Eat local, Think Global? The Intersections of Knowledge, Culture, and Subsistence at Woodland Coastal Sites in the Southeastern USA.

Summary

Along the northern parts of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of Florida and southern Georgia, coastal sites of the Deptford and Swift Creek archaeological cultures (circa A.D. 1 to 600) map onto the distinctive estuarine and salt marsh ecological zones of the region. Beyond their similar environments, inhabitants within this region seem to have been united by a cultural milieu characterized by commonalities in village life, material culture, ritual practices, and ostensibly, patterns of subsistence. This paper presents a comparative synthesis of zooarchaeological data from Middle and Late Woodland contexts on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in order to investigate the interplay of animal use and consumption with traditional ecological knowledge, social interactions, and the localized ecologies of the region. With attention to the nuances of depositional context at each site in our study, we ask whether Woodland period faunal assemblages along these coastlines only reflect the similarities and differences among local environments or whether they are also indicative of a more integrated pattern of traditional ecological knowledge and cultural preference that transcends the local.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Recent Considerations of Coastal Subsistence Practices in the Southeastern USA

Keywords

Spatial Coverage