Southeastern Archaeology (Archaeology in North America)

Magnetometry data and excavations in 2015 identified a linear palisade adjacent to the largest mound at Singer-Moye — a Mississippian Period site located in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley. We excavated two separate units, the first to ascertain if the palisade continued beyond a clear termination point in the magnetometer data, and the second to determine if it intersected with a perpendicular palisade segment identified in earlier excavation. Our results indicate that the palisade extends beyond the magnetometer results but does not intersect with the second palisade, suggesting that the two palisades were not contemporaneous.

This report presents the results of archaeological data recovery of two sites, 38SU136/137 and 38SU141, in Sumter County, South Carolina. The sites are located in the Coastal Plain Province, 50 kilometers east of the Fall Line and along the eastern edge of the Wateree to Big Bay sand sheet. Situated near the northwest edge of Big Bay, one of the largest Carolina Bays in South Carolina, these sites offer important new information on the geomorphic setting, chronology, settlement strategies, site structure, and social organization of local prehistoric groups.

Data recovery at sites 38SU136/137 and 38SU141 reconfirmed and elaborated on several broad themes of prehistoric settlement systems around Big Bay. First, the earliest cultural systems in the region (i.e., Paleoindian, Hardaway- Dalton, Side-Notched horizon, and Palmer I) appear to have been organized as high technology foragers, incorporating both high residential mobility and high logistical mobility. The territorial ranges of these systems would appear to have been very extensive, including both the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain. During this period the Big Bay ecotone may have been occupied during both warm and cold seasons. During the warm season the region appears to have been exploited primarily by high technology forager residences of still unknown population sizes, and during the winter logistically organized hunting parties visited the area taking advantage of seasonal deer aggregations. By the later half of the Early Archaic period (i.e., the Palmer phase), settlement in the region appears to have shifted toward more generalized forager residences with fewer residential moves. A new finding of the present data recovery is the positive identification of late Early Archaic multi-residence occupations. It is suggested that these occupations are associated with the Palmer II/III phase(s), but diagnostic projectile points were not recovered from any of these floors in spite of the large tool assemblages. These residences are primarily comprised of non-local cherts and rhyolite originating respectively in the Savannah and/or Edisto River valleys and in Fall Line/Piedmont localities north of Big Bay. At present this pattern is interpreted as evidence of long-distance residential moves in and out of the Big Bay area within a seasonal round. This would suggest that late Early Archaic settlement systems were organized across drainages and encompassed extremely large territories. Multihousehold forager residences continue to be the norm in the following Middle Holocene period. A greater emphasis on local raw materials suggests that territories may have been confined to the Wateree-Santee drainage, and possibly to the Fall-Line and upper Coastal Plain region.

During the ceramic Late Archaic, seasonally dispersed populations who occupied the area only very briefly exploited the Big Bay ecotone. Based on the evidence gathered by the current project and the results of other studies conducted on the Coastal Plain, it is inferred that the Thom’s Creek occupation of the Big Bay ecotone included dispersed single households of possible nuclear family composition. Other site types may emerge from continued investigation ofthe sites ringing the bay, but at the present time, only debris representative of nuclear family short-term residences has been discovered. Low intensity, dispersed utilization of the Coastal Plain uplands appears to be a common trend in Thom’s Creek settlement systems throughout South Carolina. Traditionally, upland utilization has been interpreted as involving a fall migration of groups into the uplands from more permanent and aggregated settlements situated along the coast and major river systems. While this pattern has been historically documented in more recent ethnographic accounts, there is no firm basis (either archeologically or environmentally) for assuming this pattern in the distant prehistoric past. Another possible explanation for dispersed short-term residences in the uplands is that they are due to partially mobile populations, all of whose subsistence-settlement round is contained within the upland environment. The low frequency of re-occupation on the same exact location season after season suggests that social units may have been fairly fluid and changing during this period and that exploitation of the uplands was not rigidly structured by land tenure or other mechanisms for determining property rights. During the Middle Woodland period there appears to have been an increased utilization of the uplands, perhaps resulting in small semi-permanent residences of seasonally sedentary hamlets. Finally, during the Late Woodland and early Mississippian periods, dispersed and mobile multi-household units that established camps or seasonal settlements in places of resource abundance exploited the ecotone. This may have required a number of brief stays and abandonment of locations prior to settling into a site with the proper resource composition and balance.

Identification and recording of information from the Sandbar Village site (40DV36) was initiated between 1967 and 1974 by avocational archaeologist John T. Dowd. Dowd conducted surface collections during that period as well as limited test excavations in 1969. Additional test excavations were completed at the site in 1989 by Tennessee Division of Archaeology staff, and in 1990 by Vanderbilt University Archaeological Field School students. Here, we summarize the results of all documented artifacts, structures, and features from the site, along with a series of radiocarbon dates. Although Sandbar Village was previously interpreted as a Mississippian hamlet, we suggest that the apparent contradictions created by the presence of several artifacts usually associated with larger Mississippian communities can be resolved by understanding the site as a remnant of a more substantial settlement. Alternatively, we propose the (then) contemporary Cumberland River channel was located to the south of 40DV36, and that Sandbar Village represents a peripheral section of a large town (and possible mound center) that includes what is currently known as the Widemeier site (40DV9) located directly across the river.

