Books by Zackary Gilmore
Challenging traditional archaeological narratives that portray hunter-gatherers as peoples withou... more Challenging traditional archaeological narratives that portray hunter-gatherers as peoples without history and Archaic period shell mounds as mere accumulations of food waste, this volume presents the eventful social history that unfolded at one of the largest and most elaborate shell mound complexes in the southeastern U.S. Zackary Gilmore employs a novel theoretical perspective that approaches shell mounds and related places as emergent historical processes, punctuated by countless social and material gatherings. Using this perspective, he draws on extensive depositional evidence, along with data related to the technology and provenance of early pottery to identify the kinds and scales of gatherings that transpired at the Silver Glen complex in Florida’s St. Johns River valley.
Gilmore demonstrates that Late Archaic Silver Glen hosted repeated large-scale social gatherings that attracted people and pottery from throughout peninsular Florida for purposes of feasting and monument construction. These big mound-centered gatherings were composed of countless smaller ones in the form of individual shell deposits, features, and artifacts, each with their own connection to other times, places, people, and traditions. Over time, these multiscalar gathering events helped to transform Silver Glen into a widely influential place of ritual and remembrance for many of the region’s otherwise dispersed hunter-gatherer groups.
Gilmore offers a revealing account of Silver Glen and shows that the historical trajectories of hunter-gatherers, like those of farming and industrial societies, are ultimately determined not by evolutionary principles or ecological imperative but rather by the contingent encounters and decisions of real in specific contexts.
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Papers by Zackary Gilmore
Southeastern Archaeology, 2024
Tick Island Incised (TII) is a relatively rare variety of Late Archaic fiber-tempered pottery fou... more Tick Island Incised (TII) is a relatively rare variety of Late Archaic fiber-tempered pottery found across sections of central and northern peninsular Florida. The striking stylistic divergences of TII from other Orange pottery types have led multiple researchers to invoke foreign influences or migrations to account for its appearance. This paper presents newly collected data on TII vessels from the Silver Glen complex (8LA1/8MR123) and related sites along the St. Johns River and northern Gulf Coast. These data, which represent the most detailed information yet collected on the technology, style, composition, and spatiotemporal distribution of TII pottery, are used to address numerous published speculations regarding the type's timing, origin, and cultural meaning. This research supports the idea that TII's aberrant style, which features symbolically powerful sinistral or left-opening spirals, can be explained as an example of skeuomorphism linked to preexisting lightning whelk shell cups. It further indicates that TII appeared during a particularly volatile time during the Late Archaic period and that its use and deposition in ritualized contexts may have been part of a deliberate effort to intervene in ongoing historical processes and mediate their impacts.
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Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2021
Along the geographic edges of regional populations lies latent potential for innovation and chang... more Along the geographic edges of regional populations lies latent potential for innovation and change accruing from interactions with those beyond the edges. This arguably was the case among some of the first pottery-making communities of the American Southeast. Centuries of interactions between these mobile communities and those beyond the geographic distribution of early pottery in the Savannah River valley culminated in places of permanent residence and ritual gathering at the overlapping edges of settlement ranges. Coupled with geochemical data on clay provenance, petrographic thin sections of Stallings fiber-tempered pottery register changes in social affiliation attending the emergence of gathering places. Despite continuity in the use of fiber for temper, innovations in the decoration and form of Stallings pottery coincide with changes in clay provenance and mineral composition to suggest a reorientation away from ancestral ties downriver and towards novel connections upriver. New relationships at the overlapping edges of ancestral lands were brokered at places of settlement and mortuary activity, notably at Stallings Island, which was abandoned for as much as three centuries after pottery appeared in the region. Revealed by petrographic data on the choices potters made in either maintaining or reinventing tradition is perspective on the ceramic social geography of Classic Stallings Culture that has implications for studies of social networks worldwide.
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The oldest pottery technology in North America was innovated by hunter-gatherers belonging to the... more The oldest pottery technology in North America was innovated by hunter-gatherers belonging to the Late Archaic Stallings culture (ca. 5150-3200 cal B.P.) of Georgia and South Carolina. The culture history of Stallings societies is relatively well-known; however, the permanence and scale of Stallings communities, the nature of the connections among them, and the extent to which they changed over time remain poorly understood. In this study, 450 samples Stallings pottery and 24 raw clay resource samples from along the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers were submitted for neutron activation analysis (NAA). The NAA results show a significant shift in the nature of vessel transport at the outset of the Classic Stallings phase (4100–3800 cal B.P.), an interval marked by the appearance of the region's first formalized circular villages and dedicated cemeteries. This shift involved the funneling of pots with carinated rims into a few major middle Savannah River mortuary sites, providing evidence for a novel Stallings sociality that combined relatively localized village life with periodic large-scale ritual gatherings.
