"Readable, informative, and simply indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in Eastern North America’s prehistory."—American Antiquity "Will be the fundamental reference on the archeology of the north Florida area [and] the Woodland period. . . . Provides a fascinating and informative picture of how modern archaeological studies are performed and how the ideas of researchers can evolve in the face of new data. I highly recommend it."--John F. Scarry, Florida Historical Quarterly
More than a millennium ago, the Weeden Island culture flourished across the northern half of Florida and adjacent portions of the Alabama and Georgia coastal plain. For more than a century, archaeologists have marveled over the extraordinary animal effigy pottery vessels left behind by these pre-Columbian peoples in their mounds and villages. In this volume the authors draw on north Florida archaeological excavations and site surveys to unlock the secrets of the Weeden Island culture and its magnificent ceramics. In particular, investigations at the McKeithen site, a multi-mound village site, provide information used to place the culture within the evolutionary framework of native societies in the southeastern United States. New radiocarbon dates from that site establish a firm chronological framework for Weeden Island developments. The authors examine the role of mound-building vis-à-vis social and village organization and provide definitive assessments about the crafting of Weeden Island ceramics and the ritual and social significance of animal effigy figurines and other pottery. From a wealth of past and present field investigations and from modern laboratory analyses, conclusions are offered about Weeden Island lifeways, social structure, and sociopolitical stability. Archaeology of Northern Florida provides a much-needed and valuable synthesis of the Weeden Island culture, one that fundamentally alters how we view the pre-Columbian Southeast. It will be of interest to professional archaeologists, students, and that large segment of the general public that enjoys learning about the past around us.
The authors, with more than a half-century of professional experience among them, have carried out archaeological investigations across the United States. Jerald T. Milanich is author of Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida (UPF, 1994) and Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (UPF, 1995).

Archaeology of Northern Florida, A.D. 200-900: The McKeithen Weeden Island Culture

History

Milanich, Jerald T.

Cordell, Ann S.

Knight Jr., Vernon J.

Kohler, Timothy A.

Americas

University Press of Florida

It is one of the great mysteries in the archaeology of the Americas: the depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late thirteenth-century AD. Considering the numbers of people affected, the distances moved, the permanence of the departures, the severity of the surrounding conditions, and the human suffering and culture change that accompanied them, the abrupt conclusion to the farming way of life in this region is one of the greatest disruptions in recorded history. Much new paleoenvironmental data, and a great deal of archaeological survey and excavation, permit the fifteen scientists represented here much greater precision in determining the timing of the depopulation, the number of people affected, and the ways in which northern Pueblo peoples coped—and failed to cope—with the rapidly changing environmental and demographic conditions they encountered throughout the 1200s. In addition, some of the scientists in this volume use models to provide insights into the processes behind the patterns they find, helping to narrow the range of plausible explanations. What emerges from these investigations is a highly pertinent story of conflict and disruption as a result of climate change, environmental degradation, social rigidity, and conflict. Taken as a whole, these contributions recognize this era as having witnessed a competition between differing social and economic organizations, in which selective migration was considerably hastened by severe climatic, environmental, and social upheaval. Moreover, the chapters show that it is at least as true that emigration led to the collapse of the northern Southwest as it is that collapse led to emigration.

Leaving Mesa Verde: Peril and Change in the Thirteenth-Century Southwest (Amerind Studies in Archaeology)

Biographies & Memoirs

Varien, Mark D.

Wright, Aaron M.

Arts & Literature

University of Arizona Press

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