paper considers the timing, duration, and nature of the substantial evidence for what appears to have been direct contact between the polity that centered on Cahokia and the people who built the mounds at Carson. Distinctive northern traits include raw material, lithic technology, projectile point styles, ceramics, and architecture. These traits appear for a very...

  • Shell Bead Production at a Southern Appalachian Mississippian Frontier (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Meyers.

    Frontier areas differ from non-frontier areas in multiple ways; one is by a more intense degree of interaction with other cultures. To successfully settle a frontier area, frontier groups must not just interact but also socially integrate with other groups. Craft production is one way social integration occurs. At the Middle Mississippian-period Carter Robinson site, there is evidence for the production of shell beads. This paper presents this evidence, which includes all stages of shell bead...

  • There and Back Again: Dick Jefferies, Winchester Farm, and Middle Woodland Interaction Across Central Kentucky (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Henry. George Milner. Natalie Mueller.

    Adena-Hopewell enclosure complexes have inspired much conjecture and some well-supported inferences concerning the rise of Middle Woodland ceremonialism, interaction, and social organization in the Eastern Woodlands. After examining Hopewellian interaction at Tunnacunnee in Northwest Georgia, Dick Jefferies turned his focus to Adena-Hopewell mound and enclosure sites in Central Kentucky. Dick’s examination of the Winchester Farm Enclosure in the early 1980s with George Milner was the first...

  • Travels and Traverses, Pilgrimages and Passages: Alternative Concepts of Interaction (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sissel Schroeder.

    When confronted by the presence of non-local ceramics and stone tools, variations in artifact styles, the spatial distribution of settlements and settlement hierarchies, and evidence thought to indicate intergroup conflict, archaeologists typically turn to the general concept of "interaction" to explain these material residues. Furthermore, interaction scenarios sometimes are premised on the notion of inequities in resource access. When cultural behemoths like Cahokia are implicated in scenarios...