Community Scale and Complexity: The Ceramic Social Geography of Fourth Millennium B.P. Societies of Middle Savannah River Valley and Beyond Kenneth E. Sassaman and Zackary I. Gilmore NSF Award# 1449893, effective 2-15-15 Project Summary

Overview: The proposed research investigates the changing relationships between place-based communities and regional networks of interaction through a reconstruction of the ceramic social geography of the oldest pottery tradition of North America. Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) and petrography will be conducted on large samples of sherds from Stallings period (5150–3800 cal B.P.) sites in the Savannah River valley of Georgia and South Carolina to document spatial variation in the distribution of pottery as a proxy for community scale and complexity. The results of these tests will enable us to determine how the organization of Early Stallings communities enabled and constrained the emergence of place-based communities of Classic Stallings times.

Intellectual Merit: The culture-history of Stallings archaeology is relatively well known, but inferences about the composition of communities and connections among them lack the independent, quantified measures that geochemical and petrographic analyses of pottery provide. A large inventory of pottery from dozens of sites in the study area is available for analyses, including the namesake Stallings Island site (9CB1). With its circular village, cemetery, and assemblage of elaborately decorated vessels, Stallings Island stands apart from other sites in the region as a place of social and ritual gathering at ~4100–3800 cal B.P. Its deeper history extends well beyond this site and its apogee to encompass a millennium-long period of widely distributed communities whose plain pottery and nonredundant land-use practices suggest limited attachment to particular places and persons. However, we do not know if this apparent change in community scale and complexity at 4100 cal B.P. amounts to the social differentiation and circumscription of distributed communities or instead the emplacement of an existing regional network through novel forms of social interaction, namely ritual gatherings.

Data derived from NAA and petrography of sherds representing 450 vessels from 13 sites spanning the Early (5150–4100 cal B.P) and Classic (4100–3800 cal B.P.) phases of Stallings history will be used to test alternative hypotheses on variation in clays and aplastics of pottery as a function of variation in community scale and organization. To the extent that variations in Early Stallings pottery were differentially distributed in space, the place-based communities of Classic Stallings times likely emerged out of existing social distinctions. Conversely, inasmuch as Early Stallings pottery lacks detectable subregional variations, place-based communities emerged as novel social arrangements, potentially emplacing, or “centering” entire networks of distributed persons. This latter scenario is akin to the histories of pre-Columbian agricultural societies such as those of Chaco, Cahokia, and Etowah, in which large-scale relocations of people to particular places attended a burgeoning rituality and sociality that archaeologists often characterize as “emergent complexity.” The Stallings case—as with others involving nonagricultural societies of seemingly egalitarian sociality—encourages further consideration of community-scale processes that crosscut all manner of sociopolitical complexity.

Broader Impacts: The proposed research has immediate and long-term impacts. It will immediately add a necessary but missing component to the regional database on provenance of pottery in the pre-Columbian Southeast, specifically establishing the historical benchmark for distributions of pottery-making communities on which all later distributions were contingent. NAA and petrographic data will be made available to other researchers and thus enhance the capacity for comparative and synthetic research. Enhancing the research value of Stallings collections from six repositories in the region and beyond is a related immediate impact. Longer-term impacts turn on an NSF-funded initiative to identify archaeology’s grandest challenges for purposes of cyber-infrastructural investments in “big data.” Whereas NAA data are made available through MURR, the results of petrographic data are not routinely collected and curated for comparative purposes. The proposed project will result in a new online resource that contains not only point-count data on pottery thin-sections, but also polarized images of each section. This initiative will form the basis for compiling with additional funding the large inventory of thin sections available from years of petrographic analyses at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

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From an NSF-funded effort to identify investments in IT infrastructure comes a list of archaeology’s 25 greatest research challenges. Using crowd-sourced data from members of the profession, a team of 15 archaeologists led by Keith Kintigh (2014) structured the list of Grand Challenges around five major themes, all bearing relevance to a generalized understanding of historical and evolutionary processes. Two challenges listed under the theme Emergence, Communities, and Complexity address spatial processes of the genesis, reproduction, and transformation of social bodies, be they place-based communities (sensu Ortman 2008) or networks of widely distributed persons: How does the organization of human communities at varying scales emerge from and constrain the actions of their members? How and why did small-scale human communities grow into spatially and demographically larger and politically more complex entities? Notably, these two questions focus attention on the mutual constitution of the local and extralocal, or of place-based communities and the networks of which they are a part. They thus require data on social and historical processes played out over scales sufficiently large to capture the archeological residues of all contributing social bodies. But they likewise require microscale data to model the experiences of the various agents involved locally, as well as data to track their movements translocally. Studies that have met this challenge in North American archaeology are concentrated in the Southwest, where the concatenation of high-resolution chronology, paleoenvironmental detail, open surveying terrain, and ethnohistoric records informs an archaeological record of architecture, pottery, and other material residues of human experiences across considerable time and space (e.g., Kohler and Varien 2010; Mills et al. 2013; Nelson et al. 2011). These detailed empirical records in turn inform agent-based models that have potential for application elsewhere, including futures planning (e.g., Kintigh et al. 2014; Kohler and Varien 2012).

The archaeological lenses of Southwestern archeology shed light on ancient times with a

luminosity hard to match elsewhere in North America. Nonetheless, archaeologists working in the Eastern Woodlands have found some success in reconstructing social networks and the social nodes they entail through the geochemical sourcing of artifacts, most notably pottery. As it does in the American Southwest and elsewhere, pottery offers a means to discern the social geography of particular communities through the movements of clays, pottery vessels, and the human bodies that carried them. The American Southeast offers especially great potential for ceramic social geography in its diverse and elaborate pottery traditions—some of which involved routine large-scale movements (e.g., Gilmore 2014; Wallis 2011)—and in its deep history of pottery-making, reaching back over 5,000 years (Sassaman 1993a; Saunders and Hayes 2004).

