Excavations at the Boland Site, 1984-1987: A Preliminary Report

Research Report No. 9, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reports in this series discuss the findings of archaeological excavations and research projects undertaken by the RLA between 1984 and present

Stone Quarries and Sourcing in the Carolina Slate Belt

Research Report No. 25, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reports in this series discuss the findings of archaeological excavations and research projects undertaken by the RLA between 1984 and present

An Abbreviated NAGPRA Inventory of the North Carolina Archaeological Collection

The Research Laboratories of Archaeology's inventory of human skeletal remains and associated and unassociated funerary objects from Native American sites in the North Carolina Archaeological Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Iconography of the thruston tablet

The Thruston Tablet - also known as the Rocky Creek Tablet - is among the most interesting and unusual artifacts ever found in the American South. It consists of an irregular limestone slab 19 inches long, 14 inches high, and 1 inch thick (about the size of a cafeteria tray). One side of the tablet (which we think of today as the obverse or front) is covered with engraved designs, consisting of many human forms arranged in multiple scenes. The tablet also has engraved images on the reverse, but these are faint and less distinct. The tablet is clearly Mississippian in age and probably dates to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries ad. Here we present our recent studies of the tablet\u27s imagery. We begin by reviewing past research on this object and describing our own recent investigations. We then present our analysis of the tablet\u27s iconography, a possible interpretation of its meaning, and a discussion of the tablet\u27s thematic and stylistic relationships. © 2011 by The University of Texas Press. All rights reserved

The Holly Bluff style

We recognize a new style of Mississippian-period art in the North American Southeast, calling it Holly Bluff. It is a two-dimensional style of representational art that appears solely on containers: marine shell cups and ceramic vessels. Iconographically, the style focuses on the depiction of zoomorphic supernatural powers of the Beneath World. Seriating the known corpus of images allows us to characterize three successive style phases, Holly Bluff I, II, and III. Using limited data, we source the style to the northern portion of the lower Mississippi Valley

The view from mazique (22ad502): the Coles Creek / Plaquemine cultural transition from the perspective of the Natchez Bluffs region of the Lower Mississippi Valley

At AD 1200, in the wake of the Mississippian florescence, the late Woodland occupants of the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) underwent a major reorganization of lifeways. Through the selective adoption of new forms of subsistence, settlement, and socio-political organization, Coles Creek culture was succeeded by Plaquemine culture. Current perceptions of this transition are informed principally by studies conducted in the Lower Yazoo and Tensas basins that have produced conflicting models of Plaquemine origins: the External Stimulus model and the Internal Development model. This dissertation contributes an examination of the Coles Creek/Plaquemine transition from the perspective of a third region of the LMV, the Natchez Bluffs. The Mazique site (22Ad502) is a late prehistoric mound and plaza center located in Adams County, Mississippi. Previous archaeological collections recovered here have identified both Coles Creek and Plaquemine components, making Mazique an ideal vantage from which to inspect the changes wrought by the Coles Creek/Plaquemine transition. The primary objective of this research was to determine which model of Plaquemine origins best accounts for the circumstances observed at a single Natchez Bluffs mound and plaza complex by evaluating whether the Coles Creek and Plaquemine settlement strategies employed here were more alike or different using three separate measures: intra-site settlement patterns, subsistence as inferred from vessel forms, and the history of mound construction. In 2012 and 2013, members of the Gulf Coast Survey shovel tested nearly 13 acres of the site and excavated another eight contexts. The results reveal that Mazique represents a remarkably complete Balmoral phase (AD 1000-1100) mound and plaza complex that was abandoned during the Gordon phase (AD 1100-1200), and experienced only ephemeral Plaquemine reoccupation during the Mississippi period (AD 1200-1650). When the intra-site circumstances observed at Mazique are considered from the intra-regional scale of the Natchez Bluffs, the inter-regional scale of the Coles Creek/Plaquemine heartland, and the pan-regional scale of the LMV, it is apparent that neither External Stimulus nor Internal Development offers a unifying explanation of Plaquemine origins. Therefore, I contend that the Coles Creek-Plaquemine transition is more aptly modeled as the convergence of the Coles Creek and Mississippian interaction spheres. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

The glass site (22wr502): an investigation of Plaquemine culture architecture, occupation, and interaction in the northern portion of the Natchez Bluffs Region, Mississippi

This dissertation reports the results of a multi-year archaeological study of Plaquemine culture in the Natchez Bluffs region in west-central Mississippi undertaken by the Gulf Coast Survey of the Alabama Museum of Natural History. The focus of this project, the Glass site (22Wr502), is a late-prehistoric Plaquemine culture mound center located in the northern portion of the Natchez Bluffs. Prior to the current study, little was known of Plaquemine occupation in the northern half of the Natchez Bluffs, especially when compared to our current knowledge of contemporary Plaquemine and Mississippian components in surrounding regions of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Archaeological excavations were conducted on the summit and base of the principal mound (A) at Glass in the summers 2007, 2008, and 2009. The prime purpose of this project is to investigate two late prehistoric burned wattle and daub structures (A.D. 1500-1650), which initially were detected on top of Mound A during testing and small-scale excavation of the site in 2007. Analyses of the architectural features and the artifact assemblage associated with these structures provide valuable data on elite occupation and cultural interaction at the site. The excavation of these structures adds to our knowledge of how elite architecture, such as temples or chief's houses, may have functioned in Plaquemine society. Excavations also were conducted at the base of Mound A in order to determine the chronology of mound building and the nature of artifacts associated with elite structures at the site. The results of this research are compared with that known from the southern half of the Natchez Bluffs, as well as the neighboring Lower Yazoo Basin, Upper Tensas Basin, and Lower Big Black regions, with the ultimate goal of better understanding Plaquemine culture in the Lower Mississippi Valley. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Ritual and power: examining the economy of Moundville's residential population

Household craft production and consumption play a key role in modeling the degree of economic control at Moundville. If production was household or corporately centered, then both utilitarian and non-utilitarian artifact classes should have a dispersed distribution of consumption across the site. If artifact production was organized at the polity level by elites, then artifact classes associated with elites should have a restricted distribution of consumption in specific areas where elite-controlled production occurred. To understand the way that craft production and consumption were negotiated at Moundville, this study examines data from off-mound residential areas excavated as part of four seasons of the Early Moundville Archaeological Project (EMAP). There are three objectives to examining and analyzing these data. The first objective is a site wide consumption pattern gathered from previous investigations at Moundville. The second objective is subsurface sampling, which allows for a site-wide comparison of the abundance of artifact classes through an observation of density measurements. The third objective, the excavation units, provides distribution, abundance, and context data that are compared across different areas Moundville and different contexts. The data lend evidence to suggest that certain expectations of the political economy model are not adequately represented in off-mound areas. First, there is evidence for both non-utilitarian crafts and production debris in residential middens, including abundances that are comparable to mound-top data. Second, craft production is found in domestic areas, and does not seem to be concentrated in specific areas of the site. With regards to ritual economy models, the data did not follow the pattern suggested by Kelly's Osage model, which focused stages of production; rather, Knight's mode that sees differing corporate groups specializing in specific goods with complementary exchange is a better fit with certain aspects of my data. Utlimately, data from the three objectives indicate variation in the amounts of locally available goods, but with nonlocal goods, there is an overwhelming pattern of redundancy through time. To best account for this pattern, I propose an alternative ritual economy model, ritual replication, which I feel best accounts for the pattern of redundancy in artifact classes across Moundville's habitation areas. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries