Neill Wallis

University of Florida | UF · Department of Natural History

Darwin Core, the data standard used for sharing modern biodiversity and paleodiversity occurrence records, has previously lacked proper mechanisms for reporting what is known about the estimated age range of specimens from deep time. This has led to data providers putting these data in fields where they cannot easily be found by users, which impede...

The existing classification of Weeden Island pottery does not serve the needs of twenty-first-century archaeology and has long been in need of an overhaul. We propose that the type-variety classificatory system, used in the Southwestern US, the Maya region, and the Lower Mississippi valley, could be applied to Weeden Island ceramics. This robust hi...

Darwin Core, the data standard used for sharing modern biodiversity and paleodiversity occurrence records, has previously lacked proper mechanisms for reporting what is known about the estimated age range of specimens from deep time. This has led to data providers putting these data in fields where they cannot easily be found by users, which impede...

Migration was embraced as a general phenomenon by cultural historical archaeologists in the Eastern Woodlands, subsequently rejected by processualists, and recently invoked again with greater frequency due to advances in both method and theory. However, challenges remain in regard to establishing temporal correlations between source and host region...

The “historical turn” in the archaeology of the Woodland period Gulf Coast of the Southeastern United States began several decades ago, as archaeologists began to move beyond relatively static regional cultural histories to develop detailed chronologies of several of the region’s most prominent sites, demonstrating in fine detail the manner in whic...

The American Southeast saw the development of large ceremonial village centers, the coalescence of households, and monumental architecture integrated into village layout during the Middle Woodland period (ca. AD 1–600). These shifts toward more sedentary lifeways occurred independently of, and prior to, the domestication of plants across the Southe...

Interdisciplinary collaborations and data sharing are essential to addressing the long history of human-environmental interactions underlying the modern biodiversity crisis. Such collaborations are increasingly facilitated by, and dependent upon, sharing open access data from a variety of disciplinary communities and data sources, including those w...

The full spreadsheet from the Parnell site, an archaeological site in Florida. This shows the cleaned dataset before the Darwin Core cross-walking is complete. Note the 'Verbatim' and 'Clean' Taxon and Element fields, which shows how these fields are edited slightly in order to accommodate the UBERON mappings for element and the VertNet propagation...

We present a revised chronology for the Kolomoki site (9ER1) in Georgia, occupied primarily during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. 200 BC to AD 1050). The considerable extent of the site has been noted for more than a century but came into sharper focus with the archaeological investigations by Sears (1956) and Pluckhahn (2003). The site...

The interpretive potential of Swift Creek pottery, widely produced throughout Georgia, eastern Alabama, and northern Florida during the Middle and Late Woodland periods between ca. cal AD 100 and 800, has been apparent for many years. Much research has been focused on identifying paddle designs from the impressions left on sherds. Less attention ha...

We describe the development of an open-access database for Swift Creek Complicated Stamped ceramics, a type of pottery common to Georgia, eastern Alabama, and northern Florida in the Middle and Late Woodland periods between ca. cal A.D. 100 and 800. The characteristic stamped designs on Swift Creek pottery, created by impressing a carved paddle int...

We describe the curation and use of clay samples as part of the ceramic ecology program at the Florida Museum of Natural History's Ceramic Technology Laboratory (FLMNH-CTL). We outline the history of the comparative clay sample collection at the FLMNH-CTL and detail the standard operating procedure by which samples are processed, analyzed, and cura...

Weeden Island mortuary ceremonialism united distinct cultures across the Late Woodland social landscape. The Weeden Island pottery series is central to recognizing regional ceremonial parity, with prestige (elite) and sacred (cult) wares showing strong similarities among distant sites. Finely made vessels and their ostensibly shamanistic themes led...

In the lower American Southeast, regional scale social interactions burgeoned alongside the growth of nucleated villages, widespread mound-building projects, and conspicuous mortuary ceremonialism during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. A.D. 100-800). A premier material for understanding the scale and significance of social interactions ac...

In the lower American Southeast, regional scale social interactions burgeoned alongside the growth of nucleated villages, widespread mound-building projects, and conspicuous mortuary ceremonialism during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. A.D. 100–800). A premier material for understanding the scale and significance of social interactions ac...

Low-gradient coastlines are susceptible to inundation by rising water, but they also promote marsh aggradation that has the potential to keep pace with sea-level rise. Synergies among hydrodynamics, coastal geomorphology, and marsh ecology preclude a simple linear relationship between higher water and shoreline transgression. As an archive of human...

