Anthropology

In the summer of 2013 the UGA Field School in Archaeology conducted an archaeological and geophysical survey and preliminary excavations at Raccoon Ridge, in Morgan County. This work began with the premise that our limited knowledge about the spatial configuration of Terminal Late Woodland and Early Mississippian communities constrains our understandings of the cultural frameworks that gave rise to complex organizational structures in the Mississippian period. We employed a combination of controlled surface collection, shovel tests, magnetic susceptibility, and the mapping of soil profiles in order to identify areas of potential precontact settlement remains and place excavation units. Our investigations produced evidence for multiple occupational loci including midden deposits and a combination of Vining and Woodstock phase ceramics. These results are presented here and provide initial insights into local variability in the Late Woodland-Early Mississippian transition in the Georgia Piedmont and an evaluation of the specific methods used vis-à-vis the goals of the project.

To understand the development of complex socio-political phenomena, we need to study not just the origins of central places, but also their emergence. This can be accomplished by taking an historical perspective where we position ourselves before the occurrence we wish to study. Data from the Georgia Archaeological Site File are presented to explore the Late Woodland and Early Mississippian (ca. A.D. -,) settlement landscape which contextualized the emergence of two prominent Mississippian mound centers: Macon Plateau (also known as Ocmulgee) and Etowah. Our results suggest that the Etowah River valley supported a denser population who had formed attachments to particular points in the landscape compared to the region surrounding Macon Plateau during the Late Woodland to Early Mississippian transition. These social landscapes provided different contexts for the origins of each Mississippian center and influenced later trajectories of cultural development and settlement in each region.

Florida. We suggest that such artifacts, often interpreted as fishing gear, instead were items of personal adornment and magic, and thus important in community public rituals and ceremonies. As such, they serve as useful indicators of regional and macro-regional exchanges among varying communities. By tracking the different styles and material types found at sites in Florida through a typological and network analysis, we argue that certain sites, such as Crystal River, played a larger role in connecting subregions in Florida, and may have served as cultural brokers across the macro-region due to their connections to Hopewell sites throughout the Eastern Woodlands. Furthermore, it appears that such connections were limited in time and given the prominence of plummets buried with certain individuals, we suggest that specific places and persons were entwined with some of these larger scale processes. Fig. 2. The Crystal River site (9CI1) map, showing its layout and architecture.

In this study, we present the results of a comprehensive, landscape-scale remote sensing project at Santa Elena on Parris Island, South Carolina. Substantial occupation at the site extends for over 4000 years and has resulted in a complex array of features dating to different time periods. In addition, there is a 40-year history of archaeological research at the site that includes a large-scale systematic shovel test survey, large block excavations, and scattered test units. Also, modern use of the site included significant alterations to the subsurface deposits. Our goals for this present work are threefold: (1) to explicitly present a logical approach to examine sites with long-term occupations; (2) to examine changes in land use at Santa Elena and its implications for human occupation of this persistent place; and (3) to use the remote sensing program and past archaeological research to make substantive suggestions regarding future research, conservation, and management of the site. Our research provides important insight into the distribution of cultural features at this National Historic Landmark. While the majority of archaeological research at the site has focused on the Spanish period, our work suggests a complex and vast array of archaeological features that can provide insight into over 4000 years of history in the region. At a gross level, we have identified possible Late Archaic structures, Woodland houses and features, Late Prehistoric and early Historic council houses, and a suite of features related to the Spanish occupation which builds on our previous research at the site. In addition to documenting possible cultural features at the site, our work illustrates the value of multiple remote sensing techniques used in conjunction with close-interval shovel test data.

In this study, we present the results of a comprehensive, landscape-scale remote sensing project at Santa Elena on Parris Island, South Carolina. Substantial occupation at the site extends for over 4000 years and has resulted in a complex array of features dating to different time periods. In addition, there is a 40-year history of archaeological research at the site that includes a large-scale systematic shovel test survey, large block excavations, and scattered test units. Also, modern use of the site included significant alterations to the subsurface deposits. Our goals for this present work are threefold: (1) to explicitly present a logical approach to examine sites with long-term occupations; (2) to examine changes in land use at Santa Elena and its implications for human occupation of this persistent place; and (3) to use the remote sensing program and past archaeological research to make substantive suggestions regarding future research, conservation, and management of the site. Our research provides important insight into the distribution of cultural features at this National Historic Landmark. While the majority of archaeological research at the site has focused on the Spanish period, our work suggests a complex and vast array of archaeological features that can provide insight into over 4000 years of history in the region. At a gross level, we have identified possible Late Archaic structures, Woodland houses and features, Late Prehistoric and early Historic council houses, and a suite of features related to the Spanish occupation which builds on our previous research at the site. In addition to documenting possible cultural features at the site, our work illustrates the value of multiple remote sensing techniques used in conjunction with close-interval shovel test data.

The structure and organization of macroregional networks have long captured the attention of archaeologists working in eastern North America, especially in regard to the overall character and spread of Mississippian culture across the midwestern and southeastern United States. In this paper, we use distributions of marine shell gorgets to evaluate the organization of relationships across the Mississippian world and to understand how social capital was accumulated and reciprocal relationships were established in the context of emerging organizational complexity. We use data on 1980 shell gorgets from 165 sites across eastern North America to investigate the social networks related to the distribution of these materials and, indirectly, to the types of social capital that were produced through regional social relationships. We employ a framework that articulates social network topologies with different forms of social capital to explicate the relational structure of Mississippian sociopolitics and to identify the sociospatial scales at which different forms of social capital, reciprocity, and relationships underwrote these structures. We conclude that resources (both material and immaterial) were likely drawn from community, local, regional, macroregional, and continental-scale networks while multiple types of networks were maintained across these multiscalar relational fields.

