Southeastern Archaeology News

The meeting covered topics ranging from 16,000 B.P. to 1600 A.D.

With as many as six papers underway at any given time, it was impossible for your correspondent to hear but a fraction of the papers given.

Below are photos from the meeting and reports on a few of the most notable presentations.

Dr. Kenneth Sassaman of the University of Florida (http://web.anthro.ufl.edu/faculty/Sassaman.shtml) on November 6, 2009, announced the launch of the Lower Suwanee Archaeological Survey.

"This is a bit of a coming out party for a new project for the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology," Sassaman told the early morning crowd.

"There's a good bit of serendipity here. Whenever I launch into a project it's usually instigated by some happenstance rather than by grand planning. But the serendipity that led to this particular project has caused me to think about long-term investments in large-scale projects. And the element of serendipity was the fortunate gift, a gift that was given to us by Hyatt and Cynthia Brown of Ormond Beach [Florida], to establish an endowment for Florida archaeology."

"So having these funds on an annual basis of course gives the opportunity for creating a long-term, large-scale project," Sassaman said. "And the criteria that I had in mind in thinking about something like this was, first of all, really think big, so think long-term in terms of at least a decade if not several decades of work, large scale, a big piece of geography that would provide a lot of opportunities for research and comparative studies and so forth, really the public service need of working with an agency, either federal or state, that had management needs in a big piece of geography that had archaeological resources."

"And then - I guess this was a mid-life crisis thing -I really wanted to start a project that actually could provide archaeological  information relevant to contemporary challenges like climate change, sea-level rise, things like that. And then lastly, and it was consistent with the endowment, that it be a big long-term project that would have great opportunities for graduate students to plug in and to develop their own careers, to develop their own research."

"So what I settled on after talking with a lot of folks and thinking about a lot of opportunities was the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge and the adjacent Cedar Key National Wildlife Refuge."

Sassaman showed maps of the area to be covered in the "Big Bend" of Florida's eastern Gulf coast, covering 30 linear miles of coast line. The area has had intermittent archaeological investigation, but nothing sustained, he said.  "Certainly the refuges themselves don't have the resources to do what the government would like them to do."

"This is an opportunity here to really engage in long-term research that will provide lots of opportunities for different types of student research as well as providing these management resources for the federal government," Sassaman said.

Sassaman then presented details on the geomorphology/geology of the Suwannee delta. The area contains many marsh islands and sink holes. Of great importance to prehistoric and modern residents of the area are expansive shore-parallel oyster reefs. "What we're looking here for archaeologically is a lot of sites that are being eroded actively by the sea today. Boat wake is another factor as well."

Another bit of serendipity, Sassaman said, is a local collector who was concerned about sites eroding. He had filled up his house with artifacts collected repeatedly and carefully from the same 26 sites. He contacted Sassaman and donated two truckloads of archaeological materials. "He's a really good collector in the sense that he went back repeatedly to the same sites that were being eroded. Had he not collected this stuff systematically, it would have been washed out or collected by somebody else." The collector kept everything separated by provenience. "He was non-discriminatory. He picked up everything," Sassaman said.

"It's a foothold. We haven't inventoried the stuff yet, but I think that when we do we will start seeing some broad-scale patterning of the types and how they play out geographically in space and time. Chronology building is going to be an important part of this," Sassaman said.

"Our strategy is three-fold," Sassaman said. One is rescue. Go the most vulnerable sites and try to get some data before they're gone.

The second aspect of the long-term research is reconnaissance. "This is the one that is the real long-term investment. It's going to take a long time to do this work. I projected out 30 years for 100 percent coverage."

Finally, there are a lot of questions that will be driven by students themselves, who will take the project into the future. "Keep working this until this is a well-understood archaeological area."

Sassaman said he personally wants to learn how to relate coastal archaeological records to the modern challenges of sea level rise.

Recently, the threatened destruction of a stone mound in Oxford, Alabama, refocused attention on these enigmatic native structures found through the Southeastern United States as well as many other parts of the country (Do a Google search for the term "Indian mound Oxford Alabama" to see the dozens of posts on the controversy). Archaeologists hired to examine the site found nothing significant there. Following the outcry, officials decided to preserve the natural hill on which the mound sits.