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The success of pottery provenance studies is fundamentally dependent upon spatially patterned var... more The success of pottery provenance studies is fundamentally dependent upon spatially patterned variation in the composition of exploited clay resources. Uniformity in clay composition within a region and recognizable differences between regions of interest are essential requirements for determining provenance, but these parameters are difficult to satisfy in study areas such as the coastal plain of the southeastern USA in which chemical and mineralogical variation tend toward continuous gradients. In an attempt to improve the reliability and validity of pottery provenance studies in the area, this research investigates compositional variation in raw clay samples from across Florida and southern Georgia through NAA (n=130) and petrographic analysis (n=99). The results indicate that fourteen distinct compositional regions can be differentiated, ranging from 50 km to 400 km in length. These regions dictate the direction and minimum distance a pottery vessel must have been transported in order to be recognized as nonlocal through compositional analysis. The validity of the proposed compositional regions is supported by previous case studies focused on assemblages from three of the regions. In each case, vessels were transported from other compositional regions more than 100 km away.
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Growing archaeological interest in illuminating human-scale events and experiences in the ancient... more Growing archaeological interest in illuminating human-scale events and experiences in the ancient past has led to increased scrutiny of chronological assumptions based on old and (by today's standards) imprecise radiocarbon databases. One result has been a greater awareness of the need for more numerous and higher quality assays that can be directly linked to the specific events in question. In this paper, a method is described and tested for extracting and directly dating the organic fiber temper characteristic of North America's oldest pottery technology. Multiple extraction techniques are considered, as are a number of chemical pretreatment options. Six pairs of assays on Orange and Stallings vessels from Florida and Georgia are used to demonstrate the veracity of radiocarbon age estimates from fiber temper. In each of these cases, the fiber assay meets or exceeds recently proposed chronometric hygiene standards.
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The Archaeology of Events: Cultural Change and Continuity in the Pre-Columbian Southeast, 2015
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The Archaeology of Events: Cultural Change and Continuity in the Pre-Columbian Southeast, 2015
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Precolumbian Archaeology in Florida: New Approaches to the Appendicular Southeast edited by Asa R. Randall and Neill J. Wallis, 2013
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St. Johns Archaeological Field School 2007-10: Silver Glen Run (8LA1), by Kenneth E. Sassaman, Zackary I. Gilmore, and Asa R. Randall., 2011
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Toyah Phase of Central Texas: Late Prehistoric Economic and Social Processes, edited by Nancy A. Kenmotsu and Doug Boyd, 2011
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Dissertation by Zackary Gilmore
This dissertation examines the role of extralocal aggregation events in hunter-gatherer social dy... more This dissertation examines the role of extralocal aggregation events in hunter-gatherer social dynamics by detailing the history of interaction that transpired at a Late Archaic (ca. 4700 to 3600 cal B.P.) shell mound complex in northeast Florida. Hunter-gatherers have long been evaluated by anthropologists within evolutionary frameworks that emphasize long-term ecological adaptation and downplay the significance of historical contingency. Such perspectives have constrained the types of narratives constructed for Archaic societies in the Southeast and resulted in frequent portrayals of the regional shell mounds as inconsequential accumulations of food waste. I develop an alternative approach that envisions mounds as emergent historical processes punctuated by countless material and social gathering events. I contend that through these gatherings people drew on traditions and memories of the past to forge relationships and communities that would persist into the future.
This approach is applied to the events that unfolded at the Silver Glen complex in the middle St. Johns River valley using three related research strategies. First, I analyze its depositional history, focusing on how the emplacement of various substances and artifacts altered the landscape and structured the relations among different people, places, and times. Next, I discuss techno-stylistic analyses of Orange pottery from the complex (the oldest such technology in Florida) to better understand the types of activities conducted at mound and nonmound contexts. Finally, I employ two sourcing techniques (neutron activation analysis and petrography) to determine the geographic origins of pots and estimate the social scale of the events in which they participated.
