*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The US Southeast is known for its robust methodology and interpretation of sites (Paleo-Indigenous through the twentieth century) generated in part from the diversity of work conducted by the Works Progress Administration. Yet, it is less known for its creation of theory. Southeastern archaeology focused on applying concepts of culture history and modeling human behavior while adapting theories from other regions (e.g., processual, postprocessual, agency, political economy). This session examines the current state of theory in the Southeast across all time periods and includes economic, political, and social understandings of human culture grounded in methodology with applications cross-culturally. In addition, participants reflect on how the interpretation of archaeological data from the Southeast impacts contemporary social issues like climate change, social justice, and the production of knowledge. The goal of this session is to recognize the diversity of theoretical approaches being developed in the region and to examine the value Southeast archaeology brings to understanding how persons engage with social, environmental, and political change over time. Participants will engage with different time periods, subregions, and methodologies to demonstrate the contributions of the Southeast to archaeological and anthropological theory.

Other Keywords
Theory • Historic • Mississippian • Indigenous • Paleoindian and Paleoamerican • Ideology • Underwater Archaeology • Slavery • Textile Analysis • Landscape Archaeology

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • Delaware (State / Territory) • Georgia (State / Territory) • Mississippi (State / Territory) • Tennessee (State / Territory) • North Carolina (State / Territory) • Kentucky (State / Territory) • West Virginia (State / Territory) • Virginia (State / Territory) • South Carolina (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  • Ancient Lifeways but Not Archaic Approaches: Theoretical and Methodological Contributions from Researching the Earliest Record of the American Southeast (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Smallwood. Jessi Halligan. Shane Miller. Thomas Jennings. Katherine Barry.

    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. We review contributions of archaeologists studying the Pleistocene and Early Holocene records in the American Southeast. Researchers expand on a variety of theoretical approaches, including the evolutionary theories of human behavioral ecology and cultural transmission, technological organization, and gender archaeology. While still...

  • Climate Change and Environment in Cahokia’s History (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Buchanan. Melissa Baltus. Sarah Baires.

    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. Archaeologists, particularly in the southeast, have often looked to the environment and climate change to understand the evolution of past societies. Droughts, floods, and environmental degradation have been implicated in the rise and fall of societies, especially Mississippian period societies like the city of Cahokia. Despite calls...

  • Creating Machine Learning Models Using Historical Maps to Identify the Places In-Between (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Cochran. Grant Snitker. K. C. Jones.

    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. Historical archaeology lies at the intersection of the written word, the spoken word, and material things. We extend and enhance that purview by incorporating machine learning algorithms to create more dynamic assessments of places documented on historical maps, thus engaging more deeply with sociocultural and environmental...

  • Economy of Production: A Theory of Household Labor Organization and Material Reuse (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Meyers.

    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. Although studies of household economies in archaeology are abundant one area that has not been examined is the economic use of materials, space, and labor and how this affects household economy and organization. Understanding how culture define thrift and waste would help us understand household economies more precisely. Related, many...

  • Enhancing Southeastern Archaeology with Indigenous Cultural Knowledge: A Case Study of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only RaeLynn Butler. LeeAnne Wendt.

    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. Theoretical approaches are used primarily by archaeologists in the southeastern United States to supplement the analyses on their studies of the past. However, most of these theories are missing a decidedly critical component, indigenous cultural knowledge, within their framework. Indigenous cultural knowledge incorporates the beliefs,...

  • I Know as I Relate: Reimagining Relationships of the Deep Past (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Stevens.

    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. Framed within Eurocentric materialism, economic theory of the deep past has largely formed a world of ‘natural resources’ ready for extraction, exploitation, and management. Conversely, Indigenous-based economies of North America-Turtle Island widely see an animate universe in which all creations have agency and tradition all their...

  • Ideas on an Interpretive Framework for Understanding Sites of Convict Leasing (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only V. Camille Westmont.

    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. Convict leasing was an exploitative, capitalist-driven system that successfully replaced race-based chattel slavery with class-based rented forced labor in the American South. The system sits at the intersections of race, masculinity, labor, economics, and modernity. It reveals the ways that widely condemned historical practices, such...

  • Labor Coercion, Land Access, and Free Markets after Emancipation in the American Southeast and Caribbean (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Galle. Khadene Harris.

    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 use of theory and related models that explicitly lay out the causal processes that we hypothesize operated in the past to generate patterns archaeological data is a rarity in historical archaeology. It is especially hard to find examples of research that create or use models that are then tested using archaeological data. The...

  • Life in the Ruins: Historical Ecology in Settler Colonial and Industrial Landscapes (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Mueller. Elizabeth Horton.

    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. Throughout the western hemisphere, historical ecologists working with Indigenous experts have made profound discoveries about the ways in which seemingly pristine ecosystems were shaped by Indigenous knowledge and practice over the course of thousands of years. Key methodologies include surveys of biodiversity and ecosystem structure...

  • Reconsidering the Impacts of Late Mississippian Chiefdoms on Early Spanish Entradas: A View from Western North Carolina (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Pigott.

    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...

  • Theory at the Waterline: Advances in Submerged Precontact Landscape Archaeology (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cook Hale. Jessi Halligan. Morgan Smith.

    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 southeastern United States encompasses the greatest extent of submerged continental shelf in North America along with the greatest abundance of documented submerged precontact sites. It also includes some of the earliest documented precontact sites in North America, some of which are also submerged today. A substantial component of...

  • Tracing Theoretical Approaches to Constructing and Contesting Whiteness in Southeastern Archaeology (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine G. Parker.

    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. Whiteness has been an especially salient phenomenon in shaping the histories, identities, and landscapes of the US Southeast, even as social and political rhetoric have long worked to render Whiteness invisible and implicit. However, explicit archaeological examinations of Whiteness have been comparatively limited within the...