The 63rd annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference was held at the Doubletree Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, from November 8-11, 2006. With 177 papers packed into two and a half days, it was impossible to attend all. Below are reports about some:
*Jerald Milanich, the wizard of Florida archaeology.
*The War Woman of the King Site.
*A "sacred precinct" at Etowah.
Jerald T. Milanich, the wizard of Florida archaeology
One highlight of the 2006 meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference was a 10-speaker symposium in honor of the work and legacy of Jerry Milanich of the University of Florida (Milanich is shown above, right, with Jeffrey Mitchem, left).
Milanich officially retired on Jan. 1, 2003, but has been working half of each year since then, and now lives part of the year in New York City.
“Although his employment with the University of Florida will end in December 2007, there is no way that Jerry will fade into the sunset,” said Jeffrey Mitchem, a former student of Milanch’s who organized the symposium and who’s now with the Arkansas Archaeological Survey.
Milanich is still actively writing and researching. “Jerry’s retirement will certainly be the end of an era, and there’s nobody who can adequately replace him or match his record of accomplishments. His name will forever be associated with archaeology in Florida.”
Mitchem noted that the papers presented during the symposium demonstrated the breadth of Milanich’s influence in contemporary North American archaeology. His students have spread out across the country and also worked on other continents.
“All of us have been influenced by Jerry’s scholarship and his subtle teaching by example,” Mitchem said.
Mitchem reviewed Milanich’s career. Born in 1945, Milanich grew up in Florida. After starting at the University of Florida in 1963, he began his study of anthropology, where he got hooked on archaeology while on an archaeological field school in 1966 at the Fort Center site near Lake Okeechobee.
Milanich’s mentor was the renowned Southeastern archaeologist Charles H. Fairbanks. Milanich’s completed a masters thesis on the Alachua tradition in 1968 and went on to complete a dissertation summarizing and redefining the Deptford culture in the Southeast, Mitchem said. Milanich completed his PhD in 1971, spent a year at the Smithsonian Institution and then joined the University of Florida as an assistant professor of anthropology in 1973. Two years later he became an assistant curator at the Florida State Museum on the university’s campus, where he rose to curator and twice chaired the museum’s department of anthropology.
“Throughout all of this, Jerry’s career has primarily focused on Florida archaeology, carrying out research in nearly every part of the state,” Mitchem said. “Involving students in every project, he’s been particularly successful in nurturing the symbiotic relationship between teacher and student so that both benefit from the collaboration.”
As of 2003, Milanich had served on more than 105 completed graduate committees, chairing about a third of them
Mitchem noted how Milanich was consistently able to come up with funding for graduate students. “Has been award nearly $2 million in grants and contracts since 1970, and most of these funds went to support graduate students,” Mitchem noted.
“All of the participants in today’s session have experienced Jerry’s financial support. And he always makes it look so easy,” Mitchem said.
Milanich has published more than 20 books on Florida and surrounding areas, including “Florida Archaeology” with his co-author, his mentor Charles Fairbanks, “with its hideous green cover,” Mitchem noted. “This book immediately became a standard reference on Florida prehistory and archaeology when it was published in 1980,” Mitchem said. Many of these books contained contributions by students, reflecting Milanich’s role as a teacher and mentor, Mitchem said.
“As Jerry noted in an article a few years ago, an archaeologist’s lasting professional contribution rests not on excavation, but on curation and publication,” Mitchem said. “He has certainly taken this dictum to heart, using the results of his own research and that of his students to create important syntheses of all aspects of Florida prehistory as well as early Spanish contact and the mission period.”
Milanich has also published about 100 articles and book chapters. Numerous students’ dissertations have been much improved by Milanich’s comments and suggestions, Mitchem said.
Most archaeological writings are based on some extent on excavation, and Milanich has directed some of the most important excavation projects in peninsular Florida, such as the large Weeden Island period McKeithen site, Mitchem said. These provided the opportunity for Milanich’s students to get a wonderful training in field methods, he added.
“I’ve referred to him as the wizard of Florida archaeology, and this is because of the wonderful things he does,” Mitchem said. Milanich guided many students, and also helps behind the scenes in many ways, “sort of like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.”
Mitchem concluded his talk, saying to Milanich, who was in attendance, “Jerry, we salute you,” to a resounding standing ovation from the crowd.
The War Woman of the King Site
A young 16th century Native American woman found buried at the King Site in northwest Georgia may have been a warrior like those known as a “War Woman” by the historic Cherokee.
David Hally of The University of Georgia gave a fascinating report on this possible female warrior in a talk entitled “Archaeological and Historical Evidence for Female Warriors in South Appalachian Mississippian Culture”.
The young woman – believed to have been 25 when she died - had been buried in the habitation zone at the King Site, a Mississippian town on the CoosaRiver west of Rome, Ga., near the Alabama state line. The town was surrounded by a ditch and palisade.
“The mortuary treatment given [the young woman] indicates that she achieved community recognition during her lifetime as a female warrior, a status perhaps not too different from that of a Cherokee War Woman status described in the 18th century European accounts,” Hally said.
She was buried with two large stone blades placed on her chest, one white and the second black. A cluster of 23 triangular projectile points was by her right shoulder. A red ochre stain was next to her. There was also a shell ear pin.
The woman’s grave was excavated in 1992. During subsequent lab analysis it was observed she had a pronounced deformity of her left hip, in which her leg bone was twisted and the knee would have been turned 90 degrees toward the body. “This type of injury is often seen in Third World countries where midwives assist with the delivery of babies,” Hally said. “The injury occurs when the baby is presented as a breach birth and is pulled out by the hip or legs”. Despite the deformity, it’s believed she would have been able to walk and even to run, Hally reported.
