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Forager Interactions on the Edge of the Early Mississippian World: Neutron Activation Analysis of Ocmulgee and St. Johns Pottery
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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 social relations between village-dwelling St. Johns II fisher-hunter-gatherers of northeastern Florida and more mobile Ocmulgee foragers of southern-central Georgia; non-neighboring groups situated beyond and within the southeastern edge of the Mississippian world, respectively. We draw upon neutron activation analysis data to document the presence of both imported and locally produced Ocmulgee Cordmarked wares in St. Johns II domestic and ritual contexts. Establishing social relations with Ocmulgee households or kin groups through exchange and perhaps marriage would have facilitated St. Johns II access into the Early Mississippian world and enabled them to acquire the exotic copper, stone, and other minerals found in St. Johns mortuary mounds. This study underscores the multiscalarity of past societies and the importance of situating local histories in broader geographical contexts.
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... The only sourcing of copper from St. Johns River mounds was Goad's (1978) optical emission spectrographic study that included 10 artifacts recovered by C.B. 1 It has recently been argued that one of the mechanisms responsible for the presence of non-local Ocmulgee Cordmarked pottery from south-central Georgia in St. Johns II contexts was intermarriage (Ashley et al. 2015). 2 Recognition of the similarities between Grant Mound and American Bottom artifacts is not an original observation on our part. ...
... The Ocmulgee territory lies immediately south of Macon Plateau along a direct waterway route, eventually linking Macon Plateau to Mill Cove. The cordmarked pottery made by Early Mississippian-period Ocmulgee foragers occurs in large numbers, as imports and local copies, at Mill Cove and other coeval St. Johns sites, including Mt. Royal (Ashley et al. 2015;Rolland 2005). Mill Cove is only a week or so travel by canoe from Macon Plateau, and an additional few days would have taken a journeyer to Mt. Royal. ...
No area along the far edges of the Mississippian world is as remote from Cahokia as northeastern Florida. But objects of possible Cahokian derivation, though limited in number, made their way to this distant locale The most compelling material evidence in Florida for any kind of connection to Cahokia comes from the Mill Cove Complex and Mt. Royal along the St. Johns River of the northern peninsula. Situated about 100 km from one another, these two fisher-hunter-gatherer communities were recipients of copper and stone artifacts that likely originated in the American Bottom, some 1200 km away. The overall geographical distribution of Cahokian styles and artifacts enmeshed varied internal and external processes and flows that encompassed exploration, migration, diaspora, trade, and politics. While no evidence exists for a Cahokian outpost or diaspora as far south as Florida, the presence of American Bottom artifacts along the St. Johns River could have involved more than the stock answer of simple down-the-line-exchange. This essay explores issues of long-distance travel, direct contact, knowledge seeking, object biographies, and diplomacy among peoples from these geographically disparate locales.
... Big Bend area cordmarked sites are, in fact, a local expression of a wider phenomenon documented across much of the coastal plain. Concurrent with early Mississippian developments elsewhere, this swath of the region experienced rather conservative persistence of the locally developed pattern (Ashley 2002;Ashley et al. 2015;Milanich 1994a;Price and Tucker 2003;Schnell and Wright 1993;Stephenson and King 1992). This is not to say that Middle Mississippian and Early Lamar components do not occur at all on Big Bend sites, but when they do they are few in number and relatively scattered (Snow 1990). ...
This paper develops the case for an indigenous polity on the lower Ocmulgee River in Georgia. Doing so enhances understanding of the late prehistoric–early historic indigenous cultural landscape in the Atlantic coastal plain. It also allows for refined interpretation of indigenous responses to European colonial activities. Two lines of evidence, a ceramic attribute analysis and a European artifact analysis, are the principal new bases for establishing the polity’s history. These results indicate that three chiefly centers were sequentially occupied. Ultimately, under colonial-era stresses, the polity changed from having more to less interaction with external groups and it became more strongly oriented to the Atlantic coastal zone.
