Current Research
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Beyond the Marsh: Settlement Choice, Perception, and Spatial Decision-Making on the Georgia Coastal Plain
By Tom Whitley, Inna Moore, Gitisha Goel, and Damon Jackson
Presented at the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, March 2009
When we consider the intrinsic value of land units (or cells) in an archaeological analysis of landscape, settlement choice, or site selection, we tend to develop models which use static, unchanging costs or benefits, or which rely on least common denominators for a wide range of human actions or time frames. This is naturally driven by the tendency to find correlative evaluations as the most comforting means of both hypothesis building and hypothesis testing. Correlative approaches used in such applications as inductive predictive models are inherently reductionist and typically global-inferential. In actual application though, cell-based attractors are dynamic and distinctly contextual. Thus, we need to develop models which can provide an egocentric, rather than a global, frame of reference, and which are explanatory rather than merely correlative.
The first steps in this direction are provided by agent-based models, however most agent-based models still utilize fixed frames of reference, or tools that rely on universal knowledge and global decision-making. Likewise, the acceptance of large dataset correlation testing, or training sets, as the primary means for assessing model success (even in agent-based models or neural network applications) precludes approaches which deal in sequential actions, local behaviors, or unique site types. Here we develop a model which uses cell-based analysis in several ways: First, attractor values are derivative of perception; the interface of knowledge and confidence in that knowledge. Second, spatial decision-making is temporally sequential; thus proximity tempers attractor values. And third, the scale of decision-making distinctly relies on both immediate and long range planning and returns. These concepts will be illustrated with data from the Coastal Plain of Georgia (USA) and placed in the context of adaptations to a seemingly homogenous cultural and ecological landscape.
Efforts to Preserve and Interpret the Combahee Ferry
By Ed Salo
Presented at the Sixth Savannah Symposium: World Heritage and National Registers in Perspective, Savannah, Georgia, February 2009
Synthesizing Sources: Representing Data in Household Archaeology
By Shannon Dunn
Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, January 2009
Presented at a session organized by Shannon Dunn and Heather Gibson called, "Between Words and Things: Struggling with Sources in Historical Archaeology." The session focused on methods and approaches to engaging different sources of data, how archaeologists alternately entangle and isolate "words and things," and the challenges that arise as we tack between these sources.
Practitioners of historical archaeology routinely access and incorporate texts, objects, and images in research and interpretation. The extent to which these are utilized necessarily relates to research agendas, relevance, and the relative abundance of different sources. Yet our ability to simultaneously draw from diverse sources, and to tack between sources in our own textual representations, still seems to provide a substantial challenge. In this paper I discuss the potential relationships between sources of data and ways in which we can approach the entanglement of these sources through the example of my own work including household archaeology in rural Ireland.
"...not even the remains of the dead were held sacred by this rapacious banditti!!!"
By Eric Poplin
Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, January 2009
Royal Island, The Bahamas, suffered an attack on private property on 12 September 1814 by crewmen of the American privateer Midas. This raid destroyed all but one building, with the remaining buildings and facilities associated with four plantation settlements all burned. The residents' personal goods and wealth were taken, with most residents fleeing to the bush to save themselves from injury. Even the tomb of the wife of Benjamin Barnett, principal planter on Royal Island, was broken open in search of plunder. Reputedly in retaliation for the burning of Washington, this act prompted a public apology from James Monroe, US Secretary of State, and the revocation of the Midas letter of marquee. Recent archaeological investigations at EL 53 within the Barnett settlement revealed artifacts that appear to be directly related to this raid as well as evidence of the loss and reconstruction of the plantation settlement.
The Archaeology of Indian Slavers and Colonial Allies: Excavations at the Yamasee Capital of Altamaha Town
By Alex Sweeney
Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, January 2009
The Yamasee Indians, a multiethnic conglomeration of Native Americans, lived along the lower coastal plain of South Carolina between 1683 and 1715. Altamaha Town, the capital of the Lower Yamasee Indians, was likely occupied as early as 1695 and abandoned shortly after the start of the Yamasee War in 1715. Archival documentation and maps have provided researchers information regarding Yamasee ethnohistoric origins, political structure, relations with English traders, and archaeological site locations. Recent excavations at Altamaha Town recovered more than 60,000 artifacts and identified numerous cultural features associated with several structures. Information derived from historical documentation, along with the data from the excavations at Altamaha Town, have allowed a more concrete perspective into the lifeways of this historic group of indigenous people. This paper summarizes the field investigations and the ongoing research of the data collected, and provides initial interpretations from the Altamaha Town excavations.