The proposed research addresses both of the Grand Challenge questions listed above through a

detailed reconstruction of the social geography of the first pottery-using communities in North America. So-called “Stallings” communities of ca. 5150–3800 cal B.P. were centered on the middle Savannah River valley of present-day Georgia and South Carolina. Compared to the archaeological knowledge of other hunter-gatherer populations of comparable antiquity, Stallings archaeology is relatively well known, at least in the middle Savannah region (Sassaman 2006; Sassaman et al. 2006). Beyond this locality the social and geographic reach of Stallings pottery extends east and south along the south Atlantic coast and much of the Georgia and South Carolina Coastal Plain, and at the lower elevations of the Piedmont to the west (Figure 1).

Over the ~1,350-year period during which Stallings pottery was deposited at sites regionwide, the

scale and direction of human movements, interactions, and alliances changed repeatedly, as did the degree of settlement permanence, formalization of community space, and elaboration of style. After more than a

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Figure 1. Map of the Savannah River Valley region of South Carolina and Georgia, showing location of sites with Stallings fiber-tempered pottery assemblages to be sampled in proposed research, with inset of sites in the middle Savannah area, notably Stallings Island. millennium of using simple, plain pottery, communities in select locations—both coastal and riverine—began to elaborate the form and surface treatment of pottery to express themselves in novel ways (Figure 2). Nowhere is this change more strongly expressed than at the National Historic Landmark Stallings Island site near Augusta, Georgia (Claflin 1931). Stallings Communities of Place and Practice

Stallings Island at ~4100–3800 cal B.P. was the locus of a community of people arranged in a small circular compound around a plaza that contained the bodies of their deceased (Sassaman et al. 2006). The site had for many centuries prior been a place of human burial (Claflin 1931; Jones 1873). Individuals were interred there over much of the previous millennium, although the cultural and biological connections of these earlier people to those of later communities evidently were not direct. After a period of abandonment lasting a century or two, Stallings Island emerged at ~4100 cal B.P. as one of two distinctive places in the regional landscape. Other, coeval circular villages existed at the nearby Ed

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Figure 2. Examples of Stallings sherds from the greater Savannah River region; left panel, Early Stallings Plain, some with flanged lips; right panel, Classic Stallings Drag and Jab Punctated. Marshall and Mims Point sites, but only Stallings Island and the Lake Spring site1 upriver received numerous burials. These are also the only sites of many in the region where carinated vessels were deposited regularly (Figure 3), the majority at Stallings Island. Sherds of carinated vessels are among a massive assemblage of pottery sherds decorated primarily by linear, geometric, and zoned fields of punctations, and occasionally incision and simple stamping.

In its carinated pottery, cemeteries, and insular setting, Stallings Island has the appearance of a circumscribed community with a multigenerational connection to the place, what Ortman (2008) might

call a place-based community. However, its distinctiveness is moderated by a series of practices that were shared across other places in the region. Its connection to other places on the landscape, and thus other

communities, is known to us best by a few generalized traits of Classic Stallings pottery, notably punctated surfaces and the use of fiber for temper. Sufficient radiometric age estimates are available to

know that besides the two nearby villages noted earlier, coeval Classic Stallings site clusters are found in the Savannah River Delta, the Brier Creek tributary of the Georgia Coastal Plain, and the Ogeechee River

to the south. Each site cluster is known for shell deposits with abundant decorated pottery of broadly

1 Lake Spring is now completely inundated by Clark Hill reservoir, known since 1988 as Lake Strom Thurmond, which was built in the late 1940s and flooded in 1952. Limited salvage work at the site was reported by Miller (1949), and since then the survey and excavation records have been synthesized by Elliott (1995) and aspects of the collection from Lake Spring reanalyzed by Howdeshell (2005).

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Figure 3. Examples of rim sherds of carinated vessels from the Classic Stallings period assemblage from Stallings

Island (9CB1), Columbia County, Georgia.

similar style. But there are measurable technical differences in the form and paste of pottery and statistically valid differences in the proportions of right- and left-oriented punctations. Technical design variations have been interpreted as a result of postmarital residence practices that kept groups of related potters (women?) together in communities of multigenerational duration (Sassaman and Rudolphi 2001)

How communities of practice came be spatially associated with pottery that was distinctive in form but widely shared in decorative style speaks to the multiscalar dimensions of community formation. It follows that the seemingly insular qualities of Stallings Island are a bit misleading and we are compelled to question how a place of distinctive practice was also a place of cosmopolitan persons. In this

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regard, it is worth considering the possibility that Stallings Island was a locus of social and ritual gathering for people from across the region. Archaeologists working in diverse settings across the globe have come to appreciate that many early sites of elaborate architecture, ritual, and deposition were not the settings of large-scale sedentary villages or towns, but rather places of gathering for regionally distributed and mobile populations, united together in some fashion by shared practice. This would appear to be the case for the oldest sites of monumental architecture in the Middle East (Schmidt 2010), South America (Roosevelt et al. 2012), and North America (Kidder 2011; Sassaman and Randall 2012), to name but a few.

In Florida, Silver Glen Springs is a particularly apt case in point. At this site on the St. Johns

River, an enormous assemblage of ornately decorated pottery was associated with a U-shaped shell ridge 300-m long, 200-m wide, and 8-m tall (Sassaman et al. 2011). Contrary to the supposition that a shell deposit this large and an assemblage of pottery this dense and elaborate attests to large-scale, permanent dwelling, sourcing analyses by Gilmore (2014) show that the geographic reach of its pottery stretched as far as southwest Florida, more than 200 km distant. Whereas pots may have been traded from distant sources and eventually deposited at Silver Glen Springs without significant movement of persons, other lines of evidence point to a pattern of visitation or relocation involving diverse constituencies. A similar case has been made for the Poverty Point mound complex of northeast Louisiana (Spivey et al. 2014), Adena mounds in the Midwest (Clay 1998), and Swift Creek centers in the Southeast (Wallis 2011). Wallis’s study of Swift Creek pottery is particularly compelling because it combines sourcing data on pottery (NAA and petrography) with forensic-like details on the wooden paddles used to stamp intricate designs.

