front cover of Archaeological Remote Sensing in North America
Archaeological Remote Sensing in North America
Innovative Techniques for Anthropological Applications
Edited by Duncan P. McKinnon and Bryan S. Haley
University of Alabama Press, 2017
The latest on the rapidly growing use of innovative archaeological remote sensing for anthropological applications in North America
 
Updating the highly praised 2006 publication Remote Sensing in Archaeology, edited by Jay K. Johnson, Archaeological Remote Sensing in North America: Innovative Techniques for Anthropological Applications is a must-have volume for today’s archaeologist. Targeted to practitioners of archaeological remote sensing as well as students, this suite of current and exemplary applications adheres to high standards for methodology, processing, presentation, and interpretation.
 
The use of remote sensing technologies to address academic and applied archaeological and anthropological research problems is growing at a tremendous rate in North America. Fueling this growth are new research paradigms using innovative instrumentation technologies and broader-area data collection methods. Increasingly, investigators pursuing these new approaches are integrating remote sensing data collection with theory-based interpretations to address anthropological questions within larger research programs.
 
In this indispensable volume, case studies from around the country demonstrate the technically diverse and major remote sensing methods and their integration with relevant technologies, such as geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS), and include various uses of the “big four”: magnetometry, resistivity, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and electromagnetic induction.
 
The study explores four major anthropological themes: site structure and community organization; technological transformation and economic change; archaeological landscapes; and earthen mound construction and composition. Concluding commentary from renowned expert Kenneth L. Kvamme overviews the practices, advances, and trends of geophysics and remote sensing in the past decade.
 
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front cover of Reconstructing Tascalusa's Chiefdom
Reconstructing Tascalusa's Chiefdom
Pottery Styles and the Social Composition of Late Mississippian Communities along the Alabama River
Amanda L. Regnier
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Reconstructing Tascalusa’s Chiefdom is an archaeological study of political collapse in the Alabama River Valley following the Hernando de Soto expedition.

To explain the cultural and political disruptions caused by Hernando de Soto's exploration deep into north America, Amanda L. Regnier presents an innovative analysis of ceramics and theory of cultural exchange. She argues that culture consists of a series of interconnected models governing proper behavior that are shared across the belief systems of communities and individuals. Historic cognitive models derived from ceramic data via cluster and correspondence analysis can effectively be used to examine these models and explain cultural exchange. 
 
The results of Regnier's work demonstrate that the Alabama River Valley was settled by populations migrating from three different regions during the late fifteenth century. The mixture of ceramic models associated with these traditions at Late Mississippian sites suggests that these newly founded towns, controlled by Tascalusa, comprised ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. Perhaps most significantly, Tascalusa's chiefdom appears to be a precontact example of a coalescent society that emerged after populations migrated from the deteriorating Mississippian chiefdoms into a new region.
 
A summary of excavations at Late Mississippian sites also includes the first published chronology of the Alabama River from approximately AD 900 to 1600.
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front cover of The Ritual Landscape of Late Precontact Eastern Oklahoma
The Ritual Landscape of Late Precontact Eastern Oklahoma
Archaeology from the WPA Era until Today
by Amanda L. Regnier, Scott W. Hammerstedt, and Sheila Bobalik Savage
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Revisits and updates WPA-funded archaeological research on key Oklahoma mound sites

As part of Great Depression relief projects started in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sponsored massive archaeological projects across Oklahoma. The WPA crews excavated eight mound sites and dozens of nonmound residential sites in the Arkansas River Valley that date between AD 1000 and 1450. These sites are considered the westernmost representations of Mississippian culture in the Southeast.
 
The results of these excavations were documented in field journals and photographs prepared by the field supervisors and submitted in a series of quarterly reports to WPA headquarters. These reports contain a wealth of unpublished information summarizing excavations at the mound sites and residential sites, including mound profiles, burial descriptions, house maps, artifact tables, and artifact sketches. Of the excavated mound sites, results from only one, Spiro, have been extensively studied and synthesized in academic literature. The seven additional WPA-excavated mound sites—Norman, Hughes, Brackett, Eufaula, Skidgel, Reed, and Lillie Creek—are known to archaeologists outside of Oklahoma only as unlabeled points on maps of mound sites in the Southeast.
 
