First pumpkin flower

Hey all just got the first flower on my pumpkin plants, check it out.

Back to the world of the living

hey all,  just finished with my qualifying exams!  i can now return to blog posting and doing

all other sorts of neat things.  until then,  here are some nice pics of my garden

The garden

broccoli

My cohort and I celebrating after finishing our comps

Student Affairs Committee of Southeastern Archaeology needs new members

Hello Everyone! 

 I, Jayur Mehta, am the current chair for the SEAC Student Affairs Committee.  The Student Affairs Committee is looking for new members, including the new Chair-Elect!  The Student Affairs Committe is soliciting applications for two-members-at-large, one webmaster, and the new Chair-elect. We welcome any and all students from any institution to apply for the committee. You can be an undergraduate or graduate student, just as long as you are a student during your term. The Student Affairs Committee is designed to aid students of Southeastern Archaeology, both at the annual meetings and through their tenure of study.  Being involved with the committee is a fantastic opportunity to get more involved in SEAC, meet new people, and give back to other students around the Southeast!  

If you are interested, please email Jayur Mehta, jmehta@tulane.edu with your name, email, home institution, the position you are interested in, and a brief statement about why you wish to join and ideas for future SEAC meetings.  Please send the email by December 23rd, 2011 .  Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any questions and feel free to find us at SEAC! Remember, this is a fantastic opportunity and WE WANT YOU!

Responsibilities for the Chair-Elect: 

The Chair-Elect’s main job during their first year in this position is to learn what they will need to do when they are Chair.  This includes attending both the mid-year board meeting at the SAAs and the Executive Board meeting at SEAC, helping the Chair to put together updates andworking with other members on tasks. The chair-elect assits with the planning of SEAC Student Affairs Committee events.  

Web Master:

The Web Master has the responsibility for getting information on to the SEAC student website in a timely and appropriate manner – http://www.southeasternarchaeology.org/SAC/  The Student Affairs committee webmaster works in tandem with the SEAC webmaster. A request for information to be added can come from the Chair and/or the SEAC Executive Board.  

 Members-at-Large:

There are three Member-at-Large positions – we are currently soliciting two members-at-large. They assist with student-related events at SEAC.  For examples, tasks such as brainstorming and vetting ideas for lunch forums and workshops, contacting potential speakers, organizing student events at the annual meeting, setting up and cleaning up student events, and introducing speakers can be asked of members-at-large. 

All the best,

Jayur

Intentionality…

there are some greater philosophical applications of the term “intentionality” that I won’t get into, but to me, as an archaeologist, the concept forces me to ask of architecture and archaeological sites and landscapes, ” what am I looking at today, was it planned that way, and is it the remnant of a singular concept or an imbricated mess”?
For example, did Spanish city planners really envision Bourbon St. as a mecca of hedonism or a magnet for mid-western tourists? What about all this adaptive reuse of historic structures? The condos in the old cotton warehouse, or the shopping mall in the ole’ textile mill? Intent in architecture can sometimes belie subsequent utilization. Now, take this concept and apply it to Archaic mound sites, Woodland mounds, and the Mississippian mound sites that showed up thousands of years subsequently? or to the Indians who showed up at Jaketown thousands of years too late and still started building mounds anyhow. Whats up with that?

In the Amazon, scholars attribute increased alpha diversity to anthropogenic features, like mounds, ditches, berms, and causeways, but we need to ask when these features were built and if they are coeval or palimpsests, and were they made to increase alpha diversity or were other technomic, socio-tecnic, and/or ideotecnic (old school language) functions at play?

I dont know. I think micro-scale chronological control can help with these questions. So can good maps and lots of excavation. More work is needed.

A Game of Jeopardy, Western Mesoamerica

Hey Fans of Mesoamerican Archaeology,

Always wanted to play a Jeopardy game reviewing the cultural sequence of Western Mesoamerica but too busy to make your own?  Well, have no fear,  you can download one right here.  Enjoy, and happy learning!

