Tulsa, Oklahoma November 8-11, 2017.

CTL staff and students presented their research in a number of talks at the recent SEAC conference:

Elemental Characterization of St. Johns Pottery
Lindsay Bloch, Neill Wallis, and George Kamenov
St. Johns Series pottery is commonly recovered from sites throughout peninsular Florida. Identified by chalky texture and dense freshwater sponge spicule inclusions, this ware persisted from the late Archaic to Contact period, with a variety of vessel forms and decorative techniques. While often assumed to originate in the St. Johns drainage for which it is named, the ware’s prevalence in other locations presents the possibility of independent production in multiple places. We conducted elemental analysis of St. Johns pottery from three legacy collections in Florida along with comparative clay samples in order to clarify the origins of this ware.

Petrographic Variability in Local Choctowan Pottery at Old Mobile, 1Mb94
Ann Cordell
I had the honor of collaborating with Greg Waselkov on his remarkable, multifaceted investigation of French Colonial Old Mobile by conducting a comprehensive study of paste variability in vessel assemblages from five French style structures. My focus then had been documenting continuity and change in Old Mobile’s Apalacheemade wares, especially the colonowares. I now focus on the local shell-tempered Choctawan or Mobilian wares that make up 36% (n=146) of the total vessel assemblage of 405 vessel lots. I relate paste variability to established local pottery typology and quantify the variability with comparative petrographic data from a thin-sectioned subsample.

Tempering the Cushing Effect: Ceramic Variation and Mortuary Practice at Safford Mound (8PI3)
C. Trevor Duke and Neill Wallis
Archaeologists over the last several decades have avoided unprovenienced collections as a rule of thumb. While reconstructing archaeological contexts in proper stratigraphic sequence serves as a cornerstone of most contemporary archaeological research, archaeologists have recently reevaluated the research potential of extravagant, albeit poorly recorded “legacy” collections. We specifically present an overview of the Safford Mound (8PI3) ceramic assemblage to demonstrate that the benefits of using these types of collections greatly outweigh the drawbacks. What this assemblage lacks in contextual detail, it makes up for in sheer size and artifact completeness, both of which are typically unattainable through standard recovery methods.

The Lamar-like Stamped Clay Objects: The Research Potential in Using Extant Archaeological Collections
Amanda Hall
Salvage archaeology conducted during the 1950s to the 1980s in the Florida panhandle has resulted in the recovery of Lamar-like stamped clay objects also referred to as stamped clay balls. Only a small number of objects were thought to exist until a recent inquiry into various Florida collections documented hundreds of samples. Their apparent rarity and limited excavation documentation have hampered any in-depth analysis. Using the objects as a case study, this paper emphasizes on the importance and potential of using extant collections for research.

The Role of Travel and Gathering Events in Woodland Site Histories and Ritual Concordance
Neill Wallis and Thomas Pluckhahn
Intense intraregional connectivity characterized Middle Woodland civic-ceremonial centers and residential sites in Florida and Georgia. Detailed chronologies reveal simultaneous shifts in settlement, material culture, mound construction, and mortuary ritual, while materials analysis shows frequent transport of objects among sites. We address regional-scale affinities through detailed histories of Block-Sterns and Hughes Island, sites with numerous “Swift Creek” connections, and trace biographies of their feature contents. Both sites show the signature of ritual events that drew people from afar across dozens of generations.We argue that the frequency, scale, and persistence of such journeys significantly shaped individual site histories and regional equivalencies.