Dr. Richard A. Krause (http://web.as.ua.edu/ant/name/Richard%20A./Krause/) gave a passionate and thoughtful call-to-action on why such sites are significant and worthy of preservation.

"My comments are a response to a recent controversy engendered by the designation of a stone mound near Oxford, Alabama, as insignificant," Krause told the audience. "Now, I worked on stone mounds before many people here were born. I worked on stone mounds in the 1960s in Kansas.  And I have emphathy with those who deal with them. First of all they're difficult to describe. They're difficult to excavate. They contain such a variable amount and kind of portable artifacts that you don't really have much in the way of anticipation."

"This controversy led me to wonder, how would I go about, what bodies of evidence would I want to make a reasonable significance claim. I came up with the following. First, I'd want a detailed map. Second, I would want a cross-section of a portion, better yet, a half that was detailed. Third, I would want a detailed description of any content. And fourth, perhaps most important, I would want a summary of what we know or think we know about similar phenomena in the United States. With these criteria in mind, I accessed the online report produced by Alabama Museum of Natural History's Office of Archaeological Research, known as OAR. I read it. I looked for the map. There wasn't one. I looked for the detailed cross-section, there wasn't one. For a description of the portable artifacts there was the claim that there was a late Woodland sherd. What kind? I don't know. Yet a claim of lack of significance was made. What about that summary of the temporal and spatial distribution of stone mounds and related phenomena? What the report gave me there was a pot-boiler description of North American archaeology and Paleo Indian, Archaic, Woodland."

Krause discussed  some stone mounds that have been found that, he said, document the first and earliest evidence of the fusion of two elements that are very important  to understanding Native American history, the fusion of mortuary ritualism with mound building.

Krause gave a brief description of what's known about stone, earthen/stone and earthen mounds found in North America. He discussed their geographical clustering. Some don't contain anything, but others contain human remains and some contain burial chambers. "I would venture to say, though, that the majority of stone and earth and earthen/stone tumuli in North America that date from 2,000 B.C. to 1000 A.D., the majority do contain human remains, the majority do reflect the joining of mortuary ritualism with mound building." Their temporal and spatial distribution is also "errily similar" to the spatial and temporal distribution of food production, he noted. Along with food production came social stratification. This may have been the well-spring of social stratification.

"Could not the fusion of mortuary ritualism with mound building have provided the germ that later flowered into Mississippian? Why not? Think about it. What do you do when you build a mound? Harvest and organize community labor." In addition, this leads to durable artifacts being converted into consumable artifacts when artifacts are turned into grave goods. When they're offered to the dead in mortuary ritualism, that takes these artifacts out of circulation, stimulating demand for new artifacts. "The net effect of both of these would have been to intensify production and exchange, both locally and on a broader scale."

"Could it be we have here the seeds here that later flowered?" Krause asked. "I think we ought to consider, we ought to entertain the possibility, and that should go into our calculations about significance."

Krause concluded with a discussion of how by building stone mounds, Native Americans sacralized portions of the landscape, converting portions of the landscape into the equivalent of shrines. "These shrines have a 1,000-years-longer history than any Christian, Buddhist or Islamic shrine I know of. I leave you with a question: Shouldn't we treat them with due respect? I'll make the claim that should we fail to do so, that it will reflect poorly on us."

Krause's talk was met with an enthusiastic applause by the audience.

Dr. Ken Sassaman, left, with Dr. David Anderson at SEAC 2009 in Mobile, Ala.

Recent developments in Southeastern Archaeology

David Anderson of The University of Tennessee and Ken Sassaman of the University of Florida prepared a wonderful overview of recent work in Southeastern archaeology. The presentation, delivered by Anderson, discussed 10 areas where interesting things are happening and suggested directions for years to come.

"In recent decades Southeastern archaeology has undergone profound transformation," Anderson said. From a small group, the Southeastern Archaeological Conference has grown to 1,000 members. Meetings such as the one in Mobile regularly draw 500 or more attendees.

