Victor D Thompson

University of Georgia | UGA · Department of Anthropology

Introduction: Elasmobranchs, such as sharks and rays, are among the world’s most endangered vertebrates, with over 70% loss in abundance over the past 50 years due to human impacts. Zooarchaeological baselines of elasmobranch diversity, distribution, and exploitation hold great promise for contributing essential historical contexts in the assessmen...

Shell ring archaeological sites are one of the most visible site types along the lower South Atlantic Coast of the United States. These cultural sites are large, circular to arcuate piles of mollusk shells with some reaching over three meters in elevation and over 100 m in diameter. They are comprised largely of mollusk shells (e.g., Eastern oyster...

We conduct a synthetic archaeological and ethnohistoric dating program to assess the timing and tempo of the spread of peaches, the first Eurasian domesticate to be adopted across Indigenous eastern North America, into the interior American Southeast by Indigenous communities who quickly “Indigenized” the fruit. In doing so, we present what may be...

To examine how humans sustained themselves on the coastal islands of Georgia, USA, we must first know exactly where and when those occupations occurred. This chapter presents aggregate data from the Georgia State Site Files to map which environmental attributes were most valuable to coastal populations over time. These data are used to estimate the...

In many ways, anthropogenic islands, like South Florida’s Mound Key or Nan Madol in Micronesia, serve as model systems for how human populations can affect pristine environments. This ranges from land modification due to forest clearance for agricultural and other activities to the introduction of invasive species and the extirpation or extinction...

Circular shell rings along the South Atlantic coast of the United States are vestiges of the earliest sedentary villages in North America, dating to 4500–3000 BP. However, little is known about when Indigenous communities began constructing these shell-ring villages. This article presents data from the Hokfv-Mocvse Shell Ring on Ossabaw Island, Geo...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0258979.].

We present new chronologies that inform the timing and tempo of shell ring and shell mound construction on the South Atlantic Bight. Our project combines recently acquired dates with legacy radiocarbon dates from over 25 rings and mounds to provide a higher-resolution chronology regarding the occupation and formation of this larger landscape of the...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Historical descriptions and archaeological research provide a compelling association of the Native town of Tocobaga with the Safety Harbor site (8PI2), in Tampa Bay, Florida. The Spanish established a mission-fort at Tocobaga in 1567, but it was short-lived: responding to abuse by the colonizers, the Tocobagans killed the soldiers who had been left...

Recent authors suggest shellfish may have been key to the evolution of cooperation among human societies. However, others argue that cooperation may operate at different temporal and spatial scales. We examine shifts in cooperation across the Middle (ca. 300 BC to AD 500) and Late (AD 500 to 1050) Woodland periods among fisher-hunter-gatherers of t...

Applying a coastal-geoarchaeological approach, we synthesize stratigraphic, sedimentological, mollusk-zooarchaeological, and radiometric datasets from recent excavations and sediment coring at Harbor Key (8MA15)—a shell-terraformed Native mound complex within Tampa Bay, on the central peninsular Gulf Coast of Florida. We significantly revise the ch...

Tampa Bay is a karst-controlled estuary system on Florida’s central peninsular Gulf of Mexico coast. Although previous work has reconstructed late-Pleistocene environments (ca. 20–11.5 kya) and early marine influence (ca. 8–5.5 kya) in deeper central portions of the bay, the estuarine development of the shallow inshore subbasins remains poorly unde...

In November 1995, the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia submitted inventories and summaries of Indigenous ancestors and funerary objects in its holdings to comply with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). However, after this submission, the Laboratory attempts at consultation with...

Archaeologists have not readily applied collective action and institutional approaches to the study of hunter-gatherers. This is especially true of the American Southeast. Here, I use a review of the recent literature to illustrate the value of such approaches to understanding long-term histories. This review of hunter-gatherer archaeology spans th...

Meaningful collaborations between archaeologists and descendant communities and nations is a necessary component of archaeological practice in the 2020s and beyond. While calls for decolonising the social sciences and humanities have become a common refrain, practical methodologies for supplanting settler-colonial research practice have been less a...

The Florida Keys are currently experiencing unprecedented loss of lifeways, biodiversity, and cultural heritage due to sea-level rise, catastrophic storm events, unsustainable traditions of resource exploitation, and land development. Yet, these islands have a long history of human occupation and socioecological systems underlying their current sus...

Democratic cooperation is a particularly complex type of arrangement that requires attendant institutions to ensure that the problems inherent in collective action do not subvert the public good. It is perhaps due to this complexity that historians, political scientists, and others generally associate the birth of democracy with the emergence of so...

The goal for many PhD students in archaeology is tenure-track employment. Students primarily receive their training by tenure-track or tenured professors, and they are often tacitly expected—or explicitly encouraged—to follow in the footsteps of their advisor. However, the career trajectories that current and recent PhD students follow may hold lit...

Historical ecology has revolutionized our understanding of fisheries and cultural landscapes, demonstrating the value of historical data for evaluating the past, present, and future of Earth’s ecosystems. Despite several important studies, Indigenous fisheries generally receive less attention from scholars and managers than the 17th–20th century ca...

