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Swift Creek at a human scale
Abstract
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 has been devoted to the carving of the wooden paddles and its social context. Drawing inferences from our work on Swift Creek pottery in southern Georgia and Florida, and drawing inspiration from the career of Mark Williams, we consider Swift Creek paddle production “at a human scale.” Extrapolating from the number of paddle designs identified in our sample, we argue that paddle manufacture was an infrequent occurrence, probably conducted by specialists and intended to commemorate major life events.
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 the entire temporal range of Native American history in the Southeast. I argue that the term “hunter-gatherers” itself is constraining. In its place, I suggest that a focus on institutional change and collective action provides a way to better connect histories across temporal units, which then allows for a greater understanding of how such traditions developed, were maintained (or abandoned), and reinvented over the course of history. At the end of the review, I pose five key research areas that archaeologists should focus on that speak to institutions, the nature of public and private goods, common pool resources, and collective action regarding large-scale labor projects.
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 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 across the southern landscape comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, a ubiquitous class of material culture that provides direct evidence of connections between specific sites at a multitude of scales and in myriad contexts. By combining design data and determinations of vessel provenance through Neutron Activation Analysis of a total of 825 sherds and 130 clay samples, this research ascertains types of social interaction and their predominant directions and levels of intensity across multiple ecological, social, and cultural contexts. The results indicate two main patterns: first, that vessels were frequently transported from habitation sites and civic-ceremonial centers to distant burial mounds; and second, that people traveled to ceremonial centers from outlying villages for events that included the exchange of wooden paddles. These patterns reveal a high level of social coordination within integrated networks that were inextricable from the region-wide trends toward population aggregation and heightened monumentality and rituality.
Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI36, 8CI40, 8CI41) are neighboring mound complexes on Florida’s west-central Gulf Coast, with mainly sequential occupations during the Middle and Late Woodland periods, respectively. Previous work at Crystal River produced assemblages marked by a diversity of pastes and surface treatments, suggestive of distinct communities of practice. However, these excavations were unsystematic and poorly controlled, thus confounding understanding of temporal and spatial variation in practice. Recent excavations in domestic areas, combined with the analysis of older collections from mounds, support a finer-grained understanding of variation in ceramic production. Our analysis suggests that communities of practice persisted through time, although there is variation that corresponds well with changes in settlement.
The emergence of the Swift Creek style tradition represents a shift from two or three simple carved paddle designs to many thousands of unique paddle designs by middle Swift Creek then back to merely a few in late and post Swift Creek times. This explosion in designs is a striking phenomenon, in need of consideration. Increased design diversity implicates a rise in creativity, verging on an imperative to be unique, where none previously existed in this medium. In this paper, we offer a revised model of Swift Creek social dynamics by reference to the new-found creativity of paddle makers situated within the context of ethnographic case studies.
Our work here extends a study in which we identified a set of task models used by early Swift Creek artisans to produce paddle designs. Reconstructed procedures for early bandwork compositions highlighted the importance of the placement of guide points and guidelines to the final product as well as the hierarchal nature of the production sequence, leading to the realization that designs can be profitably classified by the geometry of these initial steps. In this paper, we examine two layout classes defined from observations across some of the more common core elements in the Swift Creek design corpus. We then seriate the most common of the core elements, the Omega, by virtue of variation in its visual characteristics. We draw on the stratigraphic sequence at Fairchild’s Landing (9SE14), Seminole County, Georgia, as a test of the core-element seriation and discuss developmental differences in the Omega between two prolific Swift Creek regions, the lower Chattahoochee River of southwestern Georgia and southeastern Alabama and the lower Ocmulgee and upper Satilla rivers of central and south-central Georgia, on the other.
Woodland period Swift Creek designs have received considerable attention in recent years. Bettye Broyles and Frankie Snow, among few others, have created a working corpus within which stylistic aspects of Swift Creek designs can be explored. Here, we focus both on “observer” models that governed acceptable visual form and on “task” models used by Swift Creek artisans to produce that form by creating paddle designs. Reconstructed procedures for several paddle designs emphasize the stepwise nature of creating art in this style. We discuss the key importance of guide points, guidelines, and creatively manipulated bandwork in Swift Creek compositions. Using this approach, we hope to demonstrate the value of reconstructed whole paddle designs in the study of layout, symmetry, design concept, and other stylistic domains. Finally, we chart the historical trajectories of selected style characteristics through time and offer suggestions for future research in this domain.
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 qualities of designs stamped into vessel surfaces. Archaeologists have proffered various hypotheses to explain movement of ceramic vessels or the carved wooden paddles used in the manufacture of these vessels. This study tests these hypotheses and indicates that nonlocal vessels, particularly complicated stamped ones, were deposited almost exclusively in mortuary contexts, a pattern that requires new explanations for the role of pottery in social interactions. These data are being integrated with a larger project that aims to reveal the social processes that were tied to the manufacture, use, and distribution of pottery.