Missing in studies of what we call ceramic social geography are details of the organization and

distribution of communities before places of gathering materialized. We simply do not have a good handle on antecedent conditions in most cases and thus little basis for inferring how place-based communities emerged out of communities of distributed persons, or networks of interaction. The Stallings archaeological record provides a good opportunity for examining antecedent conditions in the centuries preceding Classic Stallings times. Early Stallings Networks

The full spatial extent of early pottery communities in the Savannah River Valley has a history that reaches well before the Classic Stallings period to encompass more than a millennium of pottery-making. Early Stallings pottery, dating from ~5150–4100 cal B.P., was broadly distributed at sites across much of the lower Savannah River and the Atlantic coast from Charleston to central Georgia. The vast majority of pottery made during this protracted period consisted of plain, fiber-tempered basins used as containers for indirect-heat cooking (Sassaman 1993a). Perforated slabs of soapstone, quarried from Piedmont sources over 100 km away, were acquired for indirect-heat cooking by some Coastal Plain communities (e.g., Crook 2009; Stoltman 1974). Interactions between Piedmont communities and their pottery-using neighbors downriver and on the coast have been cited as the primary factor accounting for the uneven and protracted process by which pottery and the direct-heat cooking method were incorporated into traditional cooking technology (Sassaman 1993a, 1995).

Whatever the nature of interactions among regional communities during the first millennium of

pottery use, they did not result in assemblages of pottery with intraregional technical variations like those of Classic Stallings times. This contrast goes well beyond the obvious difference between plain and punctated wares. Early Stallings pottery varies little in form, size, and paste, although variation in this latter attribute has never been substantiated with petrographic observations. If there is patterned variation in Early Stallings pottery that maps onto particular places, it will have to be found in the geochemistry of clays, the petrography of aplastic inclusions, or other attributes beyond casual inspection.

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In contrast to the place-based communities of Classic Stallings times, Early Stallings communities left a material record of apparently greater mobility, less land-use redundancy, and more flexible group membership. We thus have a protracted period of time (up to eight centuries) when Early Stallings communities appear to have been distributed widely, moved about openly, and used pottery that is today undifferentiated to the naked eye. We might refer to this as a distributed community, people with a shared repertoire of practice enabled through social learning networks that lacked the constraints of particular places or persons, but was instead generative of movement and interaction2. That they did not adorn their pottery with distinctive surface treatments speaks to an anonymity of design and an open social network. Determining if this is an illusion or a reality is among the necessary tasks of the proposed research, as discussed further below.

How did the distributed communities of Early Stallings times become the place-based

communities of Classic Stallings times? If, as we hypothesize, Stallings Island (and perhaps Lake Spring) was a place of regional gathering, was the shift to place-based communities anticipated by the spatial organization of existing regional networks? Alternatively, were existing regional networks contradicted or superseded by the organization and structure of place-based communities? Data bearing relevance to these questions are found in the provenance and technofunctional variation of Stallings pottery. Changing Communities

We can now return to the first of the Grand Challenge questions posed earlier to generate testable hypotheses for spatial and temporal variations in the technology of pottery as they relate to changing scales of community organization. How does the organization of human communities at varying scales emerge from and constrain the actions of their members?

In the context of Stallings history outlined above, at least two scales of community organization are apparent and we are interested in understanding how the organization of distributed communities in Early Stallings times enabled and constrained its descendants to enter into the place-based communities of Classic Stallings times. If these latter communities were truly isomorphic with places such that pottery became highly localized (as suggested by some technical attributes), then their emergence at ca. 4100 cal B.P. would appear to represent a reduction in the geographic scale of communities. If, however, place-based communities were the nodes of regional networks, then the geographic scale of communities may not have shrunk at all (as suggested by some stylistic attributes), but became reconfigured around and anchored to a few key places. Premises, hypotheses, and test implications for these alternative scenarios follow.

Premise 1: Clay Acquisition was Always Local. Following on cross-cultural observations of nonmarket potteries worldwide (Arnold 1985:39–49; Arthur 2006; Gosselain 1994; Rice 1987:116–117; Stark et al. 2000), we expect clay acquisition to be local such that raw clays were not transported more

2 Distributed communities is a modern term for the virtual communities of practice that use networked technology, especially the Web, to establish connections across space and time (Cianciolo and Evans 2013). The salience of this term to ancient social networks lies in the sense that movement of objects can also establish connections among persons independent of particular times and places. Related alternatives to the usual sense of community are discussed in a recent review by Harris (2012), who expands the concept to include not only distributed members (see also many of the papers in Canuto and Yaeger 2000), but also nonhuman agents. Likewise, we can extend the concept of distributed communities to that of distributed persons (sensu Strathern 1988) to suggest that networks consists relationships established through gifting of objects, like pots, which then extend personhood across time and space in the absence of the bodies themselves (see also Wallis 2011).