Chronology from Glass Beads: The English Period in the Southeast, ca. A.D. 1607 - 1783
By Jon Marcoux
Presented at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Charlotte, North Carolina, November 2008
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an extremely turbulent time for southeastern Indian groups, being marked by disease, warfare, and massive population displacements. Unfortunately, forming historical and archaeological understandings of this period has proven difficult when research is extended beyond historically documented sites. This paper discusses an attempt to create a seriation method for assigning occupation estimates to historic Indian sites using glass trade beads. The resulting chronology offers researchers a reasonably accurate method to identify undocumented seventeenth and eighteenth-century Indian communities across the Southeast.
As a Living Part of Our Community: Sharing the Past with the Public through CRM
By Carol Poplin
Presented at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Charlotte, North Carolina, November 2008
Presented in a session called "Crossing the Combahee - On land, Underwater, and In-between." The session was about Brockington's archaeological investigations at Combahee Ferry. Those investigations were undertaken ahead of road widening and bridge replacement activities.
The 1966 National Historic Protection Act generated a cultural resource management industry eager to conduct new federal and state mandated archaeological and historical investigations. Until recently, sharing this information with the public has not been a priority. This paper explores the challenges of presenting archaeology to the public within the framework of CRM and offers ideas for transcending the boundaries that often exist between archaeological research and public interpretation. The public program designed for the SC Department of Transportation's Combahee Ferry Historic District mitigation project serves as a case study.
The Development of the Combahee Ferry: An Ethnohistory of Ferry Transportation in the South Carolina Lowcountry
By Ed Salo
Presented at The NASOH-CAMM Conference, Pensacola, Florida, May 2008
Place, Place-making, and African-American Archaeology: Considerations for Future Work
By Andrew Agha
Published in South Carolina Antiquities, the journal of the Archaeological Society of South Carolina, Vol. 38, Nos. 1 & 2, 2006
In general terms, the study of archaeology is grounded in how material culture fits into space, from which patterns can be seen to help us understand how cultures changed and/or evolved in the past. Thus, space tends to be the focus of Historical Archaeologists that deal with the African American past; particularly, the studies of slavery. This article examines the problem of focusing primarily on things in Space, and instead introduces the idea of Place, and how people doing things in their places, not how objects are organized in space, dictate the stories we tell to the public.
An Explanatory Framework for Predictive Modeling Using an Example from Marion, Horry, Dillon, and Marlboro Counties, South Carolina
By Tom Whitley and Inna Burns
Presented at the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference in Fargo, North Dakota, April 2006
It has been argued at the CAA, and other conferences, in the last few years that archaeological predictive models which explain the relationships between the environment and human activity, rather than merely identifying presumed correlations, have the greatest potential to inform land management decision-making. Additionally, employing such models in a GIS framework allows us to examine some of the academic issues and preconceived ideas about human settlement that have been developed by the archaeologists working in a region. Recently, an explanatory approach to archaeological predictive modeling was designed and used for a large scale highway development project in eastern South Carolina. Encompassing four counties located almost entirely in the Coastal Plain, and covering more than 6500 square kilometers (~2600 square miles) this model was an ideal test for some of our notions about the nature of human settlement, procurement, and interactive behaviors. The results of this model suggest that an explanatory approach is more enlightening, more flexible, more efficient, more effective, and ultimately more useful than any other approach for this largely homogenous region. They also indicate that the approach could be employed anywhere, can be used to establish regional and/or local baselines on which to build with new information or ideas, and is adaptive to the needs of a particular project or study question.
Risk, Choice, and Perception: Elements of an Immersive GIS
By Tom Whitley
Presented at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Montreal, Canada, April 2004
One of the benefits of GIS is the ability to rapidly analyze massive amounts of spatial data. This typically means using a "top-down" or aerial view of large expanses of terrain. Given that few inhabitants of any region make observations by orbiting satellite, we must assume that spatial choices are made using a series of cognitive landscapes visualized from an individual or "immersive" perspective. Through the creative use of standard spatial tools it is possible to simulate an immersive perspective for a wide variety of archaeological situations and address the sociocultural issues of decision-making, risk management, and site selection processes.
