Brandon T. Ritchison

By the end of the fourteenth-century AD, Native peoples throughout the midwestern and southeastern regions of North America had withdrawn from major monumental and political centers established in prior centuries. In this article, I present the results of a community-level examination of settlement transformations on the Georgia Coast that I argue are the outcome of this large-scale movement of Mississippian peoples. Specifically, I examine the consequences of the depopulation of the Savannah River Valley, a case of a rapid, historically contingent Mississippian emigration beginning in the fourteenth century AD. My results establish how a large-scale immigration event affected community spatial and political organization and demonstrate that migrants and coastal locals engaged in the collective cultural construction of new identities and lifeways in response to the challenges of negotiating the use of common pool resources, such as fisheries and suitable farmland. Reconstructing the spatial organization of communities can help explain the demographic, economic, and political processes that undergird the cultural materialization of space. Although much remains to be learned about intra-settlement organization at post-Archaic, precolonial sites along the Georgia Coast, this investigation provides new information about the local, community-level spatial response to the fourteenth-century immigration event.

The goal for many PhD students in archaeology is tenure-track employment. Students primarily receive their training by tenure-track or tenured professors, and they are often tacitly expected—or explicitly encouraged—to follow in the footsteps of their advisor. However, the career trajectories that current and recent PhD students follow may hold little resemblance to the ones experienced by their advisors. To understand these different paths and to provide information for current PhD students considering pursuing a career in academia, we surveyed 438 archaeologists holding tenured or tenure-track positions in the United States. The survey, recorded in 2019, posed a variety of questions regarding the personal experiences of individual professors. The results are binned by the decade in which the respondent graduated. Evident patterns are discussed in terms of change over time. The resulting portraits of academic pathways through the past five decades indicate that although broad commonalities exist in the qualifications of early career academics, there is no singular pathway to obtaining tenure-track employment. We highlight the commonalities revealed in our survey to provide a set of general qualifications that might provide a baseline set of skills and experiences for an archaeologist seeking a tenure-track job in the United States. Doctorantes en arqueología comúnmente anhelan lograr empleo académico con tenencia docente. Los estudiantes de doctorado principalmente reciben formación académica y profesional por parte de profesores que al igual han obtenido o anhelan obtener empleo con tenencia docente. Comúnmente, se espera tácita o explícitamente proseguir en pasos de sus asesores. Sin embargo, la trayectoria profesional de estudiantes doctorales y recién egresados suelen tener poca semejanza a las trayectorias de sus respectivos asesores. Encuestamos 438 arqueólogos en plazas con tenencia docente o con posibilidad de tenencia docente en los Estados Unidos para esclarecer diversas trayectorias profesionales y asesorar actuales doctorantes que contemplan una carrera académica. La encuesta que se llevó a cabo en 2019 plantea una variedad de preguntas acerca de experiencias individuales de los encuestados. Los resultados se agrupan por década en cual se egresó el encuestado. Se discuten los evidentes patrones conforme cambios cronológicos. Los resúmenes de trayectorias profesionales académicas a lo largo de las últimas cinco décadas indican que aunque existen características compartidas en las cualificaciones de los recién egresados académicos profesionales, no existe una ruta singular hacia un empleo con tenencia docente. Resaltamos las características compartidas entre los encuestados para presentar cualificaciones que pueden ser un punto de referencia de las destrezas y experiencias adecuadas para un arqueólogo en busca de tenencia docente en los Estados Unidos.

Archaeologists working in Mexico recently claimed evidence for pre-Last Glacial Maximum human occupation in the Americas, based on lithic items excavated from Chiquihuite Cave, Zacatecas. Although they provide extensive array of ancillary studies of the cave's chronostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental record, the data they present do not support their central argument, that these lithic items are anthropogenic and represent a unique lithic industry produced by early human occupants. They give limited consideration to the most plausible alternative explanation: that the assemblage is a product of natural processes of disintegration, roof fall, and mass movement of the cave fill, and thus the lithic materials are best explained as geofacts. We assess the evidence by considering the alternative hypotheses (1) that the observed phenomena are artifacts or (2) that they result from natural processes. We conclude that hypothesis 2 is more strongly supported and that Chiquihuite Cave does not represent evidence for the earliest Americans.

Various chronologies of the earliest Native American occupations have been proposed with varying levels of empirical support and conceptual rigor, yet none is widely accepted. A recent survey of pre-Clovis dated sites (Becerra-Valdivia and Higham 2020 Becerra-Valdivia, Lorena , and Thomas Higham. 2020. “The Timing and Effect of the Earliest Human Arrivals in North America.” Nature 584: 93–97. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ) concludes a pre-Last Glacial Maximum (>26,500–19,000 cal yr BP) entry of humans in the Americas, in part based on recent work at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico. We evaluate the evidence used to develop this inference. To provide clarity, we present three explicit dispersal models for the earliest human dispersals to the Americas: Strict Clovis-First (13,050 cal yr BP), Paleoindian (16,000 cal yr BP, encompassing pre-LGM, preferred by Becerra-Valdivia and Higham ( 2020 Becerra-Valdivia, Lorena , and Thomas Higham. 2020. “The Timing and Effect of the Earliest Human Arrivals in North America.” Nature 584: 93–97. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] )), and we summarize the current genetic and archaeological evidence bearing on each. We regard all purported Pre-Paleoindian sites as equivocal and the Strict Clovis-First model to be equally unsupported at present. We conclude that current data strongly support the Paleoindian Dispersal model, with Native American ancestors expanding into the Americas sometime after 16,000 cal yr BP (and perhaps after 14,800 cal yr BP), consistent with well-dated archaeological sites and with genetic data throughout the western hemisphere. Models of the Americas’ peopling that incorporate Chiquihuite or other claimed Pre-Paleoindian sites remain unsubstantiated.

This report presents findings from recent systematic surveys and excavations at the site of Finley’s Pond (9CH204) to evaluate craft production (e.g., shell beads) and settlement expansion on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, within the context of larger social, political, and economic changes that occurred along the Georgia coast over the last millennia. Shovel tests and excavation units were conducted at Finley’s Pond as part of the University of Georgia’s 2016 Field School. The spatial distribution and density of Woodland and Late Mississippian period Irene ceramics at Finley’s Pond suggests settlement expansion and an increase in population size during the Mississippian period. The presence of beads in various forms of production, as well as raw materials and tools, such as whelk shells, abraders, and a microdrill, support the interpretation that Finley’s Pond was a location of craft production, specifically shell beads. These data suggest that the economic pursuits of Indigenous communities on the Georgia Coast was far more varied than archaeologists once thought. Our report underscores the need for further research into how non-subsistence based economic pursuits articulated with the timing of settlement expansion and the shift from foraging to farming along the Georgia Coast.

As the use of large-scale radiocarbon datasets becomes more common and applications of Bayesian chronological modeling become a standard aspect of archaeological practice, it is imperative that we grow a community of both effective users and consumers. Indeed, research proposals and publications now routinely employ Bayesian chronological modeling to estimate age ranges such as statistically informed starts, ends, and spans of archaeological phenomena. Although advances in interpretive techniques have been widely adopted, sampling strategies and determinations of appropriate sample sizes for radiocarbon data remain generally underdeveloped. As chronological models are only as robust as the information we feed into them, formal approaches to assessing the validity of model criteria and the appropriate number of radiocarbon dates deserve attention. In this article, through a series of commonly encountered scenarios, we present easy-to-follow instructions for running simulations that should be used to inform the design and construction of chronological models.