The Development of Southeastern Archaeology

421 Pages·1993·1.91 MB·English

by  Jay K. Johnson

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title: The Development of Southeastern Archaeology
author: Johnson, Jay K.
publisher: University of Alabama Press
isbn10 | asin: 0817306005
print isbn13: 9780817306007
ebook isbn13: 9780585140919
language: English
subject Archaeology--Southern States, Indians of North America-
-Southern States--Antiquities, Southern States--
Antiquities.
publication date: 1992
lcc: CC101.U6D48 1993eb
ddc: 975/.01
subject: Archaeology--Southern States, Indians of North America-
-Southern States--Antiquities, Southern States--
Antiquities.
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The Development of Southeastern Archaeology
Edited by
Jay K. Johnson
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa & London

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Copyright © 1993 by
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
designed by zig zeigler
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Development of southeastern archaeology / edited by Jay K.
Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8173-0600-5
1. ArchaeologySouthern States. 2. Indians of North America
Southern StatesAntiquities. 3. Southern StatesAntiquities.
I. Johnson, Jay K.
CC101.U6D48 1993
975´.01dc20 92-22915
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

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for
Kermit Isaac and Violet Lani Johnson

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Contents
Preface
Jay K. Johnson ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1
Changing Paradigms in the Explanation of Southeastern Prehistory
David S. Brose 1
2
Ceramics
Jon L. Gibson 18
3
Lithics
Jay K. Johnson 36
4
Physical Anthropology
Maria O. Smith 53
5
Ethnohistory
Patricia K. Galloway 78
6
Zooarchaeology
Elizabeth J. Reitz 109
7
Paleoethnobotany
Kristen J. Gremillion 132

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8
Archaeometry
Ronald L. Bishop and Veletta Canouts 160
9
Multispectral Digital Imagery
W. Fredrick Limp 184
10
Conclusion
Jay K. Johnson 207
References Cited 215
Contributors 327
Index 331

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Preface
This book is a good example of serendipity. Not that it does not represent hard work as well, but it never hurts to
be in the right place at the right time. It all started when I attended a workshop on remote sensing and archaeology
at Boston University in the summer of 1987. Among the many interesting people I met there was Anna Roosevelt,
whose primary geographical emphasis is the lower Amazon. Two years later, when the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was planning a meeting in New Orleans for February 1990, the program
committee decided that a session on southeastern archaeology would be appropriate. There were no southeastern
archaeologists on the program committee, and in fact, I know of no southeastern archaeologists who are members
of the AAAS, a point which may or may not say something about southeastern archaeology. At any rate,
Roosevelt, who is a member of the AAAS, remembered that I was a southeastern archaeologist and asked if I
would be interested in organizing a symposium. When I said yes, she teamed me up with Rolfe Sinclair, a physicist
with a passion for archaeology and many years of experience in organizing symposia for the AAAS.
As long as it dealt with southeastern archaeology, the focus of the symposium was pretty much up to me. In the
past few years I have become interested in the history of the development of archaeology, how what was done and
published in 1970 affects us today and how that is a response to what was done and published in 1940 and so on. It
may be a mark of professional middle age but I find this topic fascinating and decided it might have some appeal
to the audience of scientists and informed laymen I was told would attend the meeting. I also hoped to find