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than a few kilometers from geological sources to locations of manufacture. Conversely, the transportation of vessels is not unexpected and thus data on the geochemistry of sherds are free to vary independent of location, within, that is, the geographic reach of all Stallings pottery. Clays were available throughout the region, with residual sources in the Piedmont, marine sources at the coast and throughout the Coastal Plain, and depositional clays in the valleys of rivers with headwaters in the Piedmont or Appalachians, such as the Savannah River. Because many sources of clay have been reworked, we do not expect a one-to-one correspondence between elemental profiles of clays and local sources. However, we do expect to be able to distinguish between residual Piedmont clays and their marine counterparts, and we expect to be able to infer the relative location of redeposited Piedmont clays in the Coastal Plain by the monotonic decrement of Piedmont-specific minerals downriver (e.g., Wallis 2011). Part of the analysis proposed here involves the collection and assaying of clays from the greater Savannah River area to substantiate this premise (see below).

Premise 2: The Addition of Aplastics to Clay was a Matter of Technical and Cultural Choice. By

definition, all Stallings pottery was tempered with fiber, typically Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides). But the density of fiber in pastes varies from high to low, with some so bereft of fiber as to appear “temper-less.” In addition to fiber, pastes vary in the amount, size, and condition of quartz sand they contain, as well as the inclusion of dark minerals, mica, and other constituents of Piedmont rocks, and iron oxides, which crosscut physiography. Whereas fiber was deliberately added to clay as part of a paste “recipe,” the other aplastics include materials found naturally in clays. However, because these materials vary within assemblages from particular places, they are not likely to be simply the de facto outcome of nonselective uses of local clay. Rather, they represent both technical and cultural preferences, the former responsive to variations in the potential of local clays for achieving particular goals. The technical parameters of pastes for alternative uses of fiber-tempered pottery have been reviewed elsewhere (Sassaman 1993a). Petrographic work on Stallings pottery and native clays is needed to discriminate between variations in aplastics that are source-specific from those that are outcomes of choice. Following from these premises, alternative hypotheses for Early Stallings assemblages can now be proposed: H1: The provenance of clays used for Early Stallings pottery will covary with location as a function of local procurement and deposition. H2: The provenance of clays used for Early Stallings pottery will vary independently of location as a function of displacement between locations of production and deposition.

Implications: Hypothesis 1 (H1) anticipates an isomorphic spatial relationship between the production and deposition of pottery. This is a reasonable assumption given both the technical limitations of Early Stallings pottery and its seemingly anonymous style, indicative perhaps of a limited role in social identity. However, we also posit that people (potters) moved about routinely in the greater Savannah region at this time, and thus the covariance between sources of clay and locations of deposition cannot be assumed and needs to be investigated. For lack of data on clay provenance, we simply do not know if pots were moving with people at this time. If geochemical souring on clays from sherds at sites across the region reveals greater variation between rather than within assemblages, H1 cannot be falsified. If the opposite holds (greater variation within rather than between assemblages), then H1 can be falsified and H2 not.

H3: The aplastics of Early Stallings pottery will vary independently of location as a function of the routine movement of potters and pots throughout a network (i.e., a distributed community).

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H4: The aplastics of Early Stallings pottery will covary with location as a function of multigenerational place-based communities of potters.

Implications: Hypothesis 3 (H3) follows from the premise that temper will vary with the choices potters make to prepare clays for pottery and so if potters and pots moved openly throughout a network, their choices would become materialized across the network in assemblages of broken and discarded vessels. Casual inspection of aplastics, as noted above, would seem to bear this out, but frankly, we do not have the necessary petrographic data to quantify and compare aplastics across assemblages. If petrographic analyses of sherds from sites across the region reveals greater variation in aplastics within rather than between assemblages, H3 cannot be falsified. If the opposite holds (greater variation between rather than within assemblages), then H3 can be falsified and H4 not.

Hypotheses pertaining to the place-based communities of Classis Stallings times can be adapted

from those above, and we can add hypotheses specifying the expectations for such communities if their places were nodes of regional gathering: H5: The provenance of clays and the aplastics used for Classic Stallings pottery will covary with place as a function of social and geographic circumscription (i.e., place-based communities). H6: The provenance of clays and the aplastics used for Classic Stallings pottery will vary independently of place as a function of periodic regional gatherings involving the deposition of pottery away from places of production (distributed communities that convene occasionally at places like Stallings Island). H7: Nonlocal clays and aplastics of Classic Stallings pottery will covary with formal and/or stylistic attributes of pottery as a function of place-based social identity.

Implications: Hypothesis 5 (H5) is the expectation for place-based communities that were socially circumscribed such that pottery production and deposition were spatially isomorphic as a function of the multigenerational coresidency of potters (Sassaman and Rudolphi 2001; see also Bowser 2008; Gosselain 1998, 2008). This hypothesis would be falsified simply by the identification of more than incidental occurrences of nonlocal clays and aplastics at places of Classic Stallings pottery. Hypothesis 6 (H6) is the alternative, which points to the movement of persons and pots. Unlike the movements of potters in the case of Early Stallings networks, the expectation for place-based communities is that pots were delivered to places of gathering by visiting persons, as a form of gifting. It follows in Hypothesis 7 (H7) that pottery delivered to places of gathering would carry with it signifiers of nonlocal identity. The carinated vessels of Stallings Island fit this bill and thus are expected to evince the highest diversity of clays and aplastics in the assemblage.

In sum, data on the provenance of clays and the aplastics of pottery can be used to test alternative

hypotheses about the regional organization of Stallings communities. Ultimately, these sorts of data are needed to determine how the organization of Early Stallings communities enabled and constrained the emergence of place-based communities of Classic Stallings times. To the extent that clay and aplastic variations in Early Stallings pottery map onto space, the place-based communities of Classic Stallings times emerged out of existing social geographies. Conversely, insofar as Early Stallings assemblages lacked detectable variations in pottery, place-based communities emerged as entirely novel social arrangements. And yet, to the extent that place-based communities served as nodes of regional integration, they may have emplaced, or “centered” entire networks of distributed persons. This final expectation speaks to the second of the Grand Challenges posed above: How and why did small-scale human communities grow into spatially and demographically larger and politically more complex entities?