The results demonstrate that the mounds at Silver Glen hosted larger-scale, more extravagant social gatherings than other contemporary places. These events included feasting and ritualized deposition, and they attracted diverse people and pots from an area spanning hundreds of kilometers. I argue that by accumulating vessels with distinct affiliations and bundling them together in monumental contexts, the varied constituents gathered at Silver Glen forged enduring relationships centered on periodic mound-centered interactions. I further suggest that the unprecedented scale of these communities was enabled, at least in part, by the appearance of pottery as a preferred medium of long-distance exchange.
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Research Proposals by Zackary Gilmore
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Conference Presentations by Zackary Gilmore
A recent emphasis on “temporal hygiene” has exposed the potential interpretive pitfalls of chrono... more A recent emphasis on “temporal hygiene” has exposed the potential interpretive pitfalls of chronological assumptions based on old and (by today’s standards) imprecise radiocarbon databases. Regarding the Late Archaic Southeast, one of the most important chronological challenges is temporally
situating the development and spread of the region’s earliest pottery technology. Here, a method is outlined for directly dating charred Spanish moss from the fabric of fiber-tempered pottery. The method’s viability is demonstrated with six pairs of AMS assays from Orange and Stallings vessels from Florida and Georgia, and its advantages are discussed in relation to recently established accuracy and precision standards.
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Recent theorizing in materiality emphasizes the ability of things and places to gather various (h... more Recent theorizing in materiality emphasizes the ability of things and places to gather various (human and nonhuman) actors and position them in particular social arrangements (bundles, entanglements, intersections, etc.). The histories of Florida’s Late Archaic mounds are composed of such gathering events. Organizational and scalar transformations in mound-centered gatherings corresponded with the appearance of the region’s earliest pottery technology. Using stylistic and sourcing data (petrographic and NAA), I argue that novel material and social conditions associated with pottery disrupted existing exchange relations and reordered mounding traditions, culminating in the establishment of large-scale festival centers along the St. Johns River.
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Tick Island Incised (TII) pottery, a variety of the fiber-tempered Orange tradition, has confound... more Tick Island Incised (TII) pottery, a variety of the fiber-tempered Orange tradition, has confounded generations of Florida archaeologists. The relative rarity, limited distribution, and striking stylistic departures of this enigmatic type have inspired much speculation regarding possible connections to distant lands and “complex” societies, but there remains an overall dearth of concrete data. Incorporating information from a recently-excavated and uniquely-large TII assemblage, this paper provides an updated overview of the type’s technological and stylistic variation, its spatial and temporal distribution, and its potential Late Archaic historical significance. It includes the first secure TII radiocarbon assays, along with newly-acquired provenance data.
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The function(s) of Late Archaic shell rings in the southeastern U.S. has long been a subject of c... more The function(s) of Late Archaic shell rings in the southeastern U.S. has long been a subject of contentious debate. Using new data from Florida, this paper argues that a combination of petrographic and geochemical methods can help address this issue by determining whether the rings’ fiber-tempered ceramics are composed largely of local materials, as would be expected in a domestic “village” setting, or from various nonlocal materials, as would result from regional-scale gatherings. More generally, it contends that while geochemical techniques become more popular, traditional petrography remains vital to provenance research, especially in regions where geological diversity is relatively low.
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Bell defines ritualization as a historical process whereby some practices are strategically diffe... more Bell defines ritualization as a historical process whereby some practices are strategically differentiated from others in a given cultural context. This paper focuses on the ritualization of depositional practices associated with an assemblage of Late Archaic pits at Silver Glen Run (8LA1) in northeastern Florida. Due to their extraordinary size and elaborate fills, these pits have been interpreted as ritual features, possibly implicated in nearby mound-centered gatherings. Here, I use patterns in the types, quantities, and sequences of pit deposits to identify the specific strategies through which existing depositional traditions were altered and symbolically enhanced in this particular context.
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Recently, a number of extraordinarily large Late Archaic pits were excavated at Silver Glen Run (... more Recently, a number of extraordinarily large Late Archaic pits were excavated at Silver Glen Run (8LA1) in northeast Florida. This paper employs a biographical approach to these hypertrophic features, whose unprecedented scale and complex, highly structured fill indicate a cultural significance beyond that associated with simple immediate-return economics. Micro-scale events in the “lives” of individual pits are discussed in terms of their potential to inform on broader historical processes associated with this dynamic period of Florida’s past. I argue that these massive pits may constitute inverted subterranean shell mounds, and thus a fundamental structural transformation of a prolonged regional tradition.