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other archaeologists in the Southeast who wanted to examine the professional roots of their own subdisciplines in
the way I intended to do for lithic analysis. I was not disappointed. Several phone calls filled a session with 30-
minute presentations by David Brose, Pat Galloway, Jon Gibson, Jack Eddy, and me. I collected the abstracts, and
Sinclair put together the paperwork for the symposium.
Late in the summer of 1989 I was contacted by Susan McMurry, an editor for the AAAS, who asked if I would be
interested in expanding the session into a book. I had just recovered from editing a collection of papers on lithic
technology two years earlier and was reluctant to start another so soon. Nevertheless, the topic and the publisher
lured me in. I agreed to expand the volume by adding chapters on topics that we would not have time to cover in
the symposium and to produce a book proposal.
We all showed up in New Orleans the day before the session. Sinclair had organized a dinner that included all of
the archaeologists on the program, primarily members of our session and a session on the Southwest. We went to a
small neighborhood restaurant somewhere northeast of the French Quarter, which I could not find again on a bet.
The seafood was good and several of us drank Dixie beer in honor of the fact that we were in New Orleans. The
session the next day was nearly as much fun as the dinner the night before. Clearly, the development of
archaeology is something that other archaeologists also find interesting. We had the makings of what appeared to
me to be a fine book.
I heard from the AAAS in March 1990. Their reviewers had concluded that "While such a treatment of the subject
is definitely useful, it is more regional in nature than the kind of volume for which we have an established market.
Perhaps a publisher in your geographical area, particularly one specializing in anthropology, would be better able
to reach the target audience for such a collection than can AAAS." As it turns out, this was excellent advice. Judith
Knight, the editor for anthropology books at The University of Alabama Press, has been enthusiastic and
supportive from our first inquiry until our last deadline.
A glance at the table of contents will show that all but Jack Eddy were able to provide a manuscript. Eddy's talk
was on archaeoastronomy and it was well received at the meeting, but other commitments prevented him from
contributing to the book. Five other chapters were solicited, and after several late nights spent in word processing,
I turned over a first draft of the manuscript to Judy Knight at the Southeastern Conference meeting held in Mobile
early in November 1990. Having the whole thing in the same format and printed out on a laser printer made it look
like a book and I was pleased with the content. Still, I was relieved

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when both of the reviews came back positive in March 1991. The next five months were spent in the second round
of revisions.
Now you know how we got to this point and you might wonder if it was worth the effort. I think so, but that is
hardly an unbiased evaluation. You will have to decide. But I do think we can agree that such a book has been
needed. The Southeast has contributed a great deal to the development of American archaeology as a science, but
the contribution has not been constant through time or across the subdisciplines. The format of this book allows the
mosaic nature of this development to be examined and related to special features of the landscape and history of
the Southeast. Also, I spent three weeks collating and checking the references and I can say that there are a
staggering number of them. The access they provide to the literature on southeastern archaeology should prove
valuable. I was pleased to note that the author of the largest number of cited references is James Ford. While a
simple count may not always be a good measure of the importance of a contributor's work (only two of Joffre
Coe's works are cited), in this case it is. Scientists have often observed that they stand on the shoulders of those
who came before. If nothing else, this collection gives us some idea of who these people have been and how broad
their shoulders were.
In my initial correspondence to contributors I asked that they relate changes in method to changes in theory in their
areas of specialty, and one of the working titles for the manuscript was "Method and Theory in Southeastern
Archaeology." Both of the reviewers, however, noted that the following essays emphasize method more than
theory, and the title was not only presumptuous, it was inaccurate. One of the things clearly documented in this
book is that the Southeast has not taken part in either the theoretical exchange that led to the new archaeology of
the 1960s or the reaction that produced the postprocessual archaeology of the 1990s. As one reviewer commented,
southeastern archaeologists have been "mostly theory consumers rather than generators."
This was not always the case. During the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of culture history, the Southeast led the way
in both method and theory. Why were southeastern archaeologists prime conspirators in the earlier revolution and
bystanders to the events that followed? Certainly it has nothing to do with the nature of the archaeological record.
As these reviews demonstrate, you can do new archaeology just as well (or as badly) in the Southeast as you can in
the Southwest. While it is true that the Southeast is a conservative place, this also is a constant. It was just as
conservative in the 1930s, when change was the order of the day in archaeology.
Anticipating a point that is made in more detail in the conclusion, I

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believe that the difference has to do with the structure of the two revolutions. Culture history was a product of the
federal relief programs of the depression, and the Southeast was a major focus of such programs. Photographs of
immaculate profiles 70 feet long and 20 feet high in the shell mounds of the central Tennessee River valley are
eloquent testimonies to scale of the excavations and their potential for culture history studies. New archaeology, on
the other hand, grew in an academic setting, and Ph.D. programs in anthropology in the Southeast have been
limited to a few universities until quite recently. Each chapter of this book documents the introduction of new
archaeology into the Southeast as a consequence of cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology, and there is
no greater consumer of theory than CRM.
Regardless of whether it is a producer or consumer, the Southeast has provided a fertile testing ground for theory.
The rich and complex prehistoric record in combination with a diversified environment provide the opportunity for
southeastern archaeologists to produce results that have importance beyond the region. The following essays
document this to have been the case in the past and point to the potential for the future.
JAY K. JOHNSON

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