Incipient Pottery Practices and Divergent Complexities in the Late Archaic Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Pottery technology has long played a central role in evolutionary narratives of early complex societies, most often through its perceived link to other cultural benchmarks such as sedentism, farming, and regionalization. Archaeological research over the past few decades, however, has largely discredited simplistic and monolithic accounts of pottery origins, revealing instead a remarkable diversity of motivations, material conditions, and historical consequences related to its adoption across different contexts. This paper examines incipient pottery practices in the American Southeast, where a series of fiber-tempered traditions appeared at around 5,000 years ago among complex hunter-gatherer societies occupying the coastlines and river valleys of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Recently, compositional analyses (via NAA and petrography) were conducted of early fiber-tempered pottery from the Savannah and St. Johns River valleys with the aim of better understanding the structure and intraregional interactions of early potting communities within the two regions. Despite the obvious relatedness of the technologies involved, our results point to wide regional divergences in the manner and pace in which early pottery was incorporated into existing cultural frameworks, the material and social functions it performed, and its long-term impact on the societies involved.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25121