Vicksburg Is the Key: Recent Archaeological Investigations and New Perspectives from the Gibraltar of the South

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Vicksburg Is the Key: Recent Archaeological Investigations and New Perspectives from the Gibraltar of the South" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Vicksburg, Mississippi, has always been a place of great strategic, political, and cultural importance, and yet comparatively little systematic archaeological investigations have taken place at this “Gibraltar” of the American South. This symposium will focus on the geological, paleontological, and ecological conditions that make Vicksburg and its environs such a unique and culturally significant feature of the Lower Mississippi Valley, as well as summarize past archaeological investigations and interpretations that have been applied to this region. Additional papers will build off of this foundation and will reconsider the role of precontact and historic period Indigenous peoples and their interactions with colonial powers played that set the stage for why Vicksburg became such a focal point for both the North and the South during the American Civil War. This symposium will conclude with preliminary investigations of the archaeological potential of disturbed contexts from the 1863 Vicksburg Battlefield itself and will also highlight preliminary findings and unexpected insights concerning Vicksburg’s Civil War–era African American population as evidenced by ongoing bioarchaeological investigations of imperiled burials under immediate threat of destruction due to recent catastrophic landslides at the Vicksburg National Cemetery.