HUM 221: SE archaeology, & a book plug

Today we’re going to start looking at the Native American peoples of the Old Southwest (which now we think of as the Southeast, if you’re not confused enough already)! Read the autobiographical essay by Carroll Arnett (Gogisgi) in “Here First,” and be sure to come to class Friday and Monday while we screen a video produced by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation in North Carolina about their history, culture, heritage and plans for the future.

So today we’ll look at a couple of websites that suggest what archaeology can tell us about the prehistory of what is now Alabama. But first, the book plug: Our textbook "Native North America" is organized a very brief encyclopedia. If you don't read it, you'll be lost as we hop, skip and jump from Alaska one day (that would be Monday) to Alabama today. With nothing in between!

Well, the "in-between" is the chapters on the Woodland and Southeastern culture areas in "Native North America." They're very brief, and they'll help tie things together.


As we read about the archaic, Woodland and Mississippean cultures, remind yourself how much of this information is inferred from the things, the artifacts, that archaeologists find in the ground. And think about how very little it tells us. We know what the people did, for example. We can figure that out from the tools they left. But we don’t know who they were, what languages they spoke and how they thought. Language and thought don’t leave traces in the ground.

Or do they?

What do the rattlesnake pendants left by Mississippean Indians, for example, allow us to guess about their beliefs and ceremonies?

The second website is a project of the the Southeast Archeological Center in Tallahassee. It has a detailed, unbiased and very informative Outline of Prehistory and History of the Southeast that goes over the same material in greater detail.

Notice again how scientists infer what we know about the ancient cultures from the material culture they leave behind. For example, they can guess the following from a dig called Poverty Point in Louisiana:

Poverty Point sites in Louisiana and western Mississippi exhibit the first major residential settlements and monumental earthworks in the United States. Although the Poverty Point culture is not well understood in terms of social organization, it was involved in the transportation of nonlocal raw materials (for example, shell, stone, and copper) from throughout the eastern United States into the lower Mississippi River Valley to selected sites where the materials were worked into finished products and then traded. While specific information on Poverty Point subsistence, trade mechanisms, and other cultural aspects is still speculative, the sites nevertheless exhibit specific material culture, such as baked clay objects, magnetite plummets, steatite bowls, red-jasper lapidary work, fiber-tempered pottery, and microlithic stone tools.
In Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, fiber-tempered pottery from the 5,200 to 3,200 years ago (4,500 to 3,000 rcbp) period is not usually found. This area appears to have functioned as a transitional cultural area through which ceramic influences from the Ohio River Valley and the Middle Atlantic were introduced into the Deep South. For example, northern-inspired grit-tempered plain, fabric-impressed, and cord-marked Early Woodland pottery first appeared in central and eastern Kentucky around 3,200 to 2,600 years ago (3,000 to 2,800 rcbp), and, by the end of the Early Woodland period 2,600 years ago (2800 to 2500 rcbp), it had replaced fiber-tempered wares throughout the Southeast.

See how much of this is guesswork? How much of it is scientific reasoning, i.e. the formulation and testing of a hypothesis (actually a number of hypotheses) based on research?