The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. They are believed to have originated from the northern Philippines, either directly, via the Mariana Islands, or both. They were notable for their distinctive geometric designs on dentate-stamped pottery, which closely resemble the pottery recovered from the Nagsabaran archaeological site in northern Luzon. The Lapita intermarried with the Papuan populations to various degrees, and are the direct ancestors of the Austronesian peoples of Polynesia, eastern Micronesia, and Island Melanesia.
A midden is an old dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, mollusc shells, potsherds, lithics, and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation.
The Ertebølle culture is the name of a hunter-gatherer and fisher, pottery-making culture dating to the end of the Mesolithic period. The culture was concentrated in Southern Scandinavia. It is named after the type site, a location in the small village of Ertebølle on Limfjorden in Danish Jutland. In the 1890s the National Museum of Denmark excavated heaps of oyster shells there, mixed with mussels, snails, bones, and artefacts of bone, antler, and flint, which were evaluated as kitchen middens, or refuse dumps. Accordingly, the culture is less-commonly named the Kitchen Midden. As it is approximately identical to the Ellerbek culture of Schleswig-Holstein, the combined name, Ertebølle-Ellerbek is often used. The Ellerbek culture is named after a type site in Ellerbek, a community on the edge of Kiel, Germany.
Native American pottery is an art form with at least a 7500-year history in the Americas. Pottery is fired ceramics with clay as a component. Ceramics are used for utilitarian cooking vessels, serving and storage vessels, pipes, funerary urns, censers, musical instruments, ceremonial items, masks, toys, sculptures, and a myriad of other art forms.
In the classification of archaeological cultures of North America, the Woodland period of North American pre-Columbian cultures spanned a period from roughly 1000 BCE to European contact in the eastern part of North America, with some archaeologists distinguishing the Mississippian period, from 1000 CE to European contact as a separate period. The term "Woodland Period" was introduced in the 1930s as a generic term for prehistoric sites falling between the Archaic hunter-gatherers and the agriculturalist Mississippian cultures. The Eastern Woodlands cultural region covers what is now eastern Canada south of the Subarctic region, the Eastern United States, along to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Tchefuncte River drains into Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana in the United States. It is about 70.0 miles (112.7 km) long.
The St. Johns culture was an archaeological culture in northeastern Florida, USA that lasted from about 500 BCE until shortly after European contact in the 17th century. The St. Johns culture was present along the St. Johns River and its tributaries (including the Oklawaha River, and along the Atlantic coast of Florida from the mouth of the St. Johns River south to a point east of the head of the St. Johns River, near present-day Cocoa Beach, Florida. At the time of first European contact, the St. Johns culture area was inhabited by speakers of the Mocama, Agua Fresca and Acuera dialects of the Timucua language and by the Mayacas.
The Kincaid Mounds Historic Site c. 1050–1400 CE, is a Mississippian culture archaeological site located at the southern tip of present-day U.S. state of Illinois, along the Ohio River. Kincaid Mounds has been notable for both its significant role in native North American prehistory and for the central role the site has played in the development of modern archaeological techniques. The site had at least 11 substructure platform mounds, and 8 other monuments.
Coles Creek culture is a Late Woodland archaeological culture in the Lower Mississippi valley in the Southeastern Woodlands. It followed the Troyville culture. The period marks a significant change in the cultural history of the area. Population increased dramatically and there is strong evidence of a growing cultural and political complexity, especially by the end of the Coles Creek sequence. Although many of the classic traits of chiefdom societies are not yet manifested, by 1000 CE the formation of simple elite polities had begun. Coles Creek sites are found in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. It is considered ancestral to the Plaquemine culture.
The Plaquemine culture was an archaeological culture centered on the Lower Mississippi River valley. It had a deep history in the area stretching back through the earlier Coles Creek and Troyville cultures to the Marksville culture. The Natchez and related Taensa peoples were their historic period descendants. The type site for the culture is the Medora site in Louisiana; while other examples include the Anna, Emerald, Holly Bluff, and Winterville sites in Mississippi.
