The blog has been on the back burner while I deal with the beginning-of-the-semester crunch. I've got a lot going on this year, so I'll probably have less time to write than I did in years past. Keeping all the parts of my three-headed monster of a research agenda moving is more than a full time job.

I wanted to write a quick post about the presentations I've committed to for the fall (SEAC) and spring (SAA) conferences, as they give you a pretty good idea on what's going on with some of my "big picture" work.  I gave a presentation about my work on understanding the Kirk Horizon to the Augusta Archaeological Society at the end of August, and I'll be giving an informal presentation to SCIAA next week synthesizing what we know so far about the natural/cultural deposits at 38FA608 (site of last spring's Broad River Archaeological Field School). Here's what I'll be doing at the regional and national conferences:

SEAC (November 2017, Tulsa, OK)

David Anderson and I are teaming up to give a paper titled "Structure, Density, and Movement: Large-Scale Datasets and Basic Questions about Early Foraging Societies in the Eastern Woodlands." The paper will part of a symposium organized by Shane Miller, Ashley Smallwood, and Jesse Tune titled The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast: The Last 20 Years, 1996-2016. Here is the abstract of our paper:

"Distributions of diagnostic projectile points show that the Paleoindian and Early Archaic societies of the Eastern Woodlands were spatially-extensive, occupying vast and varied landscapes stretching from the Great Lakes to the Florida Peninsula. The scales of these societies present analytical challenges to understanding both (1) their organization and (2) how and why the densities and distributions of population changed during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. We integrate several large datasets – point distributions, site locations, and radiocarbon dates – to address basic questions about the structure and demography of the Paleoindian and Early Archaic societies of the Eastern Woodlands."  

We'll be integrating data from PIDBA, DINAA, and my ongoing radiocarbon compilation. There will be some significant work involved in meshing all this stuff together in a GIS framework that we can use analytically, so that will be one of the main things on fire for me in the coming month.

SAA Meeting (April 2018, Washington, D.C.)

​At this year's SAA meetings, I'll be contributing to Scott Jones' symposium titled Forager Lifeways at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition. My paper is titled "Patterns of Artifact Variability and Changes in the Social Networks of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands: A Critical Appraisal and Call for a Reboot." Here is the abstract:

"Inferences about the social networks of Paleoindian and Early Archaic hunter-gatherer societies in the Eastern Woodlands are generally underlain by the assumption that there are simple, logical relationships between (1) patterns of social interaction within and between those societies and (2) patterns of variability in their material culture. Formalized bifacial projectile points are certainly the residues of systems of social interaction, and therefore have the potential to tell us something about social networks. The idea that relationships between artifact variability and social networks are simple, however, can be challenged on both theoretical and empirical grounds: complex systems science and ethnographic data strongly suggest that patterns of person-level interaction do not directly correspond to patterns of material culture visible at archaeological scales. A model-based approach can be used to better understand how changes in human-level behaviors “map up” to changes in both the system-level characteristics of social networks and the patterns of artifact variable that we can describe using archaeological data. Such an approach will allow us to more confidently interpret changes in patterns of artifact variability in terms of changes in the characteristics and spatial continuity/discontinuity of social networks during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Eastern Woodlands."  

This is a basket of questions that was the main focus of my dissertation work. My goal is to lay out the case for why we really need to be doing things differently than we are in order to get at questions about social networks and social interaction. With the SAA meetings still months away, I plan to do new modeling work to support my argument. If I'm to do that, I'll have to ramp up my modeling efforts and deal with some issues around adding space back into the main models I've been working with. It needs to be done, so committing to a paper is a way to make sure I prioritize it.

I'll also be participating in a "Lightning Round" about engaging pseudoarchaeology. In this session (organized by Khori Newlander), the participants will each get just three minutes. No abstract is required for this one. As of now, I plan to use my time for "Swordgate: How to Win Friends and Influence People." 