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Books by Zackary Gilmore
Gilmore demonstrates that Late Archaic Silver Glen hosted repeated large-scale social gatherings that attracted people and pottery from throughout peninsular Florida for purposes of feasting and monument construction. These big mound-centered gatherings were composed of countless smaller ones in the form of individual shell deposits, features, and artifacts, each with their own connection to other times, places, people, and traditions. Over time, these multiscalar gathering events helped to transform Silver Glen into a widely influential place of ritual and remembrance for many of the region’s otherwise dispersed hunter-gatherer groups.
Gilmore offers a revealing account of Silver Glen and shows that the historical trajectories of hunter-gatherers, like those of farming and industrial societies, are ultimately determined not by evolutionary principles or ecological imperative but rather by the contingent encounters and decisions of real in specific contexts.
Papers by Zackary Gilmore
Dissertation by Zackary Gilmore
This approach is applied to the events that unfolded at the Silver Glen complex in the middle St. Johns River valley using three related research strategies. First, I analyze its depositional history, focusing on how the emplacement of various substances and artifacts altered the landscape and structured the relations among different people, places, and times. Next, I discuss techno-stylistic analyses of Orange pottery from the complex (the oldest such technology in Florida) to better understand the types of activities conducted at mound and nonmound contexts. Finally, I employ two sourcing techniques (neutron activation analysis and petrography) to determine the geographic origins of pots and estimate the social scale of the events in which they participated.
The results demonstrate that the mounds at Silver Glen hosted larger-scale, more extravagant social gatherings than other contemporary places. These events included feasting and ritualized deposition, and they attracted diverse people and pots from an area spanning hundreds of kilometers. I argue that by accumulating vessels with distinct affiliations and bundling them together in monumental contexts, the varied constituents gathered at Silver Glen forged enduring relationships centered on periodic mound-centered interactions. I further suggest that the unprecedented scale of these communities was enabled, at least in part, by the appearance of pottery as a preferred medium of long-distance exchange.
Research Proposals by Zackary Gilmore
Conference Presentations by Zackary Gilmore
situating the development and spread of the region’s earliest pottery technology. Here, a method is outlined for directly dating charred Spanish moss from the fabric of fiber-tempered pottery. The method’s viability is demonstrated with six pairs of AMS assays from Orange and Stallings vessels from Florida and Georgia, and its advantages are discussed in relation to recently established accuracy and precision standards.
Gilmore demonstrates that Late Archaic Silver Glen hosted repeated large-scale social gatherings that attracted people and pottery from throughout peninsular Florida for purposes of feasting and monument construction. These big mound-centered gatherings were composed of countless smaller ones in the form of individual shell deposits, features, and artifacts, each with their own connection to other times, places, people, and traditions. Over time, these multiscalar gathering events helped to transform Silver Glen into a widely influential place of ritual and remembrance for many of the region’s otherwise dispersed hunter-gatherer groups.
Gilmore offers a revealing account of Silver Glen and shows that the historical trajectories of hunter-gatherers, like those of farming and industrial societies, are ultimately determined not by evolutionary principles or ecological imperative but rather by the contingent encounters and decisions of real in specific contexts.
This approach is applied to the events that unfolded at the Silver Glen complex in the middle St. Johns River valley using three related research strategies. First, I analyze its depositional history, focusing on how the emplacement of various substances and artifacts altered the landscape and structured the relations among different people, places, and times. Next, I discuss techno-stylistic analyses of Orange pottery from the complex (the oldest such technology in Florida) to better understand the types of activities conducted at mound and nonmound contexts. Finally, I employ two sourcing techniques (neutron activation analysis and petrography) to determine the geographic origins of pots and estimate the social scale of the events in which they participated.
The results demonstrate that the mounds at Silver Glen hosted larger-scale, more extravagant social gatherings than other contemporary places. These events included feasting and ritualized deposition, and they attracted diverse people and pots from an area spanning hundreds of kilometers. I argue that by accumulating vessels with distinct affiliations and bundling them together in monumental contexts, the varied constituents gathered at Silver Glen forged enduring relationships centered on periodic mound-centered interactions. I further suggest that the unprecedented scale of these communities was enabled, at least in part, by the appearance of pottery as a preferred medium of long-distance exchange.
situating the development and spread of the region’s earliest pottery technology. Here, a method is outlined for directly dating charred Spanish moss from the fabric of fiber-tempered pottery. The method’s viability is demonstrated with six pairs of AMS assays from Orange and Stallings vessels from Florida and Georgia, and its advantages are discussed in relation to recently established accuracy and precision standards.