Characterizing constellations of practice in Pensacola shell-tempered pottery along the northern Gulf Coast (1150-1700 CE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas, Production Practices and Social Networks from Multilevel Angles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ceramic petrography is commonly used to investigate the technological choices embedded within constellations of practice that archaeologists recognize as large-scale collective identities such as the Mississippian cultural tradition. Using several lines of evidence, we aim to more accurately characterize the variation in shell tempered pottery of lesser-known communities living along the northern Gulf Coast, specifically the Pensacola Mississippian variant. These communities retained coastal lifeways while simultaneously making choices about which inland Mississippian traditions they would adopt. Here, we present the preliminary results of a petrographic analysis (n=33) from the type site of the Pensacola region, Bottle Creek (1BA2), which is located in the Upper Mobile-Tensaw Delta of Alabama. Bottle Creek has previously shown connection to more inland communities through bulk chemical analyses and macro-level identification of similar potting traditions. Further examination of variation in the size, frequency, and sorting of the different shell types used both inform our understanding of the unique choices made by Indigenous communities living along the coast, as well as provide comparative data for enhancing a machine-learning model aimed at expanding the ceramic sample that can be characterized beyond the subset of sherds that are analyzed petrographically (see Rutkoski et al., SAA 2025).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas, Production Practices and Social Networks from Multilevel Angles

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51051