Shortly after I built the website for the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) in the spring of 2014, I talked about the project to a workshop sponsored by the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (there's a link to that presentation here and some short blog posts about how my work fits into DINAA here and here). In that 2014 presentation, delivered while I was unemployed, I offered an incentive program that I hoped would spur interest in the EWHADP: beer to the first person who cited the database. With an uncertain future, I scaled my offer to whatever my employment situation happened to be at the time of citation:

At the SAA meetings last week, I met Jayur Mehta and bought him a beer.  Mehta cited the EWHADP database in a paper about the Carson site, a Mississippian site in Coahoma County, Mississippi. If I remember correctly, the paper is currently under review, so I won't say anything else about it at this point. I'm glad he was able to make use of the database, and I look forward to reading the paper.

The alert reader will notice that Dr. Mehta is holding but a single plastic cup of beer in his hand, while my incentive program clearly shows that six beers will be awarded if I am employed in a non-tenure-track position, which I am.  I will point out that the cost of the beer he is holding, purchased in a Disney facility, actually exceeded the cost of a six-pack of PBR purchased in a normal part of the world (here is a link to $4.99 six pack of PBR on sale at Binny's Beverage Depot, the first place that came up when I Googled "PBR six pack cost").  So I think I fulfilled my pledge.

Mehta was unaware of my offer when he cited the database in his paper, suggesting that my incentive program was not behind his decision to use the EWHADP dataset.  Rather, it appears, he recognized the usefulness of the data for the project he was working on.  I hope that more people use the data. It's possible that someone else already has but I'm not aware of the citation - I'm not sure how I would ever know unless I see it or someone tells me about it.

The EWHADP has been largely dormant for a while now. It's stalled midway through an effort to re-code several of the key variable related to structure size and shape. I'm hoping to get the update done at some point this summer and get a newer, larger version online. I plan to use it myself for some research that will build on the 2013 JAA paper that spawned the original dataset.

If you cite the database, please let me know. I'll create a page for those citations on the EWHADP site. I'm interested to see how people use the data, and tracking and understanding use will help me to enlarge and improve the database.

The annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) is going on right now in Orlando. I made the 6.5 hour drive down from Columbia, SC, on Thursday. It took me closer to 8.5 hours, though, because I called an audible and went to visit the birth town of Barnwell, SC, after hearing a story on NPR about James Brown as I was starting my trip. And then I stopped to look at a MiG-17 in the parking lot of the Mighty Eighth Air Force museum in Savannah, GA. It was the B-47 Stratojet visible from I-95 that caught my attention. I didn't actually go in the museum, but you understand why it sometimes takes me a while to get from Point A to Point B when I travel alone.

I'm guessing that most people that read my blog are not professional archaeologists and have never been the SAA's.  These are the annual meetings of the largest professional archaeological organization in the country.  I don't have any numbers on annual attendance, but for archaeologists these meetings are a chance to meet new people, learn new things, talk about ideas and data, and re-connect with others in our social networks.  The array of presentations and posters that one can go to over the course of several days is large (here's the program for this year's meeting). So you have to make choices about how you're going to spend your time.  I just wanted to pass on a few interesting things that I've seen, heard, or thought about over the last couple of days.

An Early Holocene Shaman Burial from Texas

Margaret (Pegi) Jodry gave a really interesting presentation on an 11,100-year-old (ca. 9,100 BC) double burial (a male and a female) from Horn Shelter No. 2 in Texas (you can find the 2014 paper that discusses the burial here). Human remains from the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene are extremely rare in North America.  The male burial is particularly interesting because it appears, based mostly on the analysis of the contents of the grave, to be the internment of a shaman. The burial includes tools probably used for making pigment (antler pestles and turtle shell bowls), a tool for applying pigment to the skin, and a scarification tool. The burial also included animal remains that probably had symbolic significance: hawk claws and badger claws were found in the vicinity of the head and neck, presumably placed there as part of the burial ceremony. Jodry speculated that the hawk and badger may have symbolized travel to the "upper world" (sky) and "lower world" (underground), respectively.

