Document Details

The Late Archaic in the Southeast U.S. (c. 4500-3100 B.P.) was a time of increased sedentism and social complexity, long-distance trade, and relatively large-scale societies. Along the coast, societies constructed monumental shell rings that functioned as persistent places on the landscape and the focal points of village sites that were occupied year-round. Estuaries provided bountiful resources for these villages, including the oysters whose shells comprise the majority of the ring sites. In the terminal Late Archaic, however, a major cultural shift occurred. Shell ring sites were depopulated, and groups became smaller and more mobile. Evidence from various world regions points to a global climatic transition occurring in the mid-Holocene whose regional timing and manifestations varied. On the Georgia Coast, evidence has long pointed to the localized effects of this climatic shift as including one or more sea-level shifts. In this examination of culture and environment at the end of the Late Archaic, we model new and existing radiocarbon dates from shell-bearing archaeological sites and interpret use and depopulation dates within the framework of a high-resolution paleoenvironmental proxy data source - a 5,177-year tree-ring chronology, a site-level standardized representation of annual tree growth, (and an earlier 529-year floating chronology) derived from ancient buried bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) trees at the mouth of the Altamaha River that provides insight into annual environmental conditions on the North Georgia Coast. This chronology and associated analyses indicate that Late Archaic societies weathered a 493-year period of enhanced environmental fluctuation that lasted from 2355 - 1863 B.C.E. and included salinity intrusion events, unreliable rainfall patterns, numerous drought years, and possible hurricanes, speaking to the resilience of both Native American societies of the ancient Southeast as well as the estuary ecosystems that provided their resource base.

Napora, K. 2021. Refining cultural and environmental temporalities at the late Archaic-early woodland transition along the Georgia coast, UGA. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Georgia, Athens, GA. 211 pages.