Circular shell rings along the South Atlantic Coast of North America are the remnants of some of the earliest villages that emerged during the Late Archaic (5000–3000 BP). Many of these villages, however, were abandoned during the Terminal Late Archaic (ca 3800–3000 BP). We combine Bayesian chronological modeling with mollusk shell geochemistry and...

At European contact, the Calusa of southwestern Florida were the most complex society in Florida. For staple sustenance they relied not on agriculture, but on aquatic resources harvested mainly from shallow inshore bays. We summarize recently discovered physical evidence on Mound Key of mound-building, monumental architecture, large-scale food proc...

Defining and examining democracy in non-Western contexts is a conceptual challenge. This is largely because scholars of contemporary political systems outside of anthropology can envision no alternative pathways other than Western expressions of democracy. Such thinking inhibits our understanding of past, and indeed future, democratic systems. In t...

The Pineland Site Complex, 8LL1902, is a large archaeological complex of middens, mounds, and other topographic features located in coastal, southwestern Florida. It was occupied from approximately AD 50 and was a major Calusa town at European contact. We combine extant research from this well-preserved site complex with new chronological and zooar...

Circular shell rings along the Atlantic Coast of southeastern North America are the remnants of some of the earliest villages that emerged during the Late Archaic Period (5000 – 3000 BP). Many of these villages, however, were abandoned during the Terminal Late Archaic Period (ca 3800 – 3000 BP). Here, we combine Bayesian chronological modeling with...

This report presents findings from recent systematic surveys and excavations at the site of Finley’s Pond (9CH204) to evaluate craft production (e.g., shell beads) and settlement expansion on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, within the context of larger social, political, and economic changes that occurred along the Georgia coast over the last millennia. S...

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...

Economics – the socially instituted ways of managing how people value, make, exchange, and consume goods – is a major part of human culture. Yet there is comparatively little study of the economies of the pre-sixteenth-century Southeast, in spite of revealing written comments by the earliest European observers and the fact that cross-culturally in...

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 Georgia Coast of the eastern United States boasts some of the largest and spatially complex Late Archaic sites in North America, with the most famous of these being shell rings. The shell ring village phenomenon and its larger ceremonial landscapes did not, however, last throughout the Late Archaic. Climate shifts that led to local relative sea...

Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dates in North American archaeology is increasing, especially among archaeologists working in deeper time. However, historical archaeologists have been slow to embrace these new techniques, and there have been only a few examples of the incorporation of calendar dates as informative priors in Bayesian models...

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 tradition...

The eastern oyster ( Crassostrea virginica ) is an important proxy for examining historical trajectories of coastal ecosystems. Measurement of ~40,000 oyster shells from archaeological sites along the Atlantic Coast of the United States provides a long-term record of oyster abundance and size. The data demonstrate increases in oyster size across ti...

In 1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived at the capital of the Calusa kingdom. During that same year Menéndez issued the order to construct Fort San Antón de Carlos, which was occupied until 1569. This fort was also the location of one of the first Jesuit missions (1567) in what is now the United States. We now can confirm what archaeologists and...

Significance Fish were captured and stored by Native Americans of southwestern Florida in complex walled structures called watercourts, constructed of shell and other sediments. These structures were engineered with knowledge of tidal systems, hydrology, and the biology of species to be stored in these courts. This work documents the considerable a...

This review of the preceding chapters highlights their commonalities and differences, and discusses the extent to which they advance the understanding of the Atlantic Coast of North America as a region of study for archaeologists, particularly for maritime archaeology and historical ecology

This chapter synthesizes and evaluates settlement and subsistence patterns in relation to landscape change for Native American occupations of the Georgia coast in the southeast USA. Dynamic coastal processes of the region have altered the topography and distribution of resources, including those important to humans. These processes were neither uni...

The productive woodlands, estuaries, and coastlines of the Middle Atlantic region of North America have been home to Native Americans from the Paleoindian period to the modern day. Inhabitants of this region adapted to broad environmental changes, including the emergence of Chesapeake Bay when rising seas drowned the Susquehanna River valley around...

From the icy shores of Labrador to the warm mangroves of the Florida Keys, North America’s Atlantic Coast was a magnet for human subsistence and settlement for millennia. North America’s Atlantic Coast is a land of diversity united by rich coastal and terrestrial ecosystems that were home to a wide variety of Native American societies and distinct...

The Florida Keys are a small island chain along the Atlantic coast that preserve unique data on human-environmental interactions in prehistory, overlooked in earlier research but now the focus of new investigations. These investigations were spurred in part by the threat of sea level rise and the need to better understand human adaptations to chang...

RADIOCARBON PRETREATMENT COMPARISONS OF BALD CYPRESS (TAXODIUM DISTICHUM) WOOD SAMPLES FROM A MASSIVE BURIED DEPOSIT ON THE GEORGIA COAST, USA – ERRATUM - Katharine G Napora, Alexander Cherkinsky, Robert J Speakman, Victor D Thompson, Robert Horan, Craig Jacobs

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...