Highland Mexico Game

The Noble Savage Myth and Landscape Transformation

Scholars of historical ecology have discounted the Ecologically Noble Savage mythology for a variety of reason, primary among them being the “Golden Age” and Romantic-period roots of the mythology. However, cultural ecologists initially favored the ecologically noble myth given it supported the “ecosystems trending towards equilibrium” approach. In a recent article, Betty Meggers (2007), that stalwart steward of cultural ecology, continues to favor an environmental and climatic explanation for the factors limiting population growth and cultural development in the Amazonian Basin and Brazilian highlands. Late in her career, long after the ecological savage was sent on his way, Meggers continues to deny the possibility that Amazonian Indians could affect their environments. In Meggers’ conception of Amazonia, the Natives of the region could not have been ecologically noble because there were never enough of them to have sufficient impacts on climate and environment (contra Crutzen’s seminal 2002 article in Nature). In her model of prehistory, the ecologically noble savage is irrelevant because the Amazonian Indian was too few in number to ever change his world. Historical ecologists, on the other hand, stipulate that dense prehistoric populations in Amazonia were responsible for both primary and secondary forms of landscape transformation. As at Ibibate and in the high and low forests of Ka’apor Indians, local and regional biodiversity was completely modified by humans. Furthermore, the geoglyphs of Acre, the ridged and zig-zag earthworks of the Llanos de Mojos , and the numerous instances of Amazonian Dark Earths gives significant reason to suggest large numbers of humans were present in the Amazonian Basin in prehistory; their low numbers at contact in the 18^th and 19^th centuries were an artifact of diseases and population disruptions catalyzed by initial contact with Spanish conquistadors in the mid-16^th century and later Portuguese explorers. Previous to Orellana and Aguirre, these populations built mounds of shell and earth, increased the arable potential of their soils through ADE, and modified the landscape through waterways and causeways. In historical ecology, Indians are neutral towards biodiversity; they did not always have neutral effects on their environments, but they were not ecologically principled and/or mythically “green” as the Noble Savage mythology posited. The historical ecological perspective is contrary to Meggers’ understanding of Amazonian prehistory and is a viewpoint which sees both the forest and the trees, understanding them both as artifacts affected by thousands of years of human interference.

Historical Ecology in the Southeast

hey all, just back from SEAC where I saw some amazing papers!
I really enjoyed all the Florida work happening in the 10,000 Islands area and Caloosahatchee. You can check out the park here, http://www.fws.gov/refuges/profiles/index.cfm?id=41555, and soon enough I’ll post more information about the archaeology. Those folks working down there have such a great handle on the ecology, history, and archaeology of that beautiful region.

Archaic Period Mounds in the Southeastern United States

Without a doubt, the most important characteristic (to me at least) of Middle and Late Archaic mounds is that they were built by non-agricultural societies. Richard Bradley’s thesis in The Significance of Monuments (1998) is simply that mound building in Neolithic Europe can be directly attributed to the spread of agriculture from the Near East.  Bradley believes Mesolithic Europeans did not distinguish themselves from the natural world, and therefore they did not mark the landscape with monuments. With the eventual adoption of agriculture, Neolithic farmers began building long barrows and cairns to mark the landscape and inter their dead. Bradley’s thesis, while applicable in Neolithic Europe, does not stand up to the fertile floodplains of the Lower Mississippi Valley.  The connection between agriculture and monuments does not hold up here in the Americas, where shell and earthen mounds first started marking the landscape as early as the Middle Archaic period (ca. 5000 years ago)[1]. However, Bradley’s assertion that the continuation of circular architectural forms from the Neolithic into the Early and then Later Bronze Age, as seen in the way later circular settlements and houses cite back to earlier circular barrows, is perhaps tenable here in the Lower Mississippi Valley, where mound and plaza architecture persists from 5000 BP to 500 BP. Keeping Bradley in mind, this post describes the major Middle and Late Archaic mound centers in the Southeast, and demonstrates their significance as related to duration on the landscape, and for what implications they may have on how we think about social organization amongst fisher-hunter-gathers.

Middle Archaic mound sites exhibit significant variation in their current surface manifestations, containing anywhere from 1 to 11 mounds, and appearing either as lone dots on the landscape, or two mounds in a line, or in a circular/arcuate shape of multiple mounds. Smaller sites like Hedgepeth and Frenchman’s Bend in Louisiana contain two mounds each (although the latter may have had two more), one at 8 feet tall and the other at 20 feet tall. A newly discovered Archaic culture site in Mississippi, 22LI504, has revealed evidence for only one 3 meter tall mound.  On the other side of the spectrum, large sites like Watson Brake exist, which have 11 differentially-sized mounds built in a mound and plaza configuration, meant to invoke, as Jon Gibson puts it, “the spirit of the gift of protection conferred by the spirit world” (Gibson 2004:260). Of course, it is possible that other mounds at Hedgepeth and 22LI504 were once present, but they either never existed, or have eroded away and been destroyed.

According to Gibson, bounded mound settlements like Watson Brake created a sense of belonging and identity for a social collective. This idea, that mound and plaza arrangements created social collectives is incredibly powerful, especially given the persistent use of plazas across time and space (La Plaza Mayor in Madrid, the Zocolo in Mexico city, the National Mall, Moundville, and the central plaza of Monte Alban are just a few examples). But it is not only the shape and configuration of mounds that indexes meaning – the way in which mounds were made is also telling. As seen today, Middle Archaic mound sites vary in the number and size of mounds they contain, however, this tells us very little about the people that actually built them – we cannot state that the people who lived at and built Frenchman’s Bend were more complex than the people that built Hedgepeth just by looking at the mounds.  We can however study the number of mantles and stages of a mound and the rate at which it was constructed to make inferences on prehistoric social organization.

We know from subsistence-related remains recovered from rockshelters and caves that sedentism among Archaic peoples was becoming more prevalent. Spare time is a requirement for mound-buildings but full-scale sedentism is not – ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer societies often claim they spend around 15-20 hours a week collected resources.  Contrast this claim with the 40 hour workweek?!? Archaic peoples in the Middle Holocene were likely heavily dependent on riparian ecosystems for food, as seen at, among others, the Black Earth site.  The availability of game, fish, and wild foods in the slow-moving aquatic ecosystems of the Lower Mississippi Valley likely resulted in a social context in which both food and time were readily available.

One manner in which relatively mobile peoples can build mounds is by constructing small stages over a long period of time. This type of construction method is seen at Watson Brake and at 22LI504, where each of the excavated mounds has small and thin construction stages.  The mound at 22LI504 was built in a series of 5 stages  – Watson Brake, among many other Middle Archaic mounds, was also built in small seasonal stages.  However, several Middle Archaic mound sites were not built in small stages – the LSU Campus mounds, Hedgepeth, and Stelly were all built relative quickly in large stages that would have required Middle Archaic peoples to stay in one place longer than for just one season. Archaeologists think it is possible that Middle Archaic hunter-gatherers could have stayed sedentary for multiple seasons because they lived in a highly fertile environment like the Lower Mississippi Valley. Given the number of mounds at Watson Brake and the mound-plaza arrangement, I think large numbers of fairly sedentary people likely constructed the site, albeit slowly. Although some of the mantles in the mounds are fairly thin, with so many mounds creating an enclosure, and in many ways creating a community, the builders of Watson Brake were not likely a highly mobile people.

Mound building continues into the Late Archaic at sites like Jaketown, Claiborne, Cedarland, and Poverty Point.  At Poverty Point, the largest mound was thought to have been constructed very quickly, perhaps within a matter of months.  While Claiborne and Cedarland have both been destroyed, data from amateur archaeologists and early investigations indicate the monuments were arcuate shaped, although it is unclear how “monumental” they truly were or how quickly they were built. Earthen mounds at Poverty Point and Jaketown, however, were truly impressive. Mound A at Poverty Point was unprecedented and remained so until Monks Mound was erected at Cahokia almost 2000 years later.  Although very little evidence for social stratification has been recovered at the site itself, there is variation in the height of the mounds, which must have been meaningful to some degree. Using a perspective based on the philosophy of Foucault, I might suggest the height of Mound A, and its command over the surrounding landscape, indexes the ability of either a collective or an individual leader to exert power over a community. This power may have originated through economic, political or ritual processes, or a combination thereof.  Furthermore,  I would suggest the nearby presence of a much older mound, the Lower Jackson mound (and perhaps the Motley mound), created a connection to a specific place and a local history that either a leader or a collective harnessed for the purposes of mound building.

Recalling Bradley’s assertion about the continuation of circular forms through Europe’s culture-history, I think it is important that a Middle Archaic mound is located a small distance from Mound A at Poverty Point. Furthermore, Poverty Point may be citing and intentionally mimicking the overall layout of the Jaketown site. Jaketown dates slightly earlier than Poverty Point and it was constructed on the inside of a point bar with ridge-swale topography surrounding it in a ring shape, much as how the semi-circle shaped rings at Poverty Point were made. Although this semi-circle shape is quite different from the mound-plaza arrangement of Watson Brake, it is not without antecedents in the Southeast -  semi-circle or arcuate shaped shell rings dating to the Archaic period have also been documented .

From the material evidence of monuments presented at Middle and Late Archaic shell and earthen sites, I think it is likely that minimally complex, transegalitarian cultures were responsible for the degree of monumentality seen at this time (Ken Sassaman has also made this argument). The two relatively larger mounds at Watson Brake and the very large mound at Poverty Point demonstrate, if you follow Foucault’s panoptic, that the space around the mounds at these two sites was subject to the power of whatever entity, whether individual or collective, claimed that powerful spot. Movement itself is observed, and bodily action itself is disciplined in this type of setting. Jon Gibson relates that mound building at the very least implies some degree of organization and control – people can certainly participate in labor willingly and build mounds as part of a communal effort; Gibson’s beneficent obligation makes this clear.  Nevertheless, at the end of the day when all the mound building is done, whoever or whatever that claims the organization of these mound-builders will eventually take the summit.