A renewed adoption of relational perspectives by archaeologists working in eastern North America has created an opportunity to move beyond categorical approaches, those reliant on the top-down implementation of essentialist models or “types.” Instead, emerging approaches, concerned with highlighting the agential power of relationships between individuals, communities, and institutions, and, more generally, with simply moving beyond categories, are allowing archaeologists to move from the bottom-up, focusing instead on the relationships that underlie, and indeed constitute, social, political, and economic phenomena. In this paper, I synthesize recent archaeological work from across eastern North America in which archaeologists have productively moved beyond a reliance on categorical perspectives. I explicitly focus on the potential for relational perspectives to recalibrate our social and temporal referents in crafting archaeological narratives.
In this article, the pottery production of indigenous groups living inside and outside of colonial spaces in southern Georgia is compared by identifying portions of the chaîne opératoire of pottery production. Diachronic and geographic changes to production demonstrate that groups living in the interior of Georgia were in continual interaction with coastal groups in the mission system. This interaction likely contributed to the emergence of the Altamaha pottery tradition, which spread from southern South Carolina to northern Florida during Spanish colonization of the region. This research shows that Native American groups navigating colonialism drew on a wide network of communities to alter traditions in the face of unprecedented social change.
Fine-grained “chalky” pottery containing microscopic sponge spicules is commonly recovered from archaeological sites throughout peninsular Florida, but many questions remain about its composition and origins. It is identified by different names, but most are associated with the St. Johns Type series. While it has been commonly assumed to originate in the St. Johns River drainage for which it is named, the prevalence of pottery with these characteristics in other locations has presented the likelihood of independent production in multiple places. In this study, we conducted LA-ICP-MS and XRD analysis of spiculate pottery from three Woodland period (ca. 1000 BCE to 1000 CE) sites, along with comparative clay samples, in order to characterize the raw materials and determine the geographic scope of production. Our results support the theory that this ware was independently produced across peninsular Florida. We further evaluate the hypothesis that this pottery was made with common wetland muck, through consideration of the material properties of muck constituents. This project emphasizes the importance of an ecosystem framework for understanding the long history of spiculate pottery production and its geographic spread within Florida.
The oldest pottery technology in North America was innovated by hunter-gatherers belonging to the Late Archaic Stallings culture (ca. 5150-3200 cal B.P.) of Georgia and South Carolina. The culture history of Stallings societies is relatively well-known; however, the permanence and scale of Stallings communities, the nature of the connections among them, and the extent to which they changed over time remain poorly understood. In this study, 450 samples Stallings pottery and 24 raw clay resource samples from along the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers were submitted for neutron activation analysis (NAA). The NAA results show a significant shift in the nature of vessel transport at the outset of the Classic Stallings phase (4100–3800 cal B.P.), an interval marked by the appearance of the region's first formalized circular villages and dedicated cemeteries. This shift involved the funneling of pots with carinated rims into a few major middle Savannah River mortuary sites, providing evidence for a novel Stallings sociality that combined relatively localized village life with periodic large-scale ritual gatherings.
Prehistoric archaeologists have done very little yet to explore how gender “works” within the historical processes of social construction during the long prehistory of the Southeast. As we undertake examinations of gender ideologies, roles, and relationships, applications of analogs play an important role. This is despite a distinctly unsettled agreement on uses of analogy in archaeology. In this piece, I explore archaeologists’ continued unease with the use of analogy in archaeological interpretation, assigning part of the blame to underlying and unresolved epistemological issues. A disciplined and studied use of formal analogies is suggested.
The amount of kaolinite and illite in bottom muds of Altamaha River and Sound, a partially-mixed estuary, does not vary appreciably downstream, indicating that the bulk of the clays is river-supplied. In contrast, much of the bottom mud of Sapelo Sound, a tidal-water body with minor freshwater discharge, seems to be derived from erosion of coastal outcrops. Our results suggest that the clay flux from ocean sources is minimal in either case, and tends to have been overestimated by previous workers. On the other hand, the clay flux from shore erosion tends to have been underestimated in sediment-budget studies of Georgia estuaries. -Authors
Prehistoric Exchange Systems in North America is the second of two volumes dealing with North American sociopolitical economies from the Archaic through Late Prehistoric periods. Taken as a whole, these two volumes seek to provide current information regarding exchange on a continental basis. As a result, the interregional interaction between different regions of North America may be established. Although the authors tend to view exchange from different theoretical viewpoints, each chapter provides data about (1) the types of commodities being exchanged, (2) the relative quantities of these goods, and (3) the sources from which they were obtained, if known.