Books by Kenneth Sassaman
The Archaeology of Ancient North America, 2020
The remains of hunter-gatherer groups are the most commonly discovered archaeological resources i... more The remains of hunter-gatherer groups are the most commonly discovered archaeological resources in the world, and their study constitutes much of the archaeological research done in North America. In spite of paradigm-shifting discoveries elsewhere in the world that may indicate that hunter-gatherer societies were more complex than simple remnants of a prehistoric past, North American archaeology by and large hasn't embraced these theories, instead maintaining its general neoevolutionary track. This book will change that.
Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology by organizing the chapters around three themes. The first section offers diverse views of the role of human agency, challenging the premise that hunter-gatherer societies were bound by their interactions with the natural world. The second section considers how society and culture are constituted. Chapters in the final section take the long view of the historical process, examining how cultural diversity arises out of interaction and the continuity of ritual practices.
A closing commentary by H. Martin Wobst underscores the promise of an archaeology of foragers that does not associate foraging with any particular ideology or social structure but instead invites inquiry into counterintuitive alternatives. Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process seeks to blur the divisions between prehistory and history, between primitive and modern, and between hunter-gatherers and people in other societies. Because it offers alternatives to the dominant discourse and contributes to the agenda of hunter-gatherer research, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of foraging peoples.
Papers by Kenneth Sassaman
South Carolina Antiquities, 2021
The multicomponent Mims Point site (38ED9) in the Sumter National Forest of South Carolina is amo... more The multicomponent Mims Point site (38ED9) in the Sumter National Forest of South Carolina is among a cluster of places in the middle Savannah River valley with archaeological evidence for villages of the Late Archaic Classic Stallings phase (ca. 4100-3800 cal B.P.). Block excavation conducted in the 1990s revealed an assemblage of pit features containing shell, animal bone, hickory nutshell, and artifacts of the Classic Stallings phase, notably drag and jab fiber-tempered pottery. In many respects, features and artifacts from Mims Point match the assemblage of nearby Stallings Island, the locus of at least one circular village. However, coupled with subtle differences in pottery technology, differences in toolstone between these assemblages invite consideration of the challenges of integrating people of different heritage into novel social arrangements. To the extent that Classic Stallings communities were structured by unilineal descent and unilocal postmarital residence, connections among communities are expected to vary with gender-specific technologies. Put into regional context, the findings of block excavation of Mims Point support the assertion that its residential communities spanning several generations included more persons with heritage and social ties in the Coastal Plain compared to those of Stallings Island, which show stronger ties to communities of the Piedmont.
Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 2022
Archaeological evidence for local environmental change is obscured by the tendency for humans to ... more Archaeological evidence for local environmental change is obscured by the tendency for humans to remove natural resources from places of procurement and deposit them elsewhere, sometimes at great distance. This is especially problematic for changes in relative sea level, which clearly affected the inhabitability of low-elevation coastal landforms but not necessarily the regional availability of resources of cultural or economic value. Needed are proxies for relative sea level from non-dietary taxa. One genus of terrestrial snails, Truncatella, offers good potential in this respect because of its specific niche at the interface between seawater and land. However, like food resources displaced by people, Truncatella shells are displaced by storms and redistributed landward of the coastline. Distinguishing between autochthonous and allochthonous deposits is essential to inferring relative sea level from the occurrence of this taxon alone. To this end, assemblages of Truncatella shell from stratified sites along the north Gulf Coast of Florida, USA are compared to associated archaeological snails of other taxa and to snail shells from the wrack of proximate foreshores to infer changes in relative sea level over the past four millennia. Variation in the morphology of shorelines and in the accumulation rates of archaeological midden mitigates any direct relationship between terrestrial snail frequencies and sea level, but the results of this study suggest that our approach can be applied to other nondietary taxa occupying marginally terrestrial niches to refine estimates for sea level derived from the sedimentary records of geological cores.