"This paper briefly explores some  of the new and exciting trends that have been occurring in Southeastern prehistoric archaeology in recent years , touching on some of the major discoveries, changes in interpretation, and ongoing debates."

Many more topics than the 10 chosen could have been discussed, Anderson said. "We ask those listening to tell us which ones you think are the most important from your perspective, especially any not discussed here. Ken and I are preparing a book-length treatment on this subject for submission next summer as part of the SAA [Society for American Archaeology] Press's 75^th anniversary series on recent developments in American archaeology. We want to portray these developments as accurately and as fully as possible. Towards this end, we want your input via email and conversation or by sending us PDFs and references."

Anderson then enumerated some of the high points in recent work:

1. Exploring the continental shelf.

"When people first arrived in the Southeast is not currently known, but underwater archaeology in the eastern Gulf of Mexico by archaeologists like Mike Faught and his colleagues has documented sites and assemblages from the middle Holocene back to late Pleistocene times along the submerged channel of the Ocilla River using remote sensing as well as hands-on exploration," Anderson said. "The past two years a team of researchers led by Jim Adovasio  and Andy Hemmings have been conducting underwater exploration of Clovis and Pre-Clovis shoreline, river channels and karstic features in the eastern Gulf back to the late glacial maximum  some 21,000 years ago. This work makes us realize that our understanding of early settlement will never be complete until we can document what was occurring in those vast areas of continental shelf lost to sea level rise."

2. New work on Clovis.

"Thanks to aggressive interest in Paleo Indian sites and artifacts, more primary attribute data on early diagnostics has been systematically compiled in the Southeast than in any other part of America. Fluted points, preforms and blade cores occur widely over the region, and it is clear that by 13,000 years ago  large numbers of artifacts and hence presumably people were present, leading some to suggest that Clovis may have originated in the Southeast," Anderson said.

3. Late Paleo Indian and early Archaic research.

4. Mid/late Archaic complexity and diversity.

Much of the recent interest on the development of cultural complexity in the archaic stems from the discovery of middle Archaic mounds in Lower Mississippi valley. The work of researchers at Watson Brake, Frenchmen's Bend and other mound complexes "has been truly transformational, contributing to a growing body of evidence for monumental construction among hunter gatherers worldwide," Anderson said.

5. New work on shell rings and middens.

6. New approaches to site integration.

7. Information management.

"Anyone attempting to keep up with the regional literature knows that there has been an information explosion in recent decades, much of it directly attributable to federal and state environmental and historic preservation legislation," Anderson said. "This has led to a massive increase in field work and reporting, reflected in the number of sites recorded in the Southeast , which have jumped from around 15,000 in 1970 to 180,000 in 1994 to somewhere approaching half a million today."

"Compiling and using site and collection data beyond the state level is still in its infancy, however, and will require a lot of work to reconcile the reporting differences, but this is something that will occur in the next few decades."

8. The remote sensing revolution.

"For those of us old enough to remember when we had to dig to know what was below the ground surface, the widespread adoption of remote sensing in Southeastern archaeology is unquestionably a revolution," Anderson said. "We are now able to see, at least where soil conditions are acceptable, subsurface features up to entire village plans without the need for large-area excavations. At sites that are protected, . . . remote sensing precludes the need to excavate and hence destroy large areas. In cases where sites are threatened, it allows us to target particular areas or features. . . .It has expanded our scale of analysis from small block units to larger areas and where villages were present, from households to communities. Remote sensing is now regarded as an essential first step in field research."

9. Climate change research.

"How human societies of the past responded to changing climate has, not surprisingly in an era of global warming, become something of a hot topic," Anderson said. ". . .Archaeological research has much to contribute to policy issues related to climate change and sea level rise."

10. Theoretical diversity.

"We really would appreciate feedback on this," Anderson told the audience, "specifically on what you think we should be talking about."

Other possible areas include:

1. Iconography

2. Absolute dating

3. Origins of agriculture

4. Colonial encounters

5. Experimental archaeology

6. Engaging Native peoples

Anderson noted that his and Sassaman's review make it clear that "Southeastern archaeology is a vibrant area of study with research proceeding in multiple directions and major unresolved challenges."