Time and Temporality in Tombigbee River drainage during the AD 1300s–1600s

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Building a Better Chronology for Fifteenth–Eighteenth-Century Eastern North America through Radiocarbon Dating and Collaborative Research Agendas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Advances in radiocarbon dating and the widespread use of Bayesian modeling are providing increased resolution to our dating of archaeological sites and assemblages. This trend has been important for achieving greater refinements in calendrical time, but it does not inherently lead to a greater understanding of experiential time. We explore these distinctions with our research in the Tombigbee drainage of Mississippi and Alabama, which has focused on the interval of AD 1000-1600. This work is part of a larger study of the Vacant Quarter depopulation phenomenon in mid-continental North America during the AD 1300s–1500s. Our Bayesian analyses of 85 dates from a number of sites provide estimates of key events in the Tombigbee’s settlement history and contribute to an understanding of how the occupation and abandonment of these agricultural communities unfolded. From a calendrical perspective, these results reflect the dynamism and volatility of settlement histories, stirred to a large degree by ongoing migrations. From an experiential perspective, the temporality of these communities was established through citational practices and memory-work mediated through the built environment and landscape. We close our presentation with reflections on the middle-range research required to bridge calendrical and experiential frameworks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Building a Better Chronology for Fifteenth–Eighteenth-Century Eastern North America through Radiocarbon Dating and Collaborative Research Agendas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50430