Some of the most interesting and puzzling early guitar sources are held in Portugal, at Lisbon's Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and at Coimbra University Library. Notated in tablature, they display a large number of pieces of supposed African origin, along with many Iberian dances and instrumental items. While the African influence is suggested by the titles, literary sources, historical context and musical features, dances such as the arromba , cãozinho , cubanco , gandu , sarambeque , cumbé and paracumbé also reveal a strong connection with Iberian forms from the period, such as the canario , villano and jácaras . Its ultimate place of origin—Africa, Iberia or America—does not seem as relevant as the interaction process itself, with all the economic, social, racial and political implications: most of that repertory was shared by musicians in different places of the Iberian dominions in Europe, Africa and the Americas, be they white or black, slaves or free artists. The article contextualizes that repertory historically, relying mostly on the works by Brazilian poet Gregório de Mattos (1636–96), a source of information on the music heard in the streets, homes, convents and brothels of 17th-century Brazil. Many of his descriptions and opinions deal with the music of slaves, free blacks and mulattos; they include many of the titles found in Portuguese guitar tablatures. The analysis of this musical material raises important questions that are addressed in the article: was this music created by black guitar players who assimilated Iberian materials and playing techniques? Or was it composed by white Iberian musicians, maybe as exotic depictions, or caricatures? What is African and what is Iberian in such music, and on what terms did such interaction take place? The article finishes with historical data on Brazilian mulatto musicians—guitar players, singers and poets—who lived in Lisbon and enjoyed some success during the second half of the 18th century.
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 into a clay vessel before firing, provide unique signatures that enable archaeologists to identify paddle matches—multiple vessels, sometimes hundreds of kilometers apart, stamped with a single paddle. These paddle matches potentially allow archaeologists to trace social interactions across hundreds of kilometers with high spatial and temporal resolution. To date, however, this potential has been hindered by the limited accessibility and fragmented nature of the dataset of reconstructed designs. The database we describe integrates paddle designs with other pertinent data for identifying paddle matches and their context, including the results of sourcing and technofunctional analyses and absolute dating. We view this database not only as a critical component of our own research, but also as a platform for collaboration among researchers that will facilitate broad syntheses of the region.
Petrography is the microscopic examination of thin sections of pottery to determine their precise mineralogical composition. In this groundbreaking work, James B. Stoltman applies quantitative as well as qualitative methods to the petrography of Native American ceramics. As explained in Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction, by adapting refinements to the technique of petrography, Stoltman offers a powerful new set of tools that enables fact-based and rigorous identification of the composition and sources of pottery. Stoltman's subject is the cultural interaction among the Hopewell Interaction Sphere societies of the Ohio Valley region and contemporary peoples of the Southeast. Inferring social and commercial relationships between disparate communities by determining whether objects found in one settlement originated there or elsewhere is a foundational technique of archaeology. The technique, however, rests on the informed but necessarily imperfect visual inspection of objects by archaeologists. Petrography greatly amplifies archaeologists' ability to determine objects“ provenance with greater precision and less guesswork. Using petrography to study a vast quantity of pottery samples sourced from Hopewell communities, Stoltman is able for the first time to establish which items are local, which are local but atypical, and which originated elsewhere. Another exciting possibility with petrography is to further determine the home source of objects that came from afar. Thus, combining traditional qualitative techniques with a wealth of new quantitative data, Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction offers a map of social and trade relationships among communities within and beyond the Hopewell Interaction Sphere with much greater precision and confidence than in the past. Ceramic Petrography and Hopewell Interaction provides a clear and concise explanation of petrographic methods, Stoltman“ s findings about Hopewell and southeastern ceramics in various sites, and the fascinating discovery that visits to Hopewell centers by southeastern Native Americans were not only for trade purposes but more for such purposes as pilgrimages, vision- and power-questing, healing, and the acquisition of knowledge. © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.
Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, dating to the Middle and Late Woodland periods, is one of the most distinctive ceramic types in eastern North America. Stylistic analyses of Swift Creek pottery have focused mainly on the spatial distributions of individual paddle designs reconstructed from stamped impressions on pottery. These studies have proven useful for tracking instances of social interaction but offer little help in the identification of assemblage-level variation and broader social processes. Symmetry analysis offers one possible avenue for the comparison of Swift Creek assemblages. In this pilot study, I consider the symmetry of more than 200 reconstructed Swift Creek paddle designs. The results indicate a concern with mirror symmetry, rotational symmetry, or a combination of both. I next contrast the symmetry of sub-assemblages from the site of Kolomoki, a Woodland ceremonial center in southwestern Georgia. The analysis reveals consistency in the symmetry of assemblages from village deposits, while mound contexts are in many ways unique. I relate these trends to broader social trends, particularly the development of an active strategy of social incorporation.
In the last few decades, archaeologists have increasingly studied the material expression of religion. At the same time, they have recognized that some objects are animate in ways similar to people. Building on previous research that combines studies of religion, object agency and behavioural perspectives, we present an approach that focuses on the variety of rituals, especially rites of passage, in which objects participate over the course of their life histories. Occurring in societies at all levels of organizational complexity, rites of passage offer archaeologists an opportunity to contribute to the anthropology of ritual and an understanding of the ways that some objects take on, or are given, attributes of life. More subtly, by comparing the rites of passage of objects and the people who interact with them, we can assess differences in the specific qualities of object and human agency. These approaches may help us to orient the search for archaeological evidence of rites of passage as well as to interpret enigmatic deposits such as caches, hoards and offerings.
