From Distributed to Place-Based Communities: The Ceramic Social Geography of Late Archaic Stallings Societies

Summary

North America’s oldest pottery-making societies belonged to the Late Archaic Stallings culture of Georgia and South Carolina. The basic culture history of Stallings archaeology is relatively well-known; however, the types and scales of communities constructed by Stallings people, along with the nature of the connections between them, remain poorly understood. This poster presents preliminary results of research that uses compositional data from Stallings fiber-tempered pottery to investigate the transition from the loosely bounded “distributed communities” of Early Stallings (5150–4100 cal B.P.) times to the more fixed and formalized “place-based communities” characteristic of Classic Stallings (4100–3800 cal B.P.). To this end, more than 400 pottery samples from 13 sites along the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers were subjected to neutron activation analysis (NAA), while half of those were also thin-sectioned and examined petrographically. These pottery data were then compared to that from a series of clay reference samples to infer patterns of mobility and interaction over the course of the Late Archaic period. The primary goal of these analyses was to evaluate the extent to which Classic Stallings social formations were constrained and/or enabled by the Early Stallings arrangements that preceded them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• People, Pottery, and Petrography: Recent research in ceramic petrography

Keywords

Spatial Coverage