Neill Wallis, associate curator of archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, explains Swift Creek Complicated Stamped Pottery, including how it is made, and its importance in archaeology research. Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, Wallis is analyzing this style of pottery used by hunter-gatherers of northern Florida, Georgia and eastern Alabama from A.D. 100-800.
Interview and videos produced by Holly Hughes for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Neill Wallis: This is Swift Creek Complicated Stamp Pottery, this is an example of Swift Creek Complicated Stamp Pottery, which is a type of pottery found in the Southeastern United States from about a 100 to 800 A.D. It was made by stamping a carved wooden paddle into the vessel before it was fired.
This type of pottery is really unique in terms of the research opportunities that it affords because each stamped impression is basically a fingerprint that we can use to trace interactions across the region where we can see vessels at different sites that were stamped with the same wooden paddle.
We studied pottery from over two dozen sites, from about six different institutions, including the Florida Museum of Natural History. We examine each vessel or each potsherd and look at the design that is represented, the vessel shape and the size, and its function, which is evidenced by things like sooting on the exterior of a vessel. We also take a small piece of each sample, each sherd or pot, and we make a thin section for petrographic analysis, we look at it under a microscope. We also put a small sample in for neutron activation analysis, which enables us to understand the chemistry of the sample.
Using those methods and combining the paddle stamping, and the composition of each sample, we can get a really good idea of where a particular vessel was made, which a lot of times is much different than where it was recovered archaeologically.
We’ve used exclusively existing collections for this project which is the work of archaeologists over the last century where they’ve excavated a lot of these vessels, never knowing when they were doing so that we could eventually make these kinds of connections between sites once we have the technology to do so, and also really the database capabilities to be able to store the kind of design information that that we have. We’ve created a database that we’ve made available online and researchers can look up the designs that they have in their own collections and see if they have any matches to other sites that are represented.
This research shows that people 1500 years ago were extensively connected in highly integrated networks. They didn’t have Facebook or the internet but they were not isolated and a lot of the major regional trends that we see in society and politics during this period, that’s only represented by archaeology, were actually influenced by their interactions across pretty big expanses.
Learn more about Florida Archaeology & Bioarchaeology at the Florida Museum.
Learn more about Swift Creek Stamped Pottery at the Florida Museum.