After a century of archaeological research in the Southeastern United States, there are still areas about which little is known. Surprisingly, one of these areas in the Appalachian Summit, which in historic times was inhabited by the Cherokee people whose rich culture and wide influence made their name commonplace in typifying Southeastern Indians. The culture of the people who preceded the historic Cherokees was no less rich, and their network of relationships with other groups no less wide. Until recently, however, the prehistoric cultural remains of the Southern Appalachians had received only slight attention.
Archaeological sites in the Appalachians usually do not stand out dramatically on the landscape as do the effigy mounds of the Ohio Valley and the massive platform mounds of the Southeastern Piedmont and Mississippi Valley. Prehistoric settlements in the Southern Appalachians lay in the bottomlands along the clear, rocky rivers, hidden in the folds of the mountains. Finding and investigating these sites required a systematic approach. From 1964 to 1971, under the direction of Joffre L. Coe, the Research Laboratories of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, conducted an archaeological project that was designed to investigate the antecedents of the historic Cherokees in the Appalachian Summit, and included site surveys over large portions of the area and concentrated excavations at several important sites in the vicinity of the historic Cherokee Middletowns.
One result of the Cherokee project is this book, the purpose of which is to present an initial description and synthesis of a late prehistoric phase in the Appalachian Summit, a phase that lasted from the beginnings of South Appalachian Mississippian culture to the emergence of identifiable Cherokee culture. At various points Professor Dickens draws these data into the broader picture of Southeastern prehistory, and occasionally presents some interpretations of the human behavior behind the material remains, however, is to make available some new information on a previously unexplored area. Through this presentation Cherokee Prehistory helps to provide a first step to approaching, in specific ways, the problems of cultural process and systemics in the aboriginal Southeast.
Jaan Kross's historical novel Sailing Against the Wind fictionalizes the life of Bernhard Schmidt (1879–1935), an Estonian-born inventor. Schmidt lost an arm in his youth while experimenting with a homemade rocket, resulting in psychological trauma that would plague him for the rest of his life. Largely self-taught, Schmidt was driven to seek recognition of his talents.
He moved to Germany in the 1930s, where, after perfecting techniques for polishing lenses, he began developing ideas for improving astronomical telescopes. He was arrested for selling one to the Russians, and although he got off with only a warning, he later suffered a breakdown and was sent to a mental hospital, where he soon died. Sailing Against the Wind becomes a meditation on national identity, the relationship between history and the individual life, and the mechanisms of the historical novel as a genre.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Within the general structure-and-process theme of this compendium, the authors have focused on either intrasite problems (those dealing with the formation and structure of a site, type of site, or type of feature) or intersite problems (those dealing with behavioral organization and process as developed from comparative site data). These papers, from a broad range of specialists, present a comprehensive study of southeastern archaeology.
Section I: Intrasite Structure and Formation Processes
Formation Processes for the Practical Prehistorian: An Example from the Southeast, J. Jefferson Reid
The Form, Function, and Formation of Garbage-filled Pits on Southeastern Aboriginal Sites: An Archaeobotanical Analysis, Roy S. Dickens Jr.
Feature Zones and Feature Fill: More Than Trash, Jack H. Wilson Jr.
Social Implications of Storage and Disposal Patterns, H. Trawick Ward
The Form and Function of South Carolina's Early Woodland Shell Rings, Michael B. Trinkley
A New Way of Looking at Old Holes: Methods for Excavating and Interpreting Timber Structures, Alexander H. Morrison II
Section II: Intersite Comparisons and Regional Chronology
Archaeology and the Archaic Period in the Southern Ridge-and-Valley Province, Jefferson Chapman
Intersite Assemblage Variability in the Lower Little Tennessee River Valley: Exploring Extinct Settlement Systems Through Probabilistic Sampling, R. P. Stephen Davis Jr.
Lithic Scatters in the South Carolina Piedmont, Veletta Canouts and Albert C. Goodyear III
Tradition and Typology: Basic Elements of the Carolina Projectile Point Sequence, Billy L. Oliver
Model and Sequence in the Maryland Archaic, Kit W. Wesler
Spheres of Cultural Interaction across the Coastal Plain of Virginia in the Woodland Period, Keith T. Egloff
Early Hopewellian Ceremonial Encampments in the South Appalachian Highlands, John A. Walthall
Deep Water and High Ground: Seventeenth-Century Settlement Patterns on the Carolina Coast, Stanley South and Michael O. Hartley
Epilogue: Joffre Lanning Coe: The Quiet Giant of Southeastern Archaeology, James B. Griffin
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