Early Holocene landscape use in the upper Tombigbee River valley

ABSTRACT

We draw on the distribution of recorded archaeological sites, temporally diagnostic projectile points, sources of lithic raw materials, and fossil pollen projections to evaluate existing models for Early Holocene landscape use in the upper Tombigbee River valley (UTRV) in northeast Mississippi. We then discuss the applicability of Anderson and Hanson (1988), Daniel (2001), and Hollenbach (2009) in gaining a better understanding of early hunter-gatherer mobility and settlement in the region and discuss future directions for research.

KEYWORDS:

• Hunter-gatherers
• Early Holocene
• lithic technology
• landscape archaeology
• southeastern United States
• spatial analysis

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank David Anderson, Glen Hanson, Randy Daniel, and Kandace Hollenbach for giving us models to test as we examine the archaeological record of the Tombigbee River valley. We would also like to thank Tom Hester and the Standifer Creek Hunting and Fishing Club for permission to conduct excavations at the Hester site. The work of data contributors, data stewards, and the Neotoma community is gratefully acknowledged for the pollen data used in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributors

James L. Strawn (M.A. Mississippi State University 2019) is a Doctoral student at the University of Georgia whose research is focusing on the social organization and structure of mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Mid-South.

D. Shane Miller (PhD Arizona 2014) is an archaeologist whose main interests are the Ice Age colonization of the Americas and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America.

Derek Anderson is an archaeologist whose research interests focus on Late Pleistocene faunal and lithic resource use in North America.

Stephen B. Carmody (PhD Tennessee 2014) is an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in paleoethnobotany with current research projects in the United States and Italy.

Data availability statement

The data and all supplemental materials that support the findings of this study are available from https://github.com/archaeoshane/Strawn_etal_SoutheasternArchaeology. The authors will provide a list of the site coordinates used in this study only with written permission of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.