With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Adam King and colleagues seek to explore changes in the built environment of the Etowah site and how those changes reflect community organization and the community formation process itself. While this study is firmly grounded in material culture, architecture, and the use of space the intent is to use data generated through remote sensing as a primary source for interpretation. Traditionally, the data generated through techniques such as gradiometry, ground-penetrating radar, and electrical resistance have only been used as guides for where to excavate to evaluate ideas and learn about the past. In part the emphasis on remote sensing is a conscious effort to reduce the impacts (of excavation) on the archaeological record of Etowah -- a precious resource to some and sacred to others. Additionally, the emphasis on remote sensing data is intended to push the interpretive limits of those data.
This project to explore the creation of the social groups living at Etowah through the built environment will contribute to continuing efforts to understand the formation of complex, often multi-ethnic communities of the Mississippian period. Because the establishment and creation of the physical space of a community is a human universal, what is learned from these efforts will contribute to broader attempts, spanning time and geography, to explore the creation of society using space and architecture. Methodologically, this project attempts to push the limits of non-invasive investigations by asking questions of geophysical data that traditionally have been asked only of excavated data. The results may make it possible to study the development of prehistoric communities like Etowah using only geophysical data and information from very limited and targeted excavations.
Today the Etowah site is a state park and a prehistoric archaeological site famous for having some of the largest earthen platform mounds built in the Deep South, and producing some of the most impressive art objects ever found in the Southeast. In the past it was a thriving Native American community and capital of a larger polity: a role it played for some 550 years during the Mississippian period of the Native American past. Etowah's archaeological record not only captures the structure of those communities, but it also contains traces of the process through which those Etowah communities were formed. Communities are collections of people who, through various means, forge themselves into a social unit with a shared sense of identity, history, and community practice. Community creation is a complex and ongoing process that is part of the universal human experience, and it is encoded into the use of space, architecture, and material culture. This project uses remote sensing data and limited archaeological excavation to explore how Etowah's built environment and associated material culture were transformed with each new incarnation of the Etowah community and in turn examine the process of community creation.
This project to explore the creation of the social groups living at Etowah through the built environment will contribute to continuing efforts to understand the formation of complex, often multi-ethnic communities of the Mississippian period. Because the establishment and creation of the physical space of a community is a human universal, what is learned from these efforts will contribute to broader attempts, spanning time and geography, to explore the creation of society using space and architecture. Methodologically, this project attempts to push the limits of non-invasive investigations by asking questions of geophysical data that traditionally have been asked only of excavated data. The results may make it possible to study the development of prehistoric communities like Etowah using only geophysical data and information from very limited and targeted excavations.
This project will also serve an important teaching function. The archaeological data will be collected by field school students as they learn the process of archaeology, and the geophysical and archaeological data produced will form the basis for a graduate student theses. It is also designed to involve descendant communities in the exploration and interpretation of their history. Members of culturally affiliated Creek and Cherokee communities will be invited to participate in the data collection, the interpretation of the results and in learning from those interpretations.