Southeastern Archaeology, 2022
Despite the ubiquity of charred hickory nutshell in archaeological contexts throughout the Easter... more Despite the ubiquity of charred hickory nutshell in archaeological contexts throughout the Eastern Woodlands, evidence for nut processing and storage is elusive and ambiguous. To the extent that hickory nuts factored prominently in Indigenous foodwaysparticularly as a storable resourcemass processing was possibly specialized at times and sited in places for that express purpose. One such place was Victor Mills (9CB138) in Columbia County, Georgia. Excavations at this site of Early Stallings activity (ca. 4350-4050 cal BP) revealed an assemblage of pits, fire-cracked rock, anvils, hammerstones, fiber-tempered pottery, and soapstone slabs indicative of largescale nut storage and processing. Given the seasonal ecology of hickory production, visits to Victor Mills for harvesting and storing nuts took place in the fall, but also at other times of the year, when stores were tapped and nuts processed for transport to sites of habitation. Put into larger context, nut storage at Victor Mills fits the conditions for concealment as outlined by DeBoer ([1988] Subterranean Storage and the Organization of Surplus: The View from Eastern North America. Southeastern Archaeology 7:1-20), that subterranean stores were established in places subject to raiding when left unattended. Implications follow for the land-use patterns of Early Stallings communities and their relationship to neighbors upriver.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2021
Along the geographic edges of regional populations lies latent potential for innovation and chang... more Along the geographic edges of regional populations lies latent potential for innovation and change accruing from interactions with those beyond the edges. This arguably was the case among some of the first pottery-making communities of the American Southeast. Centuries of interactions between these mobile communities and those beyond the geographic distribution of early pottery in the Savannah River valley culminated in places of permanent residence and ritual gathering at the overlapping edges of settlement ranges. Coupled with geochemical data on clay provenance, petrographic thin sections of Stallings fiber-tempered pottery register changes in social affiliation attending the emergence of gathering places. Despite continuity in the use of fiber for temper, innovations in the decoration and form of Stallings pottery coincide with changes in clay provenance and mineral composition to suggest a reorientation away from ancestral ties downriver and towards novel connections upriver. New relationships at the overlapping edges of ancestral lands were brokered at places of settlement and mortuary activity, notably at Stallings Island, which was abandoned for as much as three centuries after pottery appeared in the region. Revealed by petrographic data on the choices potters made in either maintaining or reinventing tradition is perspective on the ceramic social geography of Classic Stallings Culture that has implications for studies of social networks worldwide.
The oldest pottery technology in North America was innovated by hunter-gatherers belonging to the... more The oldest pottery technology in North America was innovated by hunter-gatherers belonging to the Late Archaic Stallings culture (ca. 5150-3200 cal B.P.) of Georgia and South Carolina. The culture history of Stallings societies is relatively well-known; however, the permanence and scale of Stallings communities, the nature of the connections among them, and the extent to which they changed over time remain poorly understood. In this study, 450 samples Stallings pottery and 24 raw clay resource samples from along the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers were submitted for neutron activation analysis (NAA). The NAA results show a significant shift in the nature of vessel transport at the outset of the Classic Stallings phase (4100–3800 cal B.P.), an interval marked by the appearance of the region's first formalized circular villages and dedicated cemeteries. This shift involved the funneling of pots with carinated rims into a few major middle Savannah River mortuary sites, providing evidence for a novel Stallings sociality that combined relatively localized village life with periodic large-scale ritual gatherings.
The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology, 2020
Page proofs of chapter in The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology, edited by Robbie Ethri... more Page proofs of chapter in The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Eric C. Bowne. University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 2020.
In Detaching from Place, edited by Lamoureux-St-Hilaire and Macrae, 2020
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Drone-mounted, high-resolution light detection and ranging reveals the architectural details of a... more Drone-mounted, high-resolution light detection and ranging reveals the architectural details of an ancient settlement on the Gulf Coast of Florida without parallel in the Southeastern United States. The Raleigh Island shell-ring complex (8LV293) of ca. 900 to 1200 CE consists of at least 37 residential spaces enclosed by ridges of oyster shell up to 4 m tall. Test excavations in 10 of these residential spaces yielded abundant evidence for the production of beads from the shells of marine gastropods. Beads and other objects made from gulf coastal shell were integral to the political economies of second-millennium CE chiefdoms across eastern North America. At places as distant from the coast as the lower Midwest, marine gastropods were imported in raw form and converted into beads and other objects by craftspeople at the behest of chiefs. Bead making at Raleigh Island is exceptional not only for its level of production at the supply end of regional demand but also for being outside the purview of chiefly control. Here we introduce the newly discovered above-ground architecture of Raleigh Island and outline its analytical value for investigating the organization of shell bead production in the context of ancient political economies. The details of shell-ring architecture achieved with drone-mounted LiDAR make it possible to compare the bead making of persons distributed across residential spaces with unprecedented resolution. shell rings | LiDAR | Mississippian | craft production
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2019
Prevalent as bird imagery is in the ritual traditions of eastern North America, the bony remains ... more Prevalent as bird imagery is in the ritual traditions of eastern North America, the bony remains of birds are relatively sparse in archaeological deposits and when present are typically viewed as subsistence remains. A first-millennium AD civic-ceremonial centre on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida contains large pits with bird bones amid abundant fish bone and other taxa. The avian remains are dominated by elements of juvenile white ibises, birds that were taken from offshore rookeries at the time of summer solstices. The pits into which they were deposited were emplaced on a relict dune with solstice orientations. The timing and siting of solstice feasts at this particular centre invites discussion of world-renewal rituality and the significance of birds in not only the timing of these events but also possibly as agents of balance and rejuvenation.
American Antiquity, 2020
Places such as Poverty Point, Mound City, and Chaco Canyon remind us that the siting of ritual in... more Places such as Poverty Point, Mound City, and Chaco Canyon remind us that the siting of ritual infrastructure in ancient North America was a matter of cosmological precedent. The cosmic gravity of these places gathered persons periodically in numbers that challenged routine production. Ritual economies intensified, but beyond the material demands of hosting people, the siting of these places and the timing of gatherings were cosmic work that preconfigured these outcomes. A first millennium AD civic-ceremonial center on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida illustrates the rationale for holding feasts on the end of a parabolic dune that it shared with an existing mortuary facility. Archaeofauna from large pits at Shell Mound support the inference that feasts were timed to summer solstices. Gatherings were large, judging from the infrastructure in support of feasts and efforts to intensify production through oyster mariculture and the construction of a large tidal fish trap. The 250-year history of summer solstice feasts at Shell Mound reinforces the premise that ritual economies were not simply the amplification of routine production. It also suggests that the ecological potential for intensification was secondary to the cosmic significance of solstice-oriented dunes and their connection to mortuary and world-renewal ceremonialism.
