Mound Building at Lake Jackson (8le1), Tallahassee, Florida: New Insights From Ground Penetrating Radar

Seinfeld, Daniel M.; Bigman, Daniel P.; Stauffer, J. Grant; Nowak, Jesse

doi:10.1179/2168472315y.0000000012

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…There is a place in Florida off I‐10, a Mississippian site behind the storefronts and residential neighborhoods of Tallahassee. Seven mounds, conventionally dated to about 1000–1500 CE, sit enclosed within a state park and private lots (Jones 1982, 20–22; Payne 1994, 260–72; see also Marrinan and White 2007; Marrinan 2012; Seinfeld et al 2015). Often called the Lake Jackson site, Pvlvcekolv people also call it Okeeheepkee 5 .…”

Section: Migrating Moundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South

Bloch

2020

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article theorizes the uneven entanglements between settler processes of ruination, a dynamic structured by regimes of history/prehistory, life/death, and life/nonlife, and “mound power,” or the force relations exercised by Indigenous landscapes as animate beings in their own right. I draw on research with members of a community in the U.S. South who claim Muskogee ancestry, visiting ancestral mound or earthwork and shellwork sites built over the past six thousand years. Wounded by ongoing colonial violence, these landscapes call out to descendants, drawing them into ancestral movements and relations of care. In these moments, ancestral sites refuse to be fixed within terminal chronological periods removed from a settled present, enrolling descendants into Indigenous space-times that dramatically exceed colonial timescales and temporalities. Drawing on this deep historical perspective, this article articulates a modest hope for the ways Indigenous landscapes, as agentive beings, animate decolonial possibilities for life in the ruins of colonial empires.

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Section: Migrating Moundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South

Bloch

2020

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…While platform mound construction has a much deeper history (Kassabaum, 2019), these earthen monuments and the structures found both beneath and atop them were focal points of important civic and ceremonial spaces in larger communities. To date, GPR surveys have identified mound fill episodes, architecture on summits and inner platforms, and other types of features (Anderson, Cornelison, & Sherwood, 2013; Bigman & Lanzarone, 2014; Brannan & Bigman, 2014; Henry & Johnson, 2012; Pluckhahn, Thompson, & Weisman, 2010; Seinfeld, Bigman, Grant, & Nowack, 2015; Turner, Smith, Burnette, Skaggs, & Powis, 2014). Most studies used a single antenna (frequency typically between 400 and 500 MHz) to identify possible elements of mound construction.…”

Section: Gpr Studies Of Mississippian Moundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At Singer‐Moye (9SW2) in southwest Georgia, Brannan and Bigman (2014) found that a 400 MHz antenna was ineffective because of rapid attenuation, while a 100 MHz antenna detected the mound base and bedrock, but was time‐consuming to use. Seinfeld et al (2015) compared 100 and 400 MHz antennas at Lake Jackson (8LE1) in northern Florida. The 400 MHz identified multiple construction episodes and possible traces of summit architecture.…”

Section: Gpr Studies Of Mississippian Moundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating ground‐penetrating radar antenna performance for investigating Mississippian mound construction compared with data from solid‐earth cores and magnetometry

Schurr

Monaghan

Herrmann

et al. 2020

Archaeological Prospection

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Mississippian mounds in the south‐eastern and mid‐continental United States often contain multiple construction stages and a diverse array of features. Investigating mound construction with excavation is expensive, logistically challenging, and sometimes politically impossible. Three mounds at the Angel site (12VG1), a Mississippian village (ca ad 1100–1450) in the lower Ohio River Valley, were investigated with non‐invasive geophysical and minimally invasive geoarchaeological methods. We compare the efficacy of two different ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) antenna frequencies (250 and 500 MHz) for detecting elements of mound construction previously identified with solid‐earth cores, magnetometry, and electrical resistance tomography. Solid‐earth cores provide stratigraphic information about mound layers and construction soils and materials with low horizontal spatial resolution. Surface magnetometry provides information on shallow features, such as buried building walls and floors at high resolution, but little information about depth. Radar profiles taken with 500 MHz and 250 MHz antennae were evaluated to determine which antenna frequencies are most suitable for detecting features and strata that had been documented using the other methods. Utilizing the solid‐earth cores for velocity correlations, the 500 MHz antenna provided the most useful information about prehistoric structures near the mound surface, but was limited by its relatively shallow penetration depth. The 250 MHz antenna was not able to resolve shallow features as clearly as the 500 MHz antenna. However, it was able to detect possible interior mound platforms and features, although without providing many details about possible buried structures. In combination, GPR, solid‐earth cores, and magnetometry provided new information about the construction of mounds at the Angel site.

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“…Putting aside some minimally invasive geophysical methods (e.g., downhole magnetic susceptibility), the most commonly used methods are GPR and ERT. GPR radargrams have been widely used to interpret mound stratigraphy, as the interfaces between construction layers and clay mantles can be identifiable depending on the attenuation of the signal and antenna used (Bigman & Seinfeld, 2017; Brannan & Bigman, 2014; Gage, 2000; Gage & Jones, 2001; Schurr et al, 2020; Seinfeld et al, 2015). For example, Seinfeld et al (2015) used GPR to identify the internal structure of the mounds at Lake Jackson, a Mississippian site in Florida.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi‐method geophysical investigation at Snow's Bend, a Mississippian platform mound

Plattner

Filoromo

Blair

2022

Archaeological Prospection

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Archaeological investigations of Mississippian platform mounds have traditionally required invasive excavation or coring. Excavations are damaging to sites, and in many cases, invasive or destructive research methods on Native American mounds are forbidden or inappropriate. Non-invasive geophysical investigations avoid these issues but have their own challenges in terms of resolving the interior of the mound, particularly if electrically conductive materials, such as clay, are present. Here, we present a multi-method non-invasive geophysical approach using ground penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography, time-domain induced polarization, and electrical resistance mapping to study the Mississippian platform mound at Snow's Bend (1TU2/3), a late Moundville II/III (ca. AD 1300 to 1520) site located near Moundville, Alabama. From our data, we interpreted at least two construction stages and found indications of remnants of summit architecture on each. The final, as well as earlier, construction stage of the mound had a two-tier summit with a lower platform in the northern half of the mound. Summit buildings were identified on the lower platforms of each mound stage. We acknowledge that there is inherent uncertainty with any non-invasive approach, but demonstrate the capabilities of geophysics for new understandings of the life-histories of Mississippian platform mounds.

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Mound Building at Lake Jackson (8le1), Tallahassee, Florida: New Insights From Ground Penetrating Radar

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South

Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South

Evaluating ground‐penetrating radar antenna performance for investigating Mississippian mound construction compared with data from solid‐earth cores and magnetometry

Multi‐method geophysical investigation at Snow's Bend, a Mississippian platform mound

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