In this study, we present the results of a comprehensive, landscape-scale remote sensing project at Santa Elena on Parris Island, South Carolina. Substantial occupation at the site extends for over 4000 years and has resulted in a complex array of features dating to different time periods. In addition, there is a 40-year history of archaeological research at the site that includes a large-scale systematic shovel test survey, large block excavations, and scattered test units. Also, modern use of the site included significant alterations to the subsurface deposits. Our goals for this present work are threefold: (1) to explicitly present a logical approach to examine sites with long-term occupations; (2) to examine changes in land use at Santa Elena and its implications for human occupation of this persistent place; and (3) to use the remote sensing program and past archaeological research to make substantive suggestions regarding future research, conservation, and management of the site. Our research provides important insight into the distribution of cultural features at this National Historic Landmark. While the majority of archaeological research at the site has focused on the Spanish period, our work suggests a complex and vast array of archaeological features that can provide insight into over 4000 years of history in the region. At a gross level, we have identified possible Late Archaic structures, Woodland houses and features, Late Prehistoric and early Historic council houses, and a suite of features related to the Spanish occupation which builds on our previous research at the site. In addition to documenting possible cultural features at the site, our work illustrates the value of multiple remote sensing techniques used in conjunction with close-interval shovel test data.

In honor of Ethnohistory's sixtieth anniversary, this paper compiles data on the journal and analyzes patterns and trends throughout the publication. We divided observations into four categories: (1) authorship of each article, particularly focusing on gender in authorship and coauthorship, (2) the region represented in each article, (3) the topic, and (4) data sources used by the author(s). We then analyzed each category in representative ten-year intervals from 1954 to 2013. Such data reveals trends that mirror intellectual, scholarly, and demographic changes in the social sciences overall. Female authorship, for example, steadily increases until the most recent decade, while coauthorship shows steady growth in raw numbers, but still represents a varying percentage with each decade. The North American region composes the majority of regional representation since the beginning, but Latin American regional representation as well as that outside of the Americas, shows significant increases over time. Meanwhile, fluctuating topics and data sources demonstrate diversification and expanding breadth within Ethnohistory.

Santa Elena, located on Parris Island along the coast of South Carolina, was the first capital, and northernmost permanent settlement, of Spanish La Florida. Over two decades of occupation (AD 1566-1587), five forts were successively built while by AD 1569 a burgeoning Spanish settlement of over 200 people, complete with artisans, farmers, and Jesuit missionaries, flourished. Here, we articulate the results of recent, full-coverage ground-penetrating radar and magnetic gradiometry surveys with over 40 years of extant archaeological data to elucidate organizational characteristics of the Spanish settlement at Santa Elena. In particular, we use geophysical data to identify the potential locations of buried Spanish wells across the site. We identify roughly 200 potential well locations and compare these locations to the distribution of Spanish artifacts across the site yielded through a full-coverage shovel test survey, the arrangement of Spanish structures known from large-scale block excavations, and the likely position of roadways and house lots. This new data is used to contextualize and refine extant understandings of Santa Elena's town plan while also contributing to a broader research program devoted to exploring Spanish colonial life and settlement in 16 th-century North America (The Santa Elena Landscape Project). As Santa Elena is a National Historic Landmark currently threatened by rising sea levels, this work contributes to an efficient, minimally invasive research program devoted to exploring the Spanish settlement at Santa Elena and to documenting the range of cultural resources present at the site for the purposes of protection and remediation in the context of significant, ongoing shoreline erosion.

Theoretical development in archaeology is hindered when basic reference terms such as 'the settlement,' 'the site,' or 'society,' have little relation to the behavior to be explained. Such units were not the organizations that people deployed for the activities important to them. We present an institutional framework that, we argue, helps to overcome this difficulty. Institutions are organizations of people that carry out objectives using reg-ularized practices and norms, labor, and resources. Our approach attempts to identify important institutions and to describe their properties, potentially including resources and funding, durability, scale, activities, labor, formality, participants and membership, overlap with other institutions, naming, knowledge, and objectives and outcomes. Case studies from northeastern and southeastern North America illustrate the utility of this method for analyzing synchronic social structure and processes of structural transformation.

Hernando de Soto's expedition through the southeastern United States between 1539 and 1543 is often regarded as a watershed moment for the collapse of Indigenous societies across the region. Historical narratives have proposed that extreme depopulation as a result of early contact destabilized Indigenous economies, politics, networks, and traditions. Although processes of depopulation and transformation were certainly set in motion by this and earlier colonial encounters, the timing, temporality, and heterogeneous rhythms of postcontact Indigenous histories remain unclear. Through the integration of radiocarbon and archaeological data from the Mississippian earthen platform mound at Dyar (9GE5) in central Georgia, we present a case of Indigenous endurance and resilience in the Oconee Valley that has long been obfuscated by materially based chronologies and typologies. Bayesian chronological modeling suggests that Indigenous Mississippian traditions persisted for up to 130 years beyond contact with European colonizers. We argue that advances in modeling radiocarbon dates, along with meaningful consultation/collaboration with descendant communities, can contribute to efforts that move us beyond a reliance on materially based chronologies that can distort and erase Indigenous histories.