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
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
PIs: 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.
Santa Elena: The First Capital of Spanish La Florida
PIs: Jacob Holland-Lulewicz and Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz
Located on Parris Island along the coast of South Carolina, Santa Elena was the first permanent European settlement in what is today the United States. Work at Santa Elena aims to illuminate the organization of, and life in, the early colonial towns of Spanish La Florida. Of particular interest is the potential for exploring some of the earliest sustained interactions between Indigenous groups and Spanish colonizers in the American southeast.
Long-Term Histories of Landscape Modifications and Terraforming on the Georgia Coast
PI: Isabelle 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?
Historical Baselines and Climate Futures: Mapping Drivers of Trends in the Gulf of Mexico to Support Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management
PI: Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz
This project is aimed at tracking and understanding environmental change and its impacts on the trends and variability of targeted natural resources in the Gulf of Mexico historically (past 2,000 years) and in recent years (1970s to now). This project then aims to predict future environmental change and its impacts under various climate change scenarios (now to 2100). This research is focused primarily on the West Florida Shelf (WFS) and aims to support climate-adapted ecosystem-based fisheries management.