Projects
The projects listed on this page are all in varying stages of development. Each would provide many opportunities for involvement by potential collaborators, graduate students, or undergrads. While the primary geographic focus of the SAHND and SHEL Lab is eastern North America, researchers and projects operating outside of this scope that align with SAHND or SHEL Lab research themes or that deploy similar analytical approaches are welcome!
Sociopolitical Histories of the Indigenous Deep South
PI: Jacob Holland-Lulewicz
Investigation of long-term social and political histories of the Southern Appalachian region through high-resolution radiocarbon dating and social network analyses. These projects contribute to understanding Muscogee (Creek) histories, focusing on Ancestral Muskogean places and peoples of the Deep South. Focus is on the last 1500 years, including proejcts on Indigenous-colonizer dyanmics into the 16th and 17th centuries.
Gullah-Geechee Histories from Enslavement through Emancipation
PIs: Jacob Holland-Lulewicz and Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz (Ph.D. Students Matt Picarelli-Kombert and Lakelyn Smith)
This project explores histories of Gullah-Geechee peoples along the Georgia and South Carolina coasts between the 18th-century and today. Today, the coastal landscapes and resources of the Georgia Bight and South Carolina Low Country, along with the deeply entrenched cultural practices of fishing, play a critical role in Gullah-Geechee heritage. This project investigates both the time-depth as well as the specific historical contexts through which these important, keystone cultural practices developed and the ways that Gullah-Geechee life changed from enslavement through emancipation.
Coastal Indigenous Fisheries Assessment (CIFA) Using Archaeological and Ecological Perspectives
PI: Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz
This project aims to study the long-term health and ecology of fisheries and water bodies in west-central Louisiana with PIs from Florida State University, Louisiana State University, and Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana and is a collaboration between leaders and scientists from the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana. Outcomes aim to address fisheries habitat restoration utilizing archaeological data to build a long-term dataset on human use of fisheries and past environmental change.
Cane Patch: The Integrative Socioeconomics of Settling Down on the Georgia Coast, c. 5,000BP
PIs: Jacob Holland-Lulewicz and Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz (Ph.D. Student McKenna Waite)
Sometime c. 5,000 years ago, Ancestral Muskogean communities began to “settle down” into permanent villages along the Georgia Bight, the earliest permanent settlements north of Mexico. The earliest villages were circular in nature and led to the accumulation of dense “shell rings” around the settlements. While shell rings represent settled communities, other sites along the coast, namely large “shell mounds” likely represent integrative spaces where now distinct, settled communities could come together to reaffirm social bonds and maintain social networks. Cane Patch on Ossabaw Island, GA is one of only a handful of known “shell mounds.” This project aims to unravel the history of this important place, with special focus on its potentially integrative functions. Work includes zooarchaeological analyses, paleoethnobotanical work, radiometric dating, and ceramic analayses (the earliest ceramic technology north of Colombia in South America).
Long-Term Histories of Landscape Modifications and Terraforming on the Georgia Coast
PI: Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz and Jacob Holland-Lulewicz
This project seeks to formalize the identification of Indigenous Native American and Plantation made canals and the timing of their construction along the Georgia Coast, USA. We are investigating hydrological engineering practices and features and their role within the highly complex socio-ecological relationships maintained by Atlantic Coast Indigenous communities and within Plantation Era agricultural operations through high-resolution topographic imagery from airborne LiDAR data, standard sediment coring and excavation techniques, radiocarbon dating, micromorphological analyses of sediments, isotope analyses, and historical archive research.
Indigenous Fisheries Management and Social Organization on the Georgia Coast
PIs: Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz and Jacob Holland-Lulewicz
Working on Ossabaw Island along the Georgia Coast, through traditional archaeological excavation as well as a range of zooarchaeological and ecological methods, we explore long-term estuarine resource management. We ask: (1) How does sociopolitical organization at the community scale drive emergent sustainability over the long-term and over larger scales? And (2) What was the capacity of local estuarine ecosystems and socioecological arrangements to mediate combined demographic growth and climatic fluctuations?
The Khulunbuir Archaeological Project: Agroecosytems and Social Organization in the Xiongnu Empire, Eastern Monoglia
PIs: Christina Carolus and Asa Cameron
This project is primarily centered on investigations at the late Iron Age site of Khairt Suuryn (and the region surrounding the site), a large Xiongnu Period (c.250 BC-150 AD) agricultural pit house settlement site and craft production complex overlooking the floodplain of the Kherlen River in northeastern Mongolia. Khairt Suuryn is only the third prehistoric site in Mongolia to yield crop assemblages and one of only a few known pit house settlements. Khairt Suuryn is a crucial puzzle piece to understanding the social and economic origins of agriculture on the steppe, the potential origins of early sedentism or semi-sedentism, and dynamics of network growth on the immediate path to initial state formation in this region of the world.