From Foraging to Food Production on the Southern Cumberland Plateau of Alabama and Tennessee, U.S.A.

Research involving the origin of plant domestication remains as important today as ever. While early anthropologists viewed plant domestication as a necessary precondition for cultural development, more recent ethnographic studies have shown that agriculture was a much more labor intensive subsistence practice than hunting and gathering, leading many to question the reasons behind the prehistoric transition. Today, research and advances in technology have provided conclusive evidence to include the Eastern Woodlands of North America as one of the eight global centers of indigenous plant domestication. Although the timing of domestication and the plants involved in early horticultural systems are well understood, several questions remain unanswered. Today, most models suggest that initial plant domestication occurred either in the heavily populated river valleys, or in the surrounding uplands that were also frequented by prehistoric groups. To test these models, I analyzed plant assemblages from five sites containing Archaic through Woodland period deposits, the time periods preceding, following, and during which initial plant domestication occurred. The sites were selected for their geographic position and proximity to each other. Found within a 20-mile radius of one another, Michaels Shelter and Uzzelles Shelter are located in the uplands of the southern Cumberland Plateau, Widows Creek and Mussel Beach are located in the Tennessee River Valley, and Russell Cave is situated approximately halfway between the upland and river valley sites. My results from analyzing the plant remains from these five sites show that the conditions that favored early plant domestication in floodplain settings across the region were also present in upland settings. These factors include rich soils, highly disturbed landscapes, and the frequent reoccupation of sites in areas where plant food resources naturally occurred and were encountered on the landscape. All of these factors contributed to initial plant domestication in both the upland and floodplain environments across the Eastern Woodlands. Additionally, through the application of the diet breadth and central place foraging models, I explain how individual decision-making processes in small scale societies, and not geographical location, resulted in the cultivation and domestication of indigenous plants

Methodological lagniappe: a walk in representations of the Red Stick Farmers Market

In this thesis, I take you on a walk – a walk in the making of representations – around the Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This thesis is written at a moment of instability, or crisis, in this discipline. In a “crisis of representation,” how do we represent anything? Experimenting with various methodologies of writing, representation, dialogic performance, history, and ethnographic inquiry, this thesis provides a walk over various terrains. We begin by building the framework for the walk, then tour three areas of ethnographic expansions and alternatives: new ethnography, performative writing, and historicity. John VanMaanen calls for an “impressionistic ethnography,” which is the telling and re-telling of the “backstage” stories of ethnography. Ask a dancer, and she might tell you that the “backstage” stories are not only about the costumes and the scenery of the ballet; the “backstage” stories are also about the blisters, the politics of who “gets” which role, the lives that dancers, choreographers, and set-designers live outside of the studios and stages, the people who sit in the audience, and many other things. The “backstage” stories of ethnography are also vast. For these purposes, the chapters of this thesis focus on three of the more “banal” elements of doing ethnography at the Red Stick Farmers Market: mushroom soup, cookies, and dirt. These three elements provide an exploration of writing, making, and “doing” ethnography at this point in time

Time and Relative Dimension in Space: Untangling site formation and taphonomic processes on archaeological shell from the tropical Indo-Pacific

Understanding the formation and transformation of an archaeological site is imperative to creating robust inferences about human behaviour. Relatively little work has been undertaken on the varying anthropic and non-anthropic taphonomic processes that affect shell-bearing archaeological sites, particularly in tropical locations which are prone to extreme weathering and issues of long-term preservation. This thesis provides a greater comprehension of taphonomic processes impacting archaeological shell material and uses this understanding to untangle complex spatial and temporal aspects of an archaeological site in the Indo-Pacific. Two key areas of shell taphonomy include thermal influences, such as burning and heating, and acid dissolution. Experimental studies were undertaken on each of these processes and show variable results between taxa or microstructural type. Building upon these experiments, high-resolution taphonomic analyses of archaeological shell from Golo Cave, Gebe Island, Indonesia highlight taxon-specific patterning of various taphonomic processes (seen through varying physical traces) as well as overall trends in material deposition and preservation linked to human behaviours. The individual environmental conditions of this site also impact the types and intensity of taphonomic processes and thus the formation and transformation of the deposits. This is primarily seen through fragmentation rates, burning, physical abrasion, chemical dissolution, and bioerosion. Thermal influences have a distinct impact on the presence and degree of other taphonomic processes such as bioerosion and fragmentation, highlighting the connectivity between different processes. High-resolution analyses of shell midden from this site reveals periods of intensive occupation and changes in environmental conditions. Each shell tells a story, thus high-resolution taphonomic analyses provides a method to understand how different variables impact the formation and transformation of a site. This approach to shell analysis can provide a sharper understanding of the occupation of a site, particularly when stratigraphy does not provide a clear picture of site formation. It is through the examination of pre- and post-depositional taphonomic processes that archaeologists can create robust inferences about human behaviour, hence the importance of discerning the effects of varying processes on shell material

No Tunes Chime Amidst the Bones: A Zooarchaeological Analysis of Saltpeter Cave (3NW29), an Ozarchaic Bluffshelter in Northwest Arkansas