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 utilitarian vessels, or the wooden tools used to make them, distributed widely across the landscape? This book assesses Woodland Period interactions using technofunctional, mineralogical, and chemical data derived from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped sherds whose provenience is fully documented from both mortuary mounds and village middens along the Atlantic coast. Together, these data demonstrate formal and functional differences between mortuary and village assemblages along with the nearly exclusive occurrence of foreign-made cooking pots in mortuary contexts. The Swift Creek Gift provides insight into the unique workings of gift exchanges to transform seemingly mundane materials like cooking pots into powerful tools of commemoration, affiliation, and ownership. © 2011 by The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.
In the past two decades, the study of craft production has emerged as a major focus of archaeological research, integrating
interests in technology, material culture, daily activities, ecology, economic organization, political economy, and exchange.
There have been advances on all fronts of the inquiry: definition of the concepts and questions addressed, development of
analytic techniques, statement of epistemology and theory, and presentation of a wealth of data from substantive case studies
(compare Tringham, 1996:234; e.g., Bey and Pool, 1992; Brumfiel and Earle, 1987b; Clark and Parry, 1990; Costin, 1991; Costin
and Wright, 1998; Dobres and Hoffman, 1994; Mills and Crown, 1995; Peregrine, 1991b; Wailes, 1996).
The first comprehensive and systematic investigation of a Woodland period ceremonial center. Kolomoki, one of the most impressive archaeological sites in the southeastern United States, includes at least nine large earthen mounds in the lower Chattahoochee River valley of southwest Georgia. The largest, Mound A, rises approximately 20 meters above the terrace that borders it. From its flat-topped summit, a visitor can survey the string of smaller mounds that form an arc to the south and west. Archaeological research had previously placed Kolomoki within the Mississippian period (ca. a.d. 1000-1500) primarily because of the size and form of the mounds. But this book presents data for the main period of occupation and mound construction that confirm an earlier date, in the Woodland period (ca. a.d. 350-750). Even though the long-standing confusion over Kolomoki's dating has now been settled, questions remain regarding the lifeways of its inhabitants. Thomas Pluckhahn's research has recovered evidence concerning the level of site occupation and the house styles and daily lives of its dwellers. He presents here a new, revised history of Kolomoki from its founding to its eventual abandonment, with particular attention to the economy and ceremony at the settlement. This study makes an important contribution to the understanding of 'middle range' societies, particularly the manner in which ceremony could both level and accentuate status differentiation within them. It provides a readable overview of one of the most important--but historically least understood--prehistoric Native American sites in the United States. Thomas J. Pluckhahn is Instructor in Anthropology at the University of Georgia and an archaeologist with Southeastern Archeological Services, Inc.
Thesis--University of Georgia, 1975. Directed by Wilfrid C. Bailey.
Report of the Excavations at Fairchild’s Landing and Hare’s Landing
- Joseph R Caldwell
The Swift Creek Site and Woodland Platform Mounds in the Southeastern United States
- Richard W Jefferies
Pottery Exchange and Interaction at the Crystal River Site (8CI1), Florida. Master’s thesis
- Kassie C Kemp
Swift Creek Designs and Distributions: A South Georgia Study
- Frankie Snow
Understanding Identity Through Ceramic Analysis at the Crystal River and Roberts Island Sites. Master’s thesis
- Rachel E Thompson
Carved Paddle Decoration of Pottery and Its Capacity for Inference in Archaeology: An Example From the Solomon Islands
- Geoffrey Irwin
Anthropological Papers No. 10. Museum of Anthropology
- William Newcomb
- Wilmon
Swift Creek to Square Ground Lamar: Situating the Ocmulgee Big Bend Region in Calibrated Time
- Keith Stephenson
- Frankie Snow
Reconstructed Designs From Swift Creek Complicated Stamped Sherds
- Bettye J Broyles
In Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey 2013-2014: Shell Mound and Cedar Key Tracts
- M C Donop
Swift Creek and Santa Rosa in Northwest Florida. South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology
- David S Phelps
Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa. Submitted to Georgia Department of Natural Resources
- Thomas J Pluckhahn
Swift Creek Design Catalog
- Frankie Snow
Aboriginal Pottery of the Eastern United States
- William Holmes
- Henry
The Swift Creek Site
- A R Kelly
- Betty A Smith
Excavation of the Truncated Mound at the Walling Site: Middle Woodland Culture and Copena in the Tennessee Valley
- Vernon J Knight
- Jr
An Archaeological Survey of the Ocmulgee Big Bend Region: A Preliminary Report
- Frankie Snow
Lithics, Shellfish, and Beavers
- Mark Williams
- Scott Jones
The Overgrown Road Site (8GU38): A Swift Creek Camp in the Lower Apalachicola Valley
- Nancy White
- Marie