All societies face contradictions between experienced pasts, imagined futures and the reality of ... more All societies face contradictions between experienced pasts, imagined futures and the reality of the present. Changing social and ecological contexts are catalysts for intervention by communities hoping to restore or assert structure during turbulent times. terraforming is one mode of intervention in which large-scale modifications to land reference ancient times, events and persons to create new opportunities for the future. At the landscape scale, terraforming is a form of futurism that reproduces or redirects the relations between communities, ecologies and cosmologies as historical process. In North America, ancient Floridians engaged in a wide range of landscape modifications to navigate the diverse relations between underworlds, upperworlds and the day-today. over 6000 years ago on the St Johns River, communities deposited shell, earth and objects in ridges over assemblages of massive pits dug by their predecessors, arguably restructuring the relationships among wetlands, the living and the dead. Later communities of the Florida Gulf coast constructed mounds and ridges, which were conjoined with celestial events, at a time of rapid sea-level rise to redirect their social capital towards landward communities of lesser vulnerability.
Low-gradient coastlines are susceptible to inundation by rising water, but they also promote mars... more Low-gradient coastlines are susceptible to inundation by rising water, but they also promote marsh aggradation that has the potential to keep pace with sea-level rise. Synergies among hydrodynamics, coastal geomorphology, and marsh ecology preclude a simple linear relationship between higher water and shoreline transgression. As an archive of human use of low-gradient coastlines, archaeological data introduce additional mitigating factors, such as landscape alteration, resource extraction, and the cultural value of place. The Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey (LSAS) is an ongoing effort to document the history of coastal dwelling since the mid-Holocene, when the rate and magnitude of sea-level rise diminished and the northern Gulf coast of Florida transitioned into an aggradational regime. Results of the first six years of the LSAS suggest that multicentury periods of relative stability were punctuated by site abandonment and relocation. Subsistence economies involving the exploitation of oyster and fish, however, were largely unaffected as communities redistributed themselves with changes in shoreline position and estuarine ecology. After A.D. 200, civic-ceremonial centers were established at several locations along the northern Gulf coast, fixing in place not only the infrastructure of daily living (villages), but also that of religious practice, notably cemeteries and ceremonial mounds. Intensified use of coastal resources at this time can be traced to a ritual economy involving large gatherings of people, terraforming, feasting, and the circulation of socially-valued goods. To the extent that religious practices buffered the risks of coastal living, large civic-ceremonial centers, like aggrading marshes, afforded opportunities to “outpace” sea-level rise. On the other hand, centers introduced a permanence to coastal land-use that proved unsustainable in the long term.
Uploads
Books by Kenneth Sassaman
Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology by organizing the chapters around three themes. The first section offers diverse views of the role of human agency, challenging the premise that hunter-gatherer societies were bound by their interactions with the natural world. The second section considers how society and culture are constituted. Chapters in the final section take the long view of the historical process, examining how cultural diversity arises out of interaction and the continuity of ritual practices.
A closing commentary by H. Martin Wobst underscores the promise of an archaeology of foragers that does not associate foraging with any particular ideology or social structure but instead invites inquiry into counterintuitive alternatives. Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process seeks to blur the divisions between prehistory and history, between primitive and modern, and between hunter-gatherers and people in other societies. Because it offers alternatives to the dominant discourse and contributes to the agenda of hunter-gatherer research, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of foraging peoples.
Papers by Kenneth Sassaman
Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology by organizing the chapters around three themes. The first section offers diverse views of the role of human agency, challenging the premise that hunter-gatherer societies were bound by their interactions with the natural world. The second section considers how society and culture are constituted. Chapters in the final section take the long view of the historical process, examining how cultural diversity arises out of interaction and the continuity of ritual practices.
A closing commentary by H. Martin Wobst underscores the promise of an archaeology of foragers that does not associate foraging with any particular ideology or social structure but instead invites inquiry into counterintuitive alternatives. Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process seeks to blur the divisions between prehistory and history, between primitive and modern, and between hunter-gatherers and people in other societies. Because it offers alternatives to the dominant discourse and contributes to the agenda of hunter-gatherer research, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of foraging peoples.
appear so vast as to obscure the relevance of knowledge about the ancient
past to challenges of today. Yet, in imaging alternative futures, people of
varied cultural dispositions find experiential accord. As both product of and
precedent for social action, materiality provides archaeologists some purchase
on interventions of change. In the recursive relationships between place and
being, between thing and entanglement, we observe temporalities that
privilege historical practice as the locus of social action. Examples from the
ancient American Southeast illustrate what form an archaeology of alternative
futures might take.