Detecting the Path: The Usefulness of Lidar in the Upper Central Tombigbee River Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past few decades, lidar has been used to reveal the extent and complexity of cultural landscapes in different world areas. The Mississippi period (AD 1000–1550) is poorly understood in the Upper Central Tombigbee River Valley, especially as a broader Mississippian understanding of these settlement data come from Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway surveys and excavations of the 1970s This paper compares the ability and limitations of lidar in the Upper Central Tombigbee Valley, first by testing against reported Mississippian sites in the region, then by considering the possibility to pair lidar with Indigenous knowledges in north-central Mississippi. By braiding together new settlement data, Indigenous knowledges, and current technology, we can detect the paths of the past, contextualizing a multidimensional landscape through a variety of lenses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41593.0