Our reliance on diagnostic biface types to assess site chronology has not diminished, despite appreciable improvements in the accuracy and reliability of radiocarbon dating. However, chronological information in the most widely used typological reference for the eastern US (Justice [1987]) has not been updated in three decades, and provides estimates of types’ age ranges from outdated or incomplete chronological data. Using Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates from sites throughout the eastern US, we refined the age ranges for 17 temporal diagnostics extending from the Paleoindian through the terminal Late Archaic periods in the Lower Mid-South. The results are compared with estimated ranges as provided by Justice.

This is the first volume to bring together archaeology, ethnography, and art history in the analysis of pre-Columbian pottery. While previous research on ceramics has been divided among these three disciplines, this volume shows that integrating approaches provides new understandings of many different aspects of Ancient American societies. 

Contributors from a variety of backgrounds in these fields explore what ceramics can reveal about ancient social dynamics, trade, ritual, politics, innovation, iconography, and regional styles. Essays identify supernatural and humanistic beliefs through formal analysis of Lower Mississippi Valley "great serpent" effigy vessels, costume and dress in Moche art, and Ecuadorian depictions of the human figure. They discuss the cultural identity conveyed by imagery such as Andean head motifs, and they analyze symmetry in designs from locations including the American Southwest. Chapters also take diachronic approaches—methods that track change over time—to ceramics from Mexico’s Tarascan State and the Valley of Oaxaca, as well as from Maya and Toltec societies. 

This volume provides a much-needed multidisciplinary synthesis of current scholarship on Ancient American ceramics. It is a model of how different research perspectives can together illuminate the relationship between these material artifacts and their broader cultural contexts.

"In its broad topical and geographical scope, this volume demonstrates the many ways scholars can productively study ancient ceramics and the diversity of questions their studies can address."—Christopher A. Pool, coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology

"Expansive in scope, including cases spanning millennia and traversing North, Central, and South America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays demonstrates that ceramic objects, all too often marginalized as minor arts or the fodder of stratigraphic seriation, reward close and deep study."—Bryan R. Just, author of Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom

Built in 1566 by Spanish conquistador Juan Pardo, Fort San Juan is the earliest known European settlement in the interior United States. Located at the Berry site in western North Carolina, the fort and its associated domestic compound stood near the Native American town of Joara, whose residents sacked the fort and burned the compound after only eighteen months.

Drawing on archaeological evidence from architectural, floral, and faunal remains, as well as newly discovered accounts of Pardo's expeditions, this volume explores the deterioration in Native American–Spanish relations that sparked Joara's revolt and offers critical insight into the nature of early colonial interactions.

""Investigations at Chucalissa (40SY1) in Shelby County,
Tennessee, have been instrumental in establishing Mississippian
period chronology for southwestern Tennessee and
much of the surrounding region. Excavations conducted in
2003 produced a suite of new radiocarbon dates that has
provided a refined developmental lineage of occupations in
West Tennessee and northwestern Mississippi, while geophysical
investigations in 2011 have clarified our understanding
of the late prehistoric occupation of the site and
validated suggestions of distinctive mound architecture in a
region extending over a large portion of the Southeast.""

Magnetometer data from Singer-Moye revealed anomalies that resemble structures previously identified at other Mississippian sites. Ten square meters of excavation were placed so as to investigate these anomalies. We encountered two structural features: a central hearth and a line of three post molds. The presence of a dense midden layer above the eastern half of the structure suggests post-abandonment refuse deposition. These findings contribute insights into the use-life of structures and residential areas at Singer-Moye, contributing to the small corpus of residential data available for the prehistoric lower Chattahoochee River valley.

This paper presents new data on the initial settlement of the southeastern region of South America, based on recent research conducted at the Tigre archaeological site (K87), located in the middle Uruguay River basin, near the Uruguayan border with Brazil and Argentina. The current archaeological excavations carried out in this open-air site confirmed that it is a multicomponent site. A new series of 20 radio-carbon dates refined the chronology of recurrent human occupations at this site during the late Pleis-tocene (13,260 cal BP), the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (12,920e11,750 cal BP), the early Holocene (11,300e9300 cal BP), and the late Holocene (1180 cal BP), demonstrating the strategic importance of this site during the prehistory of the region. In this paper, we describe the archaeological and stratigraphic contexts of the site, and analyze the artifact assemblage of the early components. Tigre points recovered from the archaeological excavations confirm that this is a Paleoamerican point design that circulated in the region between 12,000e11,100 cal BP. In addition, associated with these points, bifaces, fractured preforms and a type of asymmetric biface with a crescent/half moon shape were recovered. These " crescent artifacts " show a high standardization in form, size and knapping technique, which is described in this paper. Finally, we discuss the geographic distribution of the Tigre points, the blade technology present in the Uruguay River basin, the presence of prestige artifacts during the settlement, and the chronology of the " Umbu tradition " of southern Brazil in relation to the previous and recent data obtained in the Tigre site.