The Everyday Archaeologist Matters

Archaeology has many goals, and those goals may differ depending on your theoretical paradigm. These aims vary from bringing order to an incomplete and imperfect record of people in the past, to distilling the actions of the past in order to understand not only cultural changes but also the reasons those change occurred, to synthesizing this information to predict human behavior through laws, and to using the past to better the future of humanity. Thinking about the everyday broadens perspectives, posits new questions, presents testable hypotheses, and, perhaps because it is measured on a shared scale, brings some level of consilience to southeastern archaeology. In this chapter, the authors discuss three opportunities for making archaeology relevant: writing palatably, scaling interactions, and engaging people with their past by bringing archaeology into their everyday lives.

Gathering in the Late Woodland

The practice of enclosing open spaces with earthen mounds begins in the Lower Mississippi Valley around 3500 B.C. As the earliest recognized monumentalized landscapes in Eastern North America, these locations are thought to have provided periodic bases for the exploitation of rich natural resources and the maintenance of social relationships. Archaeological work at these early plaza sites has focused on establishing the age and stratigraphy of the associated mounds, leaving little known about the everyday activities that occurred around or between them. In this chapter, two case studies from separate areas of the Late Woodland Southeast are discussed: Feltus and Range sites. Participants in the large-scale rituals occurring in the Feltus plaza spent much of their time spatially separated, but the periodic moments of aggregation quite literally created the personal relationships, social structure, and ritual system in which they lived their daily lives. On the other hand, participants in the daily activities that occurred in the Range courtyards co-resided, but the particular relationships they shared with other individuals were negotiated in outside spaces, and the very presence and structure of the courtyard itself tied them – every day – into a much larger local community around formal, central plazas.

Maintaining Relations with Deer

This chapter examines the way deer were entangled in the everyday lives of Middle Archaic peoples. The authors first delve into hunter-gatherer ethnography, principally from northern hunting societies, and argue that hunting cultures are rarely extractive at their core. Rather, human-animal relations in hunting societies are better conceived as a meshwork of entanglements and mutual obligations. They also draw on the Middle Archaic archaeological record, focusing on the Black Earth site in southern Illinois and several Green River Archaic sites in west central Kentucky, to argue that white-tailed deer were extremely important to Middle Archaic hunters, not only as sources of food but also as social and spiritual creatures.

An Ethnoarchaeological Interpretation of the Salt Life, A.D. 1200

This chapter narratively reconstructs the salt-making process in the Mississippian period using archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data and information. The author proposes that salt was an everyday substance for many prehistoric southeastern peoples. Her claim is grounded in biological, archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence from cultures around the world who maintain that salt was important to many ancient peoples for their physical, spiritual, and social well-being. The author argues that her narrative approach, as with any useful interpretive tool, is based on data from excavations and analysis of artifacts, and that it unites cultural ideals about family, religion, housing, subsistence, reproduction, and other elements of daily life that are embedded within not only salt production and consumption but also many other practices.

Mound Building as Daily Practice

This chapter reconsiders monumental architecture as everyday, both for people in the past and archaeologists today. Since the authors see sediments as evidence akin to artifacts, they assert that it is capable of being interpreted in many of the same ways. How a mound site is prepared; where the earth comes from; how it was moved; and the ways it was built up, shaped, packed down, and repaired are all important considerations for understanding not just the engineering of the mounds (and make no mistake, the native mound builders were sophisticated earthen engineers) but also the organization and mobilization of labor; the deployment of resources; and the social, cultural, and symbolic values of the builders. Born out of the natural landscape and created as a central places in the cultural landscape, mounds were essential parts of everyday routines, planning, and memory.

Why the Archaeology of Everyday Matters?

This chapter functions as an introduction to the volume; it highlights previous, related work and argues why using the “everyday” as a guiding theme is useful. The idea of “everyday matters” has two meanings: either it can refer to daily concerns or events that are common and ordinary or it can demonstrate that actions which occur daily or “every day” are of significance, that such actions matter. Because, from an archaeological perspective, common concerns reveal something about the lives of the people we investigate, we propose that the archaeological record is formed on a daily basis. Thus, while fostering a degree of holism in archaeology, an everyday framework allows specialists to remain specialized. Used in a myriad of ways, this framework broadens perspectives; posits new questions; presents testable hypotheses; and, perhaps because it operates on a shared scale, brings some level of consilience to southeastern archaeology.

The Role of Dogs in Everyday Life

Dogs are the earliest and most widespread domestic animal in the world, and, thus, they are potentially an everyday matter for some peoples both in the past and in the present. Arriving with humans to the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene, dogs helped people hunt; protected their families; and carried wood, meat, and other household items. One strategy to explore the social and cultural reasons for humans keeping dogs is to use historical fiction to imagine the activities that dogs took part in and what those activities may have meant for the people around them. In this chapter, we join “Dog,” a male dog living during the Archaic period in the Southeast, and follow him throughout year.

The Itineraries of Late Archaic Shell and Ceramic Cooking Vessels

This chapter examines how ceremonial shell vessels, which were a part of everyday life in the Late Archaic, relate to later ceramic technology. The authors trace how Late Archaic cooking vessels moved through the lives of the inhabitants of the St. Johns, from their production to their ultimate deposition. These so-called itineraries follow the wanderings of vessels and persons as they came together in various social contexts. The authors found that vessels were implicated in the daily happenings of many persons, as they afforded the opportunity both to transform substances into consumed foods and to interact with others. Yet they were also central to the commemorative or ceremonial lives of past persons as well, since the vessels both contained and sustained memories and meanings.

The Daily Lives of Early Archaic Foragers in the Mid-South

This chapter is a narrative-based construction of a seasonal year using various archaeological datasets, with a focus on subsistence. The authors approach the fictional interpretation of the past from the framework of human behavioral ecology, which they find particularly useful in everyday research because it focuses on the decisions of individuals – specifically those decisions that result in the everyday actions from which the archaeological record is constructed. By imagining the daily, seasonal activities through the eyes of a young girl, they give those individuals identities and begin to think about the social relationships among earlier Archaic peoples and the landscapes that are rooted in economic relationships.

Community Practice in a Post-Removal Cherokee Town

This chapter reconstructs a series of events revolving around the archaeology of deconstruction and the movement of an historic Cherokee settlement kitchen. Specifically, the author investigates the use of fictional writing using the Welch house site as a case study. The Welch family lived in southwestern North Carolina, in the mountainous northeastern corner of the Cherokee Nation. This case study is used as a way to test the author’s knowledge of the Welch farm and the depositional events that resulted in the archaeological record. This case study serves as an archaeological example of thick description.