I found Jodry's discussion of this burial to be really interesting after recently hearing my SCIAA colleague Adam King talk about Mississippian (ca. AD 1000) iconography and cosmology. I wondered how far back in time we might be able to trace the basic cosmological elements that we can discern (with the help of linguistic data) as important to the Mississippian world.  The Hon Shelter burial seems to provide a tantalizing glimpse of the symbolic representation of a tripartite "above" "earth" and "below" cosmos in the Early Holocene, associated with a a projectile point technology (San Patrice) that is related to the Dalton points that are the most common markers of the Late Paleoindian period in the Southeast. Very interesting.

If you remember last summer's flap over the supposed "mummy" discovered in Lake County, Indiana, (I wrote about it here) you will be interested to hear that I ran into the archaeologists who were working at the site when the human remains were found. ​As I suspected (which I can't remember if I ever wrote about), the site was one that I had actually worked on in the past: I participated in the Phase II testing of the and others back in the winter of 2004 (you can see a copy of the report by Sarah Surface-Evans and others here). Anyway, James Greene, an archaeologist with Cardno Envionmental Consultation Company, told me that what they encountered was a flexed human burial dating to the Woodland period. The remains were left in place and reburied in consultation with Native American groups. As reported in this story from July 2, the sheriff erroneously described the remains to the press as "mummified." They were not. There was no mummy, and there was no cover-up about a mummy.

I've seen a lot of papers over the last couple of days about climatic/environmental change in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. The amount of information that we have now is amazing, and the datasets relevant to understanding recent environmental change continue to diversity and develop (pollen, beetles, ice cores . . .). At a paper by James Dunbar (unfortunately he wasn't there to actually give it, so I didn't get to talk to him about it), I learned about something called the "Georgetown Hole."  This is a spot along the submerged continental shelf off the coast of South Carolina that apparently preserves evidence of icebergs running aground (you can read about it on this page, which is also where I got the image and the quote below). The "scour" marks going from the Georgetown Hole toward the coast were reportedly created by the bottoms of icebergs scraping the continental shelf:

"The location and orientation of the keel marks suggests icebergs were entrained a southwestward flowing coastal current, most likely during the last glaciation. This may be the first evidence of iceberg transport to subtropical latitudes in the north Atlantic."

Apparently these marks were just discovered in 2006/2007.  If I understood Dunbar's paper correctly, there is still no firm answer on exactly when these marks were created. I think (and I'm really not sure, because I was still trying to wrap my head around the image of icebergs drifting by Charleston) Dunbar was suggested this may have been occurring rather late in the Pleistocene, perhaps even associated with the Younger Dryas (about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago) and the environmental changes associated with it. 

Disney World Not Such a Magical Place for a Conference

I'm not sure what the decision-making process was for choosing a Disney resort as a conference location.  Although I'm only offering my own opinion here, I can tell you that many people here agree with me. It's too expensive. I paid $16 for a pre-made chicken sandwich and a coke for lunch today. A pint of beer at the hotel bar is like $8 or so. The hotel rooms are over $200/night. It's impossible to go elsewhere to eat lunch, because we're on a Disney campus. Everything is Disney and everything is expensive unless you want to get in your car and drive somewhere for lunch, in which case you won't make it back in time to make the beginnings of paper sessions in the afternoon. You could argue that this is a "family friendly" location for a conference, but the SAA elected not to provide any childcare services this year. Maybe this is a great place to vacation, but my opinion is that it is a poor choice for a working conference where many of the attendees are here with limited funding and/or on their own dime.

To Be Continued . . .

I'm going to cut if off for now and get back to the business of the conference. I saw a good session this morning that was organized by Erick Robinson, Joe Gingerich, and Shane Miller ("Human Adaptations to Lateglacial and Early Holocene Climate and Environmental Changes"), but I'm hoping to talk to some of the participants more later.  It was good stuff.