Forty-five years ago Timothy Thompson excavated at two of the six mounds at the Garden Patch site but results were never reported. We assembled data from Thompson's work and enhanced them with new test pits at Mound IV and re-excavation of a Mound V trench. Mound IV is a natural sand ridge where a village was established early, by the second centur...

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 s...

Feasts are important social events but their traces in the archaeological record are often ambiguous. The residues of feasts among mobile hunter–gatherers are particularly difficult to discern due to the rarity of association with structural remains and anthropological expectations for large feasts to be limited to complex societies. This article c...

This study integrates disparate geographical areas of the American Southeast to show how studies of Early Mississippian (A.D. 900-1250) interactions can benefit from a multiscalar approach. Rather than focus on contact and exchanges between farming communities, as is the case with most Mississippian interaction studies, we turn our attention to soc...

Interactions with the bodies of hunted animals often follow prescriptions pertaining to social relationships among human and non-human persons. Despite this, deposits of archaeological food remains are seldom considered in terms of deliberate placement, instead serving primarily as reflections of preparation and consumption activities. The residues...

The River Styx site was an important Middle Woodland ceremonial center in north-central Florida that included a horseshoe-shaped earthen embankment, a burial mound containing only cremations, and diverse nonlocal artifacts. The site was recorded more than forty years ago but a report was never written. This article presents a summary of excavation...

Considerations of ritual in archaeology are often focused on mortuary practices and the deposition of finely crafted objects. From this perspective, ceremonialism and rituality in North Florida were most pronounced during the construction and inhabitation of the McKeithen site and similar Weeden Island ceremonial centers (ca. AD 200-700), where ela...

Given its pivotal location between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, its numerous islands, its abundant flora and fauna, and its subtropical climate, Florida has long been ideal for human habitation. Yet Florida traditionally has been considered peripheral in the study of ancient cultures in North America, despite what it can reveal about...

A case study is presented to test the notion that minority pottery types from 16th century contexts at the Fountain of Youth (FOY) site in St. Augustine reflect population movements from the north that preceded major political reorganizations in the region. Petrographic methods are employed to trace the manufacturing origins of early historic perio...

This chapter examines the histories or social relationships indicated at Middle Woodland Swift Creek and Weeden Island burial mounds. Variation in artifact distribution in burial mounds of the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains are compared and indicate that practices at burial mounds were likely tied to definitions of lineage and kinship. Objects th...

Tempers added to pottery have the potential to obscure geographical variation in the chem-istry of exploited clay resources when analysed using bulk methods. A pilot study was con-ducted to assess the possibility of using LA–ICP–MS to analyse clay matrix in pottery with extremely subtle partitions between INAA chemical groups. LA–ICP–MS was used to...

Although this volume covers a broad range of temporal and methodological topics, the chapters are unified by a geographic focus on the archaeology of the Georgia Bight. The various research projects span multiple time periods (including Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian, and contact periods) and many incorporate specialized analyses (such as petrogr...

Archaeological examinations of symbolic meaning often have been hampered by the Saussurean concept of signs as coded messages of preexisting meanings. The arbitrary and imprecise manner by which meaning is represented in material culture according to Saussure tends to stymie archaeological investigations of symbolism. As an alternative, archaeologi...

Tempers added to pottery have the potential to obscure geographical variation in the chem-istry of exploited clay resources when analysed using bulk methods. A pilot study was con-ducted to assess the possibility of using LA–ICP–MS to analyse clay matrix in pottery with extremely subtle partitions between INAA chemical groups. LA–ICP–MS was used to...

A unique dataset for studying past social interactions comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery that linked sites throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands but that was primarily distributed over the lower Southeast. Although connections have been demonstrated, their significance has remained enigmatic. How and why were apparently utilitar...

Results of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) of Middle and Late Woodland pottery (n = 313) and clay (n = 22) samples from northeastern Florida and southeastern Georgia are presented. Assemblages in this region include Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery that preserves unique evidence of social interactions through the inimitable q...

Many Archaic and Woodland period monuments in south-eastern North America were civic and ceremonial gathering centers. The built landscapes that emphasized these features are likely to have incorporated histories and memories in locally distinctive ways across the region. However, their attribution by archaeologists to broad temporal and social cat...

Paddle matches between sites show instances of Swift Creek "interaction," but alone these data yield little information about the context of production and exchange. A comparison of technological and functional attributes of pottery from two sites on the lower St. Johns River, the Mayport Mound (8DU96) and Swift Creek Middens (8DU5544/5545), indica...