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The Stallings case opens the possibility that “complexity” resided not in the in situ growth of a place-based community but rather in the “emplacing” of an existing regional network. This would deviate from other cases of “gathering” such as the urbanization of Cahokia (Pauketat 2004), but conform in many respects to ritual landscapes like those of Adena (Clay 1998), where periodic aggregations serve to reproduce networks of distributed communities. Above all, it questions the “small-scale” nature of dispersed, mobile societies, whose connections with others in networks of movement eclipse the geographic scale of place-based communities. If there is complexity to be found in emerging place-based communities, it may reside first and foremost in senses of time and space that enable particular places on the landscape to embody so much social geography. Sampling

A large inventory of Stallings pottery assemblages is available for study. Twenty-nine assemblages of Stallings pottery were analyzed for technofunctional and stylistic data in the late 1980s (Sassaman 1993a), and since then another seven assemblages have been analyzed using the same protocols (Sassaman et al. 1995, 2006). The Minimum Number of Vessels (MNV) in these assemblages exceeds 2,900; hundreds more have yet to be counted from Stallings Island and Lake Spring. To date no geochemical or petrographic analyses of Stallings pottery has ever been attempted (although see Thompson et al. 2008 for a preliminary attempt at sourcing contemporaneous St. Simons and Thoms Creek pottery from coastal Georgia).

The proposed research requires samples for NAA and petrography from assemblages spanning

the temporal and spatial distributions of Stallings pottery in the greater Savannah River region. For our purposes, assemblages can be divided into Early and Classic Stallings periods, with the caveat that many of these assemblages have absolute age estimates that enable more fine-grained comparisons of pottery variation over time. As noted, Early Stallings assemblages are distributed widely at sites across the region. To simplify comparisons, we can divide this distribution along the Savannah River valley into three spatial units: Lower Coastal Plain/Coast, Middle-Upper Coastal Plain, and Lower Piedmont/Fall Zone (Figure 1). Thirty pottery samples each from at least two sites per unit will be sufficient to characterize the range of geochemical and petrographic variation (Table 1).

Pottery samples of Classic Stallings will be drawn from sites (places) with formalized site plans

(e.g., circular villages) or other investments in place (e.g., Stallings Island and Lake Spring cemeteries; Mims Point storage), all with assemblages of ornately decorated pottery and two (Stallings Island and Lake Spring) with carinated vessels. Along the expanse of the Savannah River encompassed by Early Stallings sites are Classic Stallings places near the coast and in the middle Savannah locality, essentially at opposite ends of this 200-km-long expanse. To this we add two sites (Chew Mill and Strange) from the adjacent Ogeechee River drainage. With pottery distinctive in technology yet conformant to Classic Stallings decorative style, the Ogeechee River sites will provide an important control over the effects of local clay lithologies on choice of temper. Likewise, the Ogeechee River is a Coastal Plain drainage and thus does not include the depositional clays or hard rock of Piedmont and Appalachian lithologies.

The large assemblage of carinated vessels (n = 130) from Stallings Island will be sampled as a

subset of the entire site assemblage, raising the total sample from this site to 60. Additional carinated vessels will be included in the sample of 30 vessels from Lake Spring. The relatively small proportion of this form (~4 percent) in the assemblage does not warrant additional sampling. Again, no other sites in region include more than a trace of carinated vessels.

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Table 1. Inventory of Stallings Pottery Assemblages Available for Study by Period, Locality, and Site. MNV Repository Reference EARLY STALLINGS Lower Coastal Plain/Coast Bilbo ~40 UWG Crook 2009 Daws Island 49 SCIAA Michie 1973 Middle-Upper Coastal Plain Rabbit Mount 246 PM Stoltman 1974 Cox/Fennel Hill 68 SCIAA Trinkley 1975 Lower Piedmont/Fall Zone Victor Mills ~40 LSA Sassaman 2006 Ed Marshall ~50 LSA Sassaman 2006 Rae’s Creek 32 UWG Crook 1990 CLASSIC STALLINGS Coastal Chesterfield 55 CM Flannery 1943 Middle Savannah Stallings Island 1,000+ LSA/PM Clafin 1931; Sassaman et al. 2006 Lake Spring 200+ UGA Miller 1949 Mims Point 85 SCIAA/LSA Sassaman 1993b Ed Marshall 32 LSA Sassaman 2006 Ogeechee Chew Mill 191 LSA Sassaman et al. 1995 Strange 390 LSA Sassaman et al. 1995 UWG = University of West Georgia SCIAA = South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology PM = Peabody Museum, Harvard University LSA = Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology, University of Florida CM = Charleston Museum UGA = University of Georgia

A minimum of 30 vessels each from an inventory of 13 site assemblages and 60 from Stallings Island (Table 1) gives a total estimated sample of 450 vessels. A sherd from each of these vessels will be analyzed by NAA to ascertain the geochemical composition of clays used. Sherds from half of these vessels—15 each from the 13 site assemblages, and 30 from Stallings Island—will also be sectioned for petrographic analysis.