The Ritual Landscape of Late Precontact Eastern Oklahoma curates and contextualizes the results of the WPA excavations, showing how they inform archaeological understanding of Mississippian occupation in the Arkansas Valley. Regnier, Hammerstedt, and Savage also relate the history and experiences of practicing archaeology in the 1930s, incorporating colorful excerpts from field journals of the young, inexperienced archaeologists. Finally, the authors update current knowledge of mound and nonmound sites in the region, providing an excellent example of historical archaeology.
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front cover of The Search for Mabila
The Search for Mabila
The Decisive Battle between Hernando de Soto and Chief Tascalusa
Edited by Vernon James Knight Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2009
One of the most profound events in sixteenth-century North America was a ferocious battle between the Spanish army of Hernando de Soto and a larger force of Indian warriors under the leadership of a feared chieftain named Tascalusa. The site of this battle was a small fortified border town within an Indian province known as Mabila. Although the Indians were defeated, the battle was a decisive blow to Spanish plans for the conquest and settlement of what is now the southeastern United States. For in that battle, De Soto’s army lost its baggage, including all proofs of the richness of the land—proofs that would be necessary to attract future colonists. Facing such a severe setback, De Soto led his army once more into the interior of the continent, where he was not to survive. The ragtag remnants of his once-mighty expedition limped into Mexico some three years later, thankful to be alive. The clear message of their ordeal was that this new land, then known as La Florida, could not be easily subjugated.
 
But where, exactly, did this decisive battle of Mabila take place? The accounts left by the Spanish chroniclers provide clues, but they are vague, so lacking in corroboration that without additional supporting evidence, it is impossible to trace De Soto’s trail on a modern map with any degree of certainty. Within this volume, 17 scholars—specialists in history, folklore, geography, geology, and archaeology—provide a new and encouragingly fresh perspective on the current status of the search for Mabila. Although there is a widespread consensus that the event took place in the southern part of what is now Alabama, the truth is that to this day, nobody knows where Mabila is—neither the contributors to this volume, nor any of the historians and archaeologists, amateur and professional, who have long sought it. One can rightfully say that the lost battle site of Mabila is the predominant historical mystery of the Deep South.
 
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front cover of Shovel Ready
Shovel Ready
Archaeology and Roosevelt's New Deal for America
Bernard K. Means
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Shovel Ready provides a comprehensive lens through which to view the New Deal period, a fascinating and prolific time in American archaeology.
 
In this collection of diverse essays united by a common theme, Bernard K. Means and his contributors deliver a valuable research tool for practicing archaeologists and historians of archaeology, as well as New Deal scholars in general.
 
To rescue Americans from economic misery and the depths of despair during the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created several New Deal jobs programs to put people to work. Men and women labored on a variety of jobs, from building roads to improving zoos. Some ordinary citizens—with no prior experience—were called on to act as archaeologists and excavate sites across the nation, ranging in size from small camps to massive mound complexes, and dating from thousands of years ago to the early Colonial period.
 
Shovel Ready contains essays on projects ranging across the breadth of the United States, including New Deal investigations in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. Some essays engage in historical retrospectives. Others bring the technologies of the twenty-first century, including accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of curated collections and geophysical surveys at New Deal–excavated sites, to bear on decades-old excavations. The volume closes with an investigation into material remnants of the New Deal itself.
 
Contributors
John L. Cordell / John F. Doershuk / David H. Dye /Scott W. Hammerstedt / Janet R. Johnson / Kevin Kiernan /Gregory D. Lattanzi /Patrick C. Livingood / Anna R. Lunn / Bernard K.  Means / Stephen E. Nash / Amanda L. Regnier / Sissel Schroeder / James R. Wettstaed
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