Assessing Mobility and Social Interactions through Integrated Analyses of Complicated Stamped Pottery in the American Southeast

Summary

In the Deep South of the American Southeast, regional scale social interactions burgeoned alongside the growth of nucleated villages, widespread mound-building projects, and conspicuous mortuary ceremonialism during the Middle and Late Woodland period (ca. AD 100 to 800). A premier material for understanding the significance of social interactions across the southern landscape comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, a ubiquitous class of material culture that provides direct evidence of connections between specific sites at a multitude of scales and in myriad contexts. The impressions of wooden paddles carved with an array of unique designs serve like maker’s marks in documenting vessels finished with an individual identifiable tool. By combining design data, patterns of vessel form and use, determinations of vessel provenance through NAA and petrography, and absolute dating, this research ascertains types of social interaction and their predominant directions and levels of intensity across multiple ecological, social and cultural contexts. The results are considered in terms of the efficacy of models of migration, residential mobility, post-marital residence, and exchange, and their implications for better understanding major regional trends in village aggregation and ritual practice.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Migration and Mobility in the New World

Keywords

Spatial Coverage