We sampled individual growth rings from three ancient remnant bald cypress ( Taxodium distichum ) trees from a massive buried deposit at the mouth of the Altamaha River on the Georgia Coast to determine the best technique for radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dating pretreatment. The results of our comparison of traditional ABA pretreatment and holocellulose and...

Formally established in the fall of 1947, the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia is an archaeological research and collection repository. It is considered one of the premier institutions for curation of archaeological collections from the American Southeast. For over 70 years, the Laboratory has served as a repository for object...

In coastal and island archaeology, carbonate mollusk shells are often among the most abundant materials available for radiocarbon (14 C) dating. The marsh periwinkle (Littorina irrorata) is one of these such species, ubiquitously found along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States in both modern and archaeological contexts. This paper pre...

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 Jesu...

Few researchers have investigated shell midden sites in western Ireland. Here, we discuss the geoarchaeological approach undertaken at an Atlantic Ocean-facing dunefield shell midden site in County Sligo, Connacht. Ground penetrating radar, magnetic susceptibility, and apparent electrical resistivity were used to map subsurface features and identif...

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,...

Few historical archaeologists working on sites that postdate A.D. 1500 employ radiocarbon dating throughout the course of their research. We argue that historical archaeologists underutilize radiocarbon dating, and present the case for its use and Bayesian modeling of the dates. We illustrate these methods with a simulated hypothetical example and...

This essay is a perspective on Paleoindian research examining the nature of this body of scholarship and how it is perceived by outside scholars. The discussion revolves around three different tropes in Paleoindian literature: (1) chronology and settlement research; (2) technology studies; (3) behavioral and ecological theory. While the studies tha...

Between 1985 and 2014, the number of US doctoral graduates in Anthropology increased from about 350 to 530 graduates per year. This rise in doctorates entering the work force along with an overall decrease in the numbers of tenure-track academic positions has resulted in highly competitive academic job market. We estimate that approximately79% of U...

Summary statistics for ranking and placement averages by subdiscipline for programs listed in S2–S4 Tables. (DOCX)

US anthropology doctoral recipients by year relative to numbers of US anthropology doctorates who obtained anthropology faculty positions. (DOCX)

Summary of biological anthropology market share divided into 10-year increments beginning with 1974. (DOCX)

Summary of sociocultural anthropology market share divided into 10-year increments beginning with 1974. (DOCX)

Summary of Anthropology department (all subfields) market share divided into 10-year increments beginning with 1974. (DOCX)

Summary of archaeology market share divided into 10-year increments beginning with 1974. (DOCX)

Our work at Mound Key, the Capital of the Calusa Kingdom, identifies a large structure on top of Mound 1 that likely was associated with a powerful long-lived lineage. The rise to power for this group coincided with a significant amelioration of the shallow-water estuarine environment of Estero Bay during the Warm Medieval Period. We interpret this...

There are many examples of colonial entanglements resulting in shifts in religions, practices, subsistence, and political structures, largely linked to inequalities between the colonized and the colonizers. However, there are also examples in which practices, particularly among Native American societies, persisted in the context of social situation...

This volume explores how native peoples of the Southeastern United States cooperated to form large and permanent early villages, using the site of Crystal River on Florida's Gulf Coast as a case study. Crystal River was once among the most celebrated sites of the Woodland period (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000), consisting of ten mounds and large numbe...

Phase 4, the final phase of occupation at Crystal River and Roberts Island, started sometime between around AD 780 and 870 and ended between 900 and 980, spanning the transition between the Late Woodland period and Mississippian period, and the beginning of the Medieval Warm period. Occupation at the former site waned during this interval, while Ro...

Recent archaeological work suggests that people began moving away from Crystal River in Phase 3, which probably began between around AD 500 and 600 and lasted until sometime between AD 650 and 750, during the Late Woodland Period. Nevertheless, the site seems to have continued to serve as a ceremonial center. The village contracted to the area nort...

The pattern and historical process of early village development at Crystal River are contextualized with regard to regularities that might be typical of this transition on the Gulf Coast, focusing particularly on a handful of sites where archaeological investigations provide sufficient spatial and temporal control to reconstruct the lived experienc...

Current radiocarbon evidence suggests that monument construction at Crystal River began sometime around 1000 BC, based on dating of human remains excavated from the circular embankment of the Main Burial Complex. Construction of the two burial mounds began a few centuries later, but likewise predates the earliest occupation of the village. Thus, th...

The village at Crystal River expanded greatly in size and permanence in Phase 2, which began sometime between around AD 200 and 300 and ended by around AD 500. This growth may have owed partially to a rise in sea level associated with the warmer temperatures of the Roman Warm Period, which might have made life on the seaward islands more difficult....

In the archaeology of the American Southeast, the Woodland period (from around 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1050) is not conventionally understood as an interval marked by significant “firsts.” But it was marked by a dramatic change in the way people related to one another, as indicated by the earliest widespread appearance of sedentary villages, often associ...

The importance of the archaeological site of Crystal River has been known since at least 1859, but it was excavations in the site’s burial mounds by C.B. Moore in the early twentieth that made the site famous among archaeologists. Later, Ripley Bullen provided additional insight on several of the other mounds and the village at Crystal River, and h...

Radiocarbon dat