In addition to geochemical analysis of Stallings pottery, the proposed research is designed to

sample and characterize geological sources of clays from the Savannah River valley. This will entail field sampling at cutbanks and other exposures at several locations in the valley from the lower Piedmont to the coast. Samples from the adjacent Ogeechee River valley will likewise be sought. A maximum of 30 clay samples will be collected and subjected to NAA and petrographic analysis. Additional comparative data will be provided by the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) database compiled from previous studies in the region. Methods

Chemical and mineralogical techniques will be applied to these pottery and clay samples in order

to characterize the social composition and geographic scale of Stallings communities and trace their

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shifting organizations through time. The primary goal of provenance research is to deduce the geographic source of archaeological materials (e.g., pottery vessels) by comparing them with substances with known source locations (e.g., clay samples) (Wallis 2011). The basic principle guiding this type of research, the “provenance postulate,” states that: “Sourcing is possible as long as there exists some qualitative or quantitative, chemical or mineralogical difference between natural sources that exceeds the qualitative or quantitative variation within each source” (Neff and Glowacki 2002:5; see also Weigand et al. 1977). Even where precise source locations cannot be pinpointed, it is possible to distinguish between local and nonlocal vessels based on the “criterion of abundance,” the usually reliable assumption that things (in this case, pottery vessels with certain chemical compositions) are most common closest to where they originated (Bishop et al. 1982; Neff and Glowacki 2002).

In this case, a combination of Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) and ceramic petrography will

be used to make provenance inferences. NAA is a bulk chemical technique used to characterize the elemental constituents of a material. This technique, described in detail by Glascock (1992; Glascock et al. 2004), involves placing a small, usually powdered, sample into a nuclear reactor core where it is bombarded with neutrons. This bombardment results in a small fraction of the nuclei being transformed into unstable radioactive isotopes that decay at a known rate. While decaying, isotopes emit gamma rays with characteristic energies that can be measured to determine the quantities of the various elements present in the sample. Multivariate statistical techniques (Glascock 1992; Neff 2002) can then be used to identify groups among the samples based on shared chemical constituents that are presumed to reflect geographically distinct source areas. The analytical precision of NAA (Bishop et al. 1982:292; Rice 1987:397), along with its small sample requirements (< 400 mg), simple preparation procedures (Glascock 1992), and comparability across datasets, have made it the disciplinary standard for the chemical characterization of pottery pastes (Pollard and Heron 2008:50).

Whereas NAA characterizes the bulk chemical composition of a material, petrography reveals its

mineralogical constituents. Ceramic petrography involves the examination of pottery thin sections under a polarizing microscope, which emits polarized light up through the thin section, revealing characteristic optical properties of the constituent minerals, allowing them to be identified (Nesse 2000). Petrographic analysis is particularly useful for archaeologists because it not only allows for the identification of different minerals, but also for quantifying their orientation, textures, abundances, characteristics that can be used to distinguish naturally-occurring inclusions from culturally-added tempers. Petrography also registers void shapes and frequencies (vital for characterizing fiber-tempered vessels), surface treatments, and alterations due to firing or postdepositional factors (Rice 1987:379) and is not affected by processes of diagenesis to which chemical techniques may be susceptible (Stoltman 2001). Although Stallings pottery is defined largely by its organic temper, it also contains varying quantities of quartz sand and assorted heavy minerals. Regardless of whether these aplastics exist as natural constituents in local clay deposits or were added as temper, geographically patterned disparities in mineral inclusions are, as revealed through petrographic analysis, likely to be informative when making provenance determinations. Because they exhibit different strengths and yield independent datasets, NAA and petrographic techniques are generally viewed as complimentary rather than as alternatives (e.g., Bishop et al. 1982; Rice 1987; Stoltman 1989; Wallis 2011).

The effectiveness of both INAA and petrography for distinguishing among clays and pottery from

different areas of the southeastern U.S. has, at this point, been repeatedly demonstrated (e.g., Cordell 2004; Cordell and Deagan 2013; Gilmore 2014; Pluckhahn and Cordell 2011; Steponaitis et al. 1996; Stoltman and Mainfort 2002; Wallis 2011; Wallis et al. 2010; Wallis and Cordell 2013). Although the ubiquity of clays and frequently redundant lithologies in the Southeast make it more difficult to isolate precise source locations compared to some other regions (e.g., Glowacki and Neff 2002; Stoner et al. 2008), consistent chemical and mineralogical trends have been identified and proven effective in demonstrating the circulation of prehistoric pottery. Geological surveys in Georgia and South Carolina

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have revealed substantial, patterned variations in clay mineralogy and chemistry across the present study area due to a number of factors, including compositional differences in parent rocks, contrasting ages of distinct deposits, and diverse modes and distances of sediment transport (Bates 1963; Hetrick et al. 1987; Smith 1929). In the Savannah River Valley, detectable differences would be expected to occur, at minimum, among mountain, piedmont, and coastal plain clays with chemical concentrations and mineral grain sizes diminishing along the course of the river toward the coast (based on Crocker 1999). This distribution pattern has indeed been verified in clays and pottery along the Altamaha/Ocmulgee drainage system directly to the south (Wallis 2011:101). Consequently, a combination of NAA and petrography, applied to both pottery and clays, should be effective in evaluating the relative levels of chemical and mineralogical diversity present in the Stallings pottery assemblages from various times and places and for estimating the geographic scale of the area from which this pottery originated.

Chronological control over the sherd inventory is critical if we are to detect changes in

petrographic and geochemical variations indicative of changing community scale. By and large, Stallings pottery and site-specific chronologies are well known, backed as they are by ~130 radiometric assays for 23 sites in the study area, coupled with stratigraphic contexts for effective index attributes on pottery, notably the temporal priority of flanged lips on plain vessels (Sassaman 1993a). However, gaps do exist in the radiometric inventory, notably at select sites with only one or two assays (Cox/Fennel Hill; Lake Spring; Chesterfield; Strange; Chew Mill). We are budgeting for an additional ten AMS assays on carbonized fibers extracted from sherds. Gilmore (2014) has developed effective protocols for removing minute charred fibers from Orange-period sherds from the St. Johns Valley of Florida and has paired fiber assays with assays of associated charcoal and/or soot to verify the veracity of the method. These same protocols will be used to date strategic samples from poorly-dated sites in the Stallings sample. It is unlikely this method will work on the low-fiber fabric of sherds for the Ogeechee sites, so efforts to refine the dating of Chew Mill and Strange will hinge on the presence of soot, which is occasionally present (Sassaman et al. 1995).