Re-thinking Accuracy and Precision in Predictive Modeling
By Tom Whitley
Presented at the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference, Prato, Italy, April 2004
Testing archaeological predictive models has almost always relied upon evaluating the percentage of sites "captured" versus the percentage of area defined as "high" potential. This is known as the "gain" statistic. Fundamentally inherent in correlative models and the gain statistic, though, is the assumption that measuring the deviation from randomness is the best method to evaluate the accuracy and precision of a model. This paper will show, in contrast, that the locations of archaeological sites are always dependent upon the location of the previous instance of settlement and therefore can act only like time-series dependent phenomena, never like random points. This calls for a fundamentally different means of testing models which can account for spatial autocorrelation.
On the Frontier: Looking at Boundaries, Territoriality, and Social Distance with GIS
By Tom Whitley
Presented at the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference, Prato, Italy, April 2004
Archaeological spatial analysis is a typically normative process. We tend to focus on the centralized locations of "things" such as sites or artifacts at the expense of identifying and evaluating "buffer zones" or boundaries. But how do we measure interactions between neighbors? Are there ways in which we can evaluate, understand and explain the creation and implementation of buffers, boundaries, territories, and trade routes? This paper will address means of extracting objective measures of "social distance" and relating them to the landscape in general. The perspective will be from an "immersive" point of view and one in which cognitive decision-making is emphasized. Several examples will be presented to illustrate the concepts.
A Brief Outline of Causality-Based Cognitive Archaeological Probabilistic Modeling
By Tom Whitley
Presented at the Symposium on Predictive Modeling and Archaeological Heritage Management, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, May 2003
In our effort to identify and manage the significant resources which comprise our cultural heritage, archaeologists have employed a number of methods which have focused on linking "sites" with key spatial factors in a predictive framework. Until recently these efforts have been largely correlative, deterministic, and devoid of social or interpretative theory. This has evolved into practical methods which lack an explication of causality, conflict with the intended economic or interpretative purposes of the undertaking, and relegate human cognition (both in the past and today) to being vaguely represented by a "black box" of uncertainty. In contrast, causality-based methods of cognitive modeling have the potential to produce ways of managing archaeological heritage, explaining patterns of cognition and behavior, and introducing agency and complexity into theories of human-spatial interaction. If the underlying causal relationships between conditions, events and decisions related to site selection are outlined in a mechanistic and probabilistic fashion, we may begin to understand why certain areas are selected for different kinds of behaviors, how that is transformed into what we consider to be "sites," and how we could use our knowledge to identify and protect significant archaeological resources. The methods presented here will be outlined on a theoretical basis, presented in a practical framework, and summarized as the intersection of three quite distinct kinds of models; past site selection, management priority, and disturbances.
Causality and Cross-Purposes in Archaeological Predictive Modeling
By Tom Whitley
Presented at the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference, Vienna, Austria, April 2003
In recent years numerous archaeological approaches to predictive modeling have been presented in the literature. Most of these have taken the "inductive" perspective of applying known site locations to an analysis that estimates probable site location based on a mathematical equation and presents predictive surfaces in a GIS. Conversely, "deductive" models have also been used in which "expert systems" or site selection variables have been quantified as probability surfaces. There has been little discussion, though, of the differences between CRM and academic-based predictive modeling and how it has influenced the state of the "science" today. Generating more refined correlative predictive models either through the use of higher quality site location data or through more complex statistical techniques, runs counter to the implicit goals of CRM-based predictive modeling. A simple cognitive GIS approach which assumes a causal explanatory relationship creates comparable or better results (especially in homogenous areas) with no negative effects on these limited goals. Ultimately, the dichotomy between correlative and cognitive approaches is not in theoretical orientation, rather it is embodied in our understanding (or failure to understand) that correlative predictive modeling is really a tool useful only for land management, not interpretive archaeology.
Presenting Mr. Ira's Masterpiece: Two Centuries of Agricultural Change at the Shields-Ethridge Farm
By Patricia Stallings
University of Georgia Thesis, May 2002
For two centuries, owners of the Shields-Ethridge Farm in Jackson County, Georgia adapted to changes in the larger agricultural scene. Following the pattern of other upcountry settlers, they first cultivated tobacco, then switched primarily to cotton when the region became immersed in the growing market. By 1900, the glutted economy began to show signs of recovery, enticing the farm's new owner, Ira Washington Ethridge, to fully participate in its growth. Transforming the farm into a complex of cultivation and ancillary businesses, Ethridge left a decided mark on the operation. With mechanization, though, the region's cotton production waned, leaving cotton-dependant farms like the Ethridge's to face crucial decisions. Today, the farm serves as a growing museum, one that can fill a void left by other living history farms that focus primarily on historic agriculture and not the social and cultural changes brought by mechanization.
