Dr. Ramie A Gougeon

Postcolonial resource use in the historic southeastern United States often left scars on the landscape that impact and exacerbate the effects of modern climate change. Case studies of degenerative agricultural and silviculture practices in European and American colonial and postcolonial Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana illustrate the often irrevocable nature of landscape modification. Historical archaeologists are called upon to better elucidate how early human actions first affected local and regional environments in ways that continue to reverberate in the present day.

Analyses of three Late Mississippian house floors from the Little Egypt site (9Mu102) were undertaken to discern discrete activity areas used by women and men. Areas were identified by seeking patterns of spatially co-occurring artifact types associated with specific activities, activities frequently correlated strongly with a specific gender in cross-cultural ethnological studies. Women’s activities dominated the assemblages and occupied the most space in all three houses. This model of household activity areas mirrors findings across the southern Appalachian region but does little to understand the social aspects of production within multigenerational, matrilineal, and arguably matrifocal households. This chapter is a further consideration of the gendered uses of space through the lens of taskscapes, those arrays of related activities performed by social actors, to interrogate the experiences of being a Mississippian woman in a domestic house.

Archaeologists use the same terms with vastly different meanings, resulting in ineffective communication. Time is of the essence when working with heritage at risk, and standardized language facilitates effective conversations and actions to describe, interpret, and communicate aspects of archaeology in the time of climate change. A panel at the 2022 Society for Historical Archaeology conference was sponsored by the Heritage at Risk Committee to delineate the meaning of the oft-used but rarely defined terms “site,” “resource,” “significance,” “risk,” “triage,” “data,” “audience,” and “sustainability.” The purpose of this article is to take a step toward disciplinary unification to facilitate future dialogue and action through modeling, monitoring, and mitigating heritage at risk.

In a recent examination of bird effigy vessels from the north-central coast of the Gulf of Mexico, one remarkable species identified appears to be Gallus gallus domesticus, or the chicken. Examples of small ceramic rooster heads sporting dramatic, single combs and short beaks may be indirect evidence of contact between native coastal peoples and Spanish explorers in the early decades of the AD 1500s. The particular socio-cultural conditions that would have made possible the introduction of these decidedly non-native birds into the repertoire of Native American potters in the protohistoric era are explored.