For the NAA component of this research, all samples will be sent to the University of Missouri

Research Reactor (MURR) for analysis. In addition, an application will be submitted to MURR’s Subsidy Program for Archaeological Research. This program, supported by the National Science Foundation, offers a substantial subsidy for analysis, reducing the per sample cost for NAA from $100 to $30. Petrographic thin sections will be professionally cut by Spectrum Petrographics, Inc., and the analysis will be carried out the Ceramic Technology Laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History. There, standard petrographic point-counting procedures will be applied, as outlined by Stoltman (1989).

The petrographic analyses proposed here will be conducted by Zackary Gilmore, a UF Ph.D.

candidate who will graduate in August 2014 and undertake this work as a postdoctoral researcher. Gilmore garnered NSF support for his dissertation research on the geochemical and petrographic composition of Orange fiber-tempered pottery, the Florida counterpart to Stallings pottery. With graduate training in mineral petrography, extensive tutelage under Florida Museum of Natural History ceramicist Ann Cordell, and now 200 hours of scope work, Gilmore has the technical expertise to execute the petrographic analyses. Cordell is making available her lab’s microscope set-up for this project.

Gilmore will also be responsible for most of the proposed research tasks: traveling to repositories

to select samples of sherds; collecting raw clay samples from locations in the study area’ preparing sherds for processing by Spectrum Petrographics; preparing samples for NAA assays at MURR; creating and maintaining a database on the samples and results of analyses; creating and posting an online resource for sharing the data; and contributing to reports, presentations, and publications. Work Plan

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The proposed research entails four week-long trips to collect samples, preparation of samples for analyses, an estimated 382.5 hours of microscope work, statistical analysis of the NAA results, report preparation, and database curation. All tasks will be conducted by postdoctoral researcher Zackary Gilmore, under the supervision of the PI. Several of the collections are housed at the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology, University of Florida, and can thus be accessed without delay. Assemblages from repositories in Georgia, South Carolina, and Massachusetts will be first sorted into vessel lots and then sampled for NAA and petrography. Permission to access and sample sherds from the nonlocal repositories is pending, but the PI has accessed all of these collections before and does not anticipate any problems getting permission for destructive analysis. A work plan schedule is provided below in Table 2.

Table 2. Work Plan for the Tasks of the Proposed Research. Task Workdays Start date End date Travel to collect clay samples 7 December 15, 2014 December 21, 2014 Preparing clay briquettes* 6 December 23, 2014 January 15, 2015 Sampling and preparing LSA sherds 14 December 30, 2014 January 16, 2015 Processing of thin sections for LSA sherds 42 January 16, 2015 February 27, 2015 Travel to Peabody 7 January 21, 2015 January 27, 2015 Travel to South Carolina 7 February 4, 2015 February 10, 2015 Travel to Georgia 7 February 18, 2015 February 24, 2015 Preparing all samples for NAA/Petrography 5 February 25, 2015 February 28, 2015 Processing of thin sections for non-LSA sherds 42 February 28, 2015 April 10, 2015 NAA Analysis ~135 February 28, 2015 July 12, 2015 Petrographic scopework** 85 March 1, 2015 September 18, 2015 Analysis of NAA results*** 10 July 15, 2015 August 27, 2015 Report preparation 35 September 23, 2015 November 15, 2015 *drying time not counted in workdays but counted in time span **based on 1.5 hours of point counting per sherd, three sherds a day; three days a week ***intermittently during period of scopework Summary

In the 21st century, social collectives referred to broadly as “communities” encompass far more than those co-residing in particular places to include virtual networks of widely distributed persons. The distributed communities of today may have had their counterparts in ancient networks of movement and interaction that connected people across vast geographies without long-term commitments to places of co-residency. We suspect that in many cases, place-based and distributed communities were mutually constitutive in that places of periodic gathering served to reproduce entire networks of interaction. Short of tracking the movement of bodies through bioassays of human skeletal tissue (not possible given taphonomic and legal limitations), our capacity to reconstruct the social geographies of distributed communities resides in the provenance of material culture of nonlocal origins, both in the sources of raw materials used to make them and in the practices artisans carried with them as they and their products moved throughout social networks. The NAA and petrographic analyses proposed in this study will provide the necessary data to reconstruct the movement of potters and their pottery in order to determine if the place-based communities of Classic Stallings times were alternatively a transformation or a consequence of existing networks of movement and interaction. Essential to this research is establishment of the extant social geography of Early Stallings pottery, a ware whose plain surface treatments and otherwise homogenous technical attributes would appear to reflect an undifferentiated network of movement and interaction. NAA and petrographic data have the potential to reveal technical variation hitherto undetected by macroscopic inspection. If subregional variations in clay use and the aplastics of Early Stallings pottery are evident in the results of geochemical and microscopic analyses, we might expect the pottery of place-based communities at Stallings Island, Lake Spring, and Chesterfield to trace

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directly to existing social geographies, that is, to have “evolved” in situ. Macroscopic technical variations of pottery among place-based communities of Classic Stallings age reveal circumscribed traditions that otherwise share in a regional tradition of stylistic expression. Again, NAA and petrographic data will enable us to go beyond the apparent differences of pottery across Classic Stallings places to locate its nonlocal influences and thus distributed persons. In their unique and elaborate form, the carinated vessels of Stallings Island hold particularly good potential for registering the social geography of bodies whose movements through distributed communities intersected occasionally in place. To the extent that place-based communities of Classic Stallings times gathered together persons distributed across the greater Savannah region, they not only owe their configuration to historical social geographies (which no doubt explain why particular places gather particular persons) by also their futures (displacement and resettlement) to the distributed communities they served to reproduce. Broader Impacts