Furthermore, I think Bradley’s principle of citationality  is important to apply in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Mound and plaza arrangements and semi-circle shaped monuments are a long-lived tradition in the Lower Valley, and I think, ancient signs of a connection to place. The Natchez claimed to be descended from the Sun – this assertion legitimated power and created a sense of permanence to a particular spot on the landscape. Similarly, whatever Poverty Point entity was responsible for building at the site, whether individual or collective, it is clear they obviously found connections to the landscape through the Lower Jackson mound and decided to recreate the more-ancient mounded landscape of the Jaketown site onto a landform bookended by at least one Middle Archaic mound. Scholars have not found more recent recreations of the Poverty Point site, but many other mound and plaza type archaeological sites have been documented in the Southeast. It may not be fair to say that all mound and plaza cites are referencing one another, but perhaps it is reasonable to think that mound and plaza construction in the Lower Valley, a long and robust tradition, was facilitated not only by a fertile environment, but also by the presence of highly powerful and symbol-laden anthropogenic landscape containing many signs of power in the form of earthen and shell monuments.

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[1] Oddly enough, shell rings and shell mounds begin appearing in South America along the Atlantic coast at approximately the same time,  ca. 5000 years ago.  They are generally known as sambaquis.

Public Archaeology Grant

Hey All,  SEAC just posted for its 2011 Public Archaeology grant,  it is a great grant that gives scholars and interested individuals the resources to teach to the public about archaeology.   You can find out more at the link below, or just reading the posting below it.

http://www.southeasternarchaeology.org/grant.html

 

SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONFERENCE
ANNOUNCES 2012 PUBLIC OUTREACH GRANT CYCLE

The Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC), in order to promote public awareness of archaeology in the Southeast, supports a program of small grants to finance public outreach projects. SEAC provides an annual grant of $2,000 per year to an applicant through a competitive application process.

Projects proposed for grant funding should promote public awareness of archaeology in the Southeast through any of a variety of educational and outreach activities. Examples of suitable projects might include: teacher workshops, printed material for the public, exhibits, workshops for adults or children, Archaeology Week/Month activities, Project Archaeology workshops, Elderhostel programs, archaeology fairs, public field trips, or other public-oriented projects.

The competition is open to anyone in or near the traditional boundaries of the southeastern culture area, and all proposals must have some tie to the southeast. For purposes of the grant, southeastern states are defined as: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee; border states are defined as: Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

The 2012 Grant Cycle is now beginning, and submissions are requested. Information about the SEAC Public Outreach Grant—including a history of the grant, description, requirements, and a grant application—can be found on the SEAC web site at http://www.southeasternarchaeology.org/grant.html.

All submissions must be received by the committee chair no later than December 1. For additional information or queries contact Mary Kwas, Committee Chair, Arkansas Archeological Survey, 479-575-6549 or mkwas@uark.edu.

The Amazon and its peoples

The history of the Amazon is a history of Ideas – from the 16th century to today, scholars have debated what exactly the Amazon as Pristine or Anthropogenic really means. Von Humboldt in the 1800′s espoused concepts of pristine and romantic forests, where the Indians of the Amazon themselves were lumped in with the beasts of the forest. His view, among others, was responding to the Industrial Revolution while also seeking out in the Amazon goods and resources by which to fuel industrialization.  By categorizing Indian lands as pristine and untouched,  Humboldt and later early 20th-century geographers could legitimate robbing the Amazon of its soul.  The influences of Romanticism can readily be seen in the early chronicles of the region.

Modern scholars, however, view the Amazon as an anthropogenic forest,  where the woods and trees are artifacts of thousands of years of human-generated impact.  Beyond simplistic notions of human generated impacts to the environment, it is likely that forests were actively managed for specific plant species.  Ethnohistoric sources tell us the Amazon was full of roads and cities at the time of first contact. Francisco de Orellana sailed down the Amazon in 1541 looking for El Dorado, failing, but finding in its stead a forest of ridiculous biodiversity populated by healthy and organized Indians. Sometimes criticized as exaggerated,  Orellans account was not corroborated by later explorers in the 18th century.  However,  much as how highly complex Lower Mississippi Valley groups were defragmented by De Soto in 1540,  so too were Amazonians devastated by the Orellan’s egress down river.

Betty Jo Meggers brought the Amazon into anthropological awareness  with the publication of her novel, Counterfeit Paradise, the book predicated upon the notion that the Amazon could only support only small -scale swidden agriculturalists.  This treatise in cultural ecology placed the environment as the limiting factor in the progression/evolution (for lack of better worlds, ugh) of indigenous societies. Bringing the Amazon into a brighter light, unfortunately for the Amazon, was the massive deforestation of the Brazilian rain forests perpetuated by the Brazilian government. In the empty spaces of fallen trees, incredibly large, geometric excavated and mounded geoglyphs were discovered by geographer Hansi.  The span of the ditches and embankments making these geoglyphs can be as wide as 11 meters – they were sometimes excavated as deep as 5 meters, and were often made in the shape of squares, ovals, and rectangles.  Dated to approximately 2000 BP to 750 BP,  these glyphs mark an Amazon as anthropogenic, and not limiting nor pristine.