During five seasons of excavations, 249 burials were excavated at the King Site. Halley said that his analysis of the burials showed that adult males and adult females often have very different grave goods. Only 15 percent of adult female burials had grave goods, Hally reported. Those with grave goods often had only one type. In contrast, Hally said, 73 percent of adult males had grave goods of four different types and over over a dozen actual items.
Several common types of grave goods occurred exclusively or predominantly with males, such as triangular points, clay pipes, flint knapping kits, stone blades, hematite and antler cylinders.
Two burials, however – including the young woman’s – were exceptions to these generalizations, Hally said. Both had been identified by osteological analysis as female. Both had grave goods artifacts strongly associated with adult males, such points and bifacial blades and hematite in the case of the burial of the possible War Woman. They were the only female burials with male-associated artifacts.
Both burials had been damaged by plowing. Because the osteological evidence was not as strong as he might have wished, and because the mortuary treatment suggested the burials were male, Hally said, he decided to treat the burials as biologically male for his research - up until about five months ago.
Hally went on to describe the role of warfare in the late prehistoric period in the Southeast. Importantly, he said, military prowess was one of the main avenues to social standing. Women served as warriors among the historic Cherokee, and were known as “War Women”.
The points found in large numbers in King Site burials may have had a military role, Hally said. They’re very well made, thin and symmetrical, and very different from the thicker, asymmetrical points typically found in domestic habitations.
Large blades, such as those appearing on Mississippian shell cups and gorgets and those found in the grave of the young woman, may have been used to remove scalps or decapitate enemies.
Blades, points and other artifacts may have been symbolic of warrior grades, Hally said.
Hally said he decided to resolve the issue of the War Woman’s sex and the sex of the other possible woman warrior through DNA analysis. Tests of bone samples yielded evidence that the burial of the suspected young War Woman was indeed female. The samples from the other burial didn’t yield sufficient DNA for analysis.
The anomalous character of the War Woman’s burial is consistent with a Cherokee War Woman, Hally said. Her burial contained artifacts associated with warfare such as points, bifacial blades used in war and hematite, which was applied to bodies and scalps.
The War Woman “may have earned the right to display these symbols by performing the same military feats that were required of males,” Hally said.
“Alternatively, these rights may have been awarded in recognition as her status as a War Woman or a female warrior. The fact that she gained these rights at a much younger age than males typically did and had a deformed hip suggests the latter and that she earned the honor primarily as the result of one impetuous act of military bravery. It is difficult to believe that an individual with a disability such as [the woman’s] would have had the physical ability had would have had the physical ability to be a successful warrior.”
For more information on the King Site, see “The King Site: Continuity and Contact In Sixteenth-Century Georgia,” edited by Robert L. Blakely, The University of Georgia Press, 1988.
A “sacred precinct” discovered at Etowah?
Etowah is one of the largest Mississippian sites in the Southeast, a large six-mound site on the EtowahRiver northwest of Atlanta near the city of Cartersville, Georgia.
During the summers of 2005 and 2006, a team of archaeologists from four universities along with members of the Muscogee [Creek] Nation of Oklahoma and Robert Sharp of The Art Institute of Chicago investigated parts of the site using a variety of remote-sensing equipment.Sharp presented a report at SEAC 2006 on this research that was conducted along with Adam King (South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology), Chet Walker and Clay Schultz (both with the University of Texas, Austin), Kent Reilly (Texas State University), and Johnnie Jacobs and Tim Thompson (both with the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma).
While much is known about Etowah, “Etowah has never received a thorough, systematic examination,” Sharp noted. “So the purpose of the 2005-2006 Etowah remote sensing project was to see what else we could learn about Etowah and to undertake that with a variety of instruments looking at many different aspects including the plaza, the palisade and the ditch. We wanted to know about the village area west of the mound and in particular Mound A, which has never been excavated.”
The researchers employed a variety of non-invasive equipment, including a fluxgate gradiometer, two different ground penetrating radar devices, and a cesium magnetometer. All the instruments were used throughout the site.
On Mound A, “naturally we hoped to find some evidence of a chief’s dwelling, for this is what we thought we knew about Mound A, that that’s where the chief lived,” Sharp said.
And in fact they may have. Sharp reported that based on the evidence the researchers found, they have the confidence to propose that the top of Mound A held an architectural complex of at least four structures, in addition to other features.Structure 1, the largest of the four, is about 18 meters square with a largely open, undivided interior. A portico may have been on one side.
Structure 2 is rectangular and about 10 by 12 meters, “about twice the size of a conventional residence in the village,” Sharp said.The third is a 6 by 8 meter rectangular structure.“We also believe we have found a fourth structure lying adjacent to Structure 2,” Sharp reported. It is about 15 meters square with a hearth in the center, he said.
Several other features have been located, including screens or walls.Different instruments produced remarkably similar images of the summit of Mound A, Sharp said.
“So then what do we know? We know that there’s much more than a chief’s dwelling on the summit of Mound A,” Sharp reported. The researchers propose the summit of Mound A was “a sacred precinct combining buildings of various sizes, some of them quite large, community structures and dwellings, clearly not simple residences, and other features perhaps to shield the summit of the mound from view from the plaza below while still providing a place from which one could be seen, a portico in front of an immense ceremonial structure.”
Sharp concluded by reviewed some analogous structures found on other Mississippian mounds at sites around the Southeast.