Pottery sourcing studies involving a combination of petrography and geochemical methods like NAA and x-ray diffraction are gaining a foothold in the archaeology of the Southeastern U.S. (Gilmore 2014; Herbert and McReynolds 2008; Wallis 2011; Wallis et al. 2010). The proposed work contributes immediately to a growing database of both raw clays and archaeological pottery for the region with data on the oldest pottery tradition in North America. Not only do these data provide a baseline against which later patterns of movement and exchange involving pottery can be compared for historical continuities and disjunctures, they offer a diachronic perspective spanning an apparent transition from distributed to place-based communities and thus the basis for investigating changing community scale and organization. The limited but meaningful results on clay and pottery sourcing to date in the region show that clays from different provinces in the region are discernible with NAA and that pots indeed moved about the region routinely. Among these studies are those involving pottery from places of social gathering (e.g., Gilmore 2014; Wallis 2011), where diverse sources and presumably diverse persons are represented in an array of nonlocal pottery, little of which is detectable based on macroscopic attributes alone. Collectively, sourcing studies in the American Southeast are enabling a thorough reassessment of the relations of persons to places and to other persons that has hitherto been masked by traditional typological approaches to aboriginal pottery.

The proposed research likewise has a positive immediate impact on the research value of

collections housed at six different repositories in the Southeast and beyond. Some of these collections were salvaged from sites that were looted and many of the collections have languished for decades. The continued application of NAA, petrography, and other sourcing techniques to pottery collections long since ignored has the potential to bolster public and government commitment to the long-term curation of archaeological collections, even those lacking the museum-quality attributes of aesthetic value.

Finally, an NSF-funded initiative to identity the “Grand Challenges” of archaeology turns on the

development of cyberstructural capacity to curate and analyze “big data” (Kintigh et al. 2014). MURR maintains an online database of the NAA data it generates. There are no comparable resources for the sharing of petrographic data, which exist in two, interrelate forms: numerical data from point counting and the imagery of polarized thin sections. The proposed project will establish an online resource for sharing both point-count data and microphotographs from this project and the NSF-funded research of Gilmore (2014). This will immediately establish a petrographic database for the earliest pottery traditions in the Southeast (the oldest in North America), but also serve as a platform for later incorporating the substantial inventory of thin-sections of pottery curated at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where Ann Cordell has been conducting ceramic petrography since the late 1980s. The interpretive potential of such a database for longitudinal and large-scale spatial patterning of exchange, migration, and social affiliation is substantial.

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Data Management Plan Curation

All analyses included in this research are to be performed on existing collections currently curated at various archaeological repositories. All Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) samples that are not completely destroyed during analysis will be curated permanently at the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center (MURR). Following their analysis, all petrographic thin sections will be curated permanently at the Ceramic Technology Laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) where they will remain accessible for further study. In addition, all data from this project will be made available on the website of the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology (http://www.anthro.ufl.edu/LSA/).

Sharing of Primary Data

As noted above, the primary data from all analyses will be compiled and stored at the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology (LSA) at the University of Florida. In compliance with the lab’s standing policy, all primary data, along with a technical report outlining the methods and results of the research, will be made available for viewing and download on the LSA’s website. The NAA data will also be available for download from the compiled NAA database accessible from the MURR Archaeometry Laboratory website (http://archaeometry.missouri.edu/datasets/datasets.html), and we are proposing here to establish a similar platform for the sharing of archived and future petrographic data generated by personnel of LSA and the Florida Museum of Natural History. Dissemination of Results As data are acquired and analyzed, periodic presentations will be given at professional organization meetings and, where possible, venues open to the general public. The results of this research will also contribute to both scholarly and popular publications.

Facilities, Equipment, and Other Resources

Pottery and clay samples to be subjected to Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) and petrographic analysis will be prepared at the Ceramic Technology Laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) with the assistance of ceramicist Ann Cordell. The lab’s diamond-tipped rock saw, digital scale, and electric furnace will be employed in these preparations.

Petrographic thin sections will professionally cut by Spectrum Petrographics Inc.

Petrographic point-counts will be collected by Zackary Gilmore using the FLMNH’s Leitz Laborlux 11 Pol petrographic microscope, which is equipped with a Leitz Wetzlap mechanical stage and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital microscope camera. Gilmore is a University of Florida Ph.D. candidate who will graduate in Fall 2014 and undertake this work as a postdoctoral researcher. Gilmore garnered NSF support for his dissertation research on the geochemical and

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petrographic composition of Orange fiber-tempered pottery, the Florida counterpart to Stallings pottery. With graduate training in mineral petrography, extensive tutelage under Florida Museum of Natural History ceramicist Ann Cordell, and now more than 200 hours of scope work, Gilmore has the technical expertise to execute the petrographic analyses.

The NAA will be conducted at the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of

Missouri-Columbia Research Reactor (MURR), which is equipped with a nuclear reactor, a VG Elemental Axiom SC magnetic sector high-resolution Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) with 213 nm UV Microprobe II Laser Ablation system, high purity germanium (HPGe) detectors coupled to automatic sample changers, a network of MicroVAX and IBM-compatible computers, an archival collection of reference samples, a fume hood, a muffle furnace, a drying oven, an analytical balance, a laboratory press, a glove box, rock saws, petrographic microscopes, and binocular microscopes.

Gilmore will analyze all data and create and maintain a database containing the results

using a Dell Optiplex 990 desktop computer with a 2.8 GHz Intel® Core i7 processor and 8 GB of RAM at the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology (LSA), University of Florida. This computer will also be used to create and post an online resource for sharing the data and to prepare reports, presentations, and publications stemming from the results of these analyses.

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