The Southeastern Ozarks region is a karst limestone environment featuring many sheltered sites, including Saltpeter Cave in Newton County, Arkansas. Early and Middle Archaic components of this site assemblage contain abundant faunal materials that illustrate how Ozarchaic peoples modified their subsistence strategies to accommodate significant climate change that began ~10,000 years ago. I have employed several quantitative techniques, including, density-mediated attrition analysis, diet breadth models, and bone fragmentation patterns to investigate the hunting and trapping practices at this southern Ozarchaic site. I have also employed small mammal representation and correspondence analysis using datasets from Dust Cave, Modoc Rock Shelter, and Little Freeman Cave in Alabama, Illinois, and Missouri respectively to contextualize these practices in a broader landscape. While people living in other regions of the Eastern Woodlands appear to have altered their species selection patterns to cope with these changes, the people occupying Saltpeter Cave retained a selective concentration on forested patches which they quarried for game in what must have been a diverse mosaic landscape between 10,000 and 4,000 cal BP

Storyteller, Story-Teacher: A Portrait of Three Teachers? Use of Story in Elementary Classes

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the use of storytelling as a teaching strategy in the classrooms of three experienced elementary school teachers. Storytelling is defined in this study as the use of a narrative, spoken or written, in prose or in verse, true or fictitious, related so as to inform, entertain, or instruct the listener or reader. This research answers questions concerning; (a) what constitutes storytelling in these teachers’ classrooms, (b) teachers’ purposes for using storytelling, and (c) factors that have encouraged these teachers to employ storytelling in their teaching practices. Framed within constructivist theory, the study provides insight into how these three respondents teach content through storytelling and bridge information from teller to listener. Data collection included classroom observations, interviews of teacher-participants, and the collection of teacher-generated artifacts such as lesson plans and teacher notes. Portraiture is used as a method for writing up the data in order to record the perspectives and experiences of the participants in this study by documenting their voices, visions, and wisdom in a detailed exploration into the feelings about and use of storytelling in their teaching practices. The instructional strategies reported through this qualitative inquiry support a socio-cognitive interactive model of literacy and demonstrate its importance in learning content in an elementary school environment. The data were analyzed continually through a search for emerging patterns and through constant comparison analysis. The researcher found that the teachers used stories and illustrations in an impromptu manner and that storytelling served both cognitive and affective purposes. Cognitively, storytelling was employed to form connections to students’ prior knowledge and new knowledge being introduced. Storytelling was used as a mnemonic device to help students transfer storied information to new situations. Affectively, storytelling served to engage students in an enlightening and entertaining manner. Students responded to the use of stories through actively participating in classroom discussions and sharing stories of their own. Storytelling assists these teachers in their critical roles as negotiators and facilitators of meaning construction in the text and social context of the classroom

ASSEMBLING ENSLAVED LIVES: LABOR, CONSUMPTION, AND LANDSCAPES IN THE NORTHERN SHENANDOAH VALLEY

This dissertation is a study of the lives of some of the people enslaved on rural plantations and farmsteads in the northern Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. Scholars did not widely acknowledge the presence of slavery in the Valley before the 1990s, and this is the first work to provide an in-depth view of the lives of enslaved Shenandoahans before 1860. Specifically, this project answers two questions: what was life like for enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley, and how did they shape the region\u27s political economies. Data for this project comes from archaeological excavations at the main enslaved quartering site at Belle Grove Plantation and 19th-century written sources from Frederick and Shenandoah Counties, Virginia, and Jefferson County, West Virginia. Using these sources, this dissertation assesses 1) the impact grain agriculture had on enslaved people and the economic impact of enslaved farmers, 2) the food rations issued to enslaved Shenandoahans and the ways they grew, gathered, raised, and hunted at night and on Sundays to ensure their families had enough to eat, 3) how restrictions on enslaved people’s consumption practices limited their ability to travel to, and buy goods from, cities, towns, and country stores, 4) the ways enslaved people used imported tea and tablewares and locally-made utilitarian ceramics to make lives for themselves, and the larger economic implications of these actions, and 5) the struggles between enslaved Shenandoahans and their enslavers that took place through local landscapes. In addition to its contribution to Shenandoah Valley history, this dissertation proposes new ways of theorizing archaeological research on enslaved life that draws heavily from assemblage thinking and Black studies, focusing on ontological politics through which how enslavers defined enslaved people as a different type of human than themselves and enslaved people redefined their humanities on their own terms

The Allegheny Frontier: West Virginia Beginnings, 1730–1830

The Allegheny frontier, comprising the mountainous area of present-day West Virginia and bordering states, is studied here in a broad context of frontier history and national development. The region was significant in the great American westward movement, but Otis K. Rice seeks also to call attention to the impact of the frontier experience upon the later history of the Allegheny Highlands. He sees a relationship between its prolonged frontier experience and the problems of Appalachia in the twentieth century. Through an intensive study of the social, economic, and political developments in pioneer West Virginia, Rice shows that during the period 1730–1830 some of the most significant features of West Virginia life and thought were established. There also appeared evidences of arrested development, which contrasted sharply with the expansiveness, ebullience, and optimism commonly associated with the American frontier. In this period customs, manners, and folkways associated with the conquest of the wilderness to root and became characteristic of the mountainous region well into the twentieth century. During this pioneer period, problems also took root that continue to be associated with the region, such as poverty, poor infrastructure, lack of economic development, and problematic education. Since the West Virginia frontier played an important role in the westward thrust of migration through the Alleghenies, Rice also provides some account of the role of West Virginia in the French and Indian War, eighteenth-century land speculations, the Revolutionary War, and national events after the establishment of the federal government in 1789. Otis K. Rice is professor of history and chairman of the department at West Virginia Institute of Technology.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/1078/thumbnail.jp