The Marksville culture was an archaeological culture in the lower Lower Mississippi valley, Yazoo valley, and Tensas valley areas of present-day Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and extended eastward along the Gulf Coast to the Mobile Bay area, from 100 BCE to 400 CE. This culture takes its name from the Marksville Prehistoric Indian Site in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Marksville Culture was contemporaneous with the Hopewell cultures within present-day Ohio and Illinois. It evolved from the earlier Tchefuncte culture and into the Baytown and Troyville cultures, and later the Coles Creek and Plum Bayou cultures. It is considered ancestral to the historic Natchez and Taensa peoples.
The Fourche Maline culture was a Woodland Period Native American culture that existed from 300 BCE to 800 CE, in what are now defined as southeastern Oklahoma, southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and northeastern Texas. They are considered to be one of the main ancestral groups of the Caddoan Mississippian culture, along with the contemporaneous Mill Creek culture of eastern Texas. This culture was named for the Fourche Maline Creek, a tributary of the Poteau River. Their modern descendants are the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma.
The Marshall Site (15CE27) is an Early Mississippian culture archaeological site located near Bardwell in Carlisle County, Kentucky, on a bluff spur overlooking the Mississippi River floodplain. The site was occupied from about 900 to about 1300 CE during the James Bayou Phase of the local chronology and was abandoned sometime during the succeeding Dorena Phase. Its inhabitants may have moved to the Turk Site, which is located on the nearest adjacent bluff spur to the south, and which was founded about this time. It is several miles south of the Wickliffe Mounds Site.
Clarence H. Webb was an American medical doctor and archaeologist who conducted extensive research on prehistoric sites in the southeastern United States. A pediatrician by profession, he became interested in archaeology on a camping trip with his sons where he found some small, triangular points. A distinguished physician, his archaeological research included the study of Caddoan culture, and at a number of major sites such as Poverty Point, John Pearce, Gahagan, and Belcher Mound.
Shell rings are archaeological sites with curved shell middens completely or partially surrounding a clear space. The rings were sited next to estuaries that supported large populations of shellfish, usually oysters. Shell rings have been reported in several countries, including Colombia, Peru, Japan, and the southeastern United States. Archaeologists continue to debate the origins and use of shell rings.
The Pensacola culture was a regional variation of the Mississippian culture along the Gulf Coast of the United States that lasted from 1100 to 1700 CE. The archaeological culture covers an area stretching from a transitional Pensacola/Fort Walton culture zone at Choctawhatchee Bay in Florida to the eastern side of the Mississippi River Delta near Biloxi, Mississippi, with the majority of its sites located along Mobile Bay in the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. Sites for the culture stretched inland, north into the southern Tombigee and Alabama River valleys, as far as the vicinity of Selma, Alabama.
The Sims site (16SC2), also known as Sims Place site, is an archaeological site located in Saint Charles Parish, Louisiana, near the town of Paradis. The location is a multi-component mound and village complex with platform mounds and extensive midden deposits. The site habitations are divided into three periods. It was first inhabited about 800 CE by peoples of the Coastal Coles Creek culture. By 1100 CE the culture of the site had transitioned into the Mississippianized Plaquemine culture that lasted until 1450 CE. A little later was a Late Mississippian/protohistoric period that lasted from 1500 until about 1700 or 1800.
Morgan Mounds is an important archaeological site of the Coastal Coles Creek culture, built and occupied by Native Americans from 700 to 1000 CE on Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana. Of the 45 recorded Coastal Coles Creek sites in the Petite Anse region, it is the only one with ceremonial substructure mounds. These indicate that it was possibly the center of a local chiefdom.
The Atchafalaya Basin Mounds is an archaeological site originally occupied by peoples of the Coastal Coles Creek and Plaquemine cultures beginning around 980 CE, and by their presumed historic period descendants, the Chitimacha, during the 18th century. It is located in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana on the northern bank of Bayou Teche at its confluence with the Lower Atchafalaya River. It consists of several earthen platform mounds and a shell midden situated around a central plaza. The site was visited by Clarence Bloomfield Moore in 1913.
The Griesmer site (La-3) is located on the Kankakee River in Lake County, Indiana, about a mile southeast of Schneider, in Northwestern Indiana. It is classified as a Prehistoric, multi-component site with Middle Woodland, Late Woodland and Upper Mississippian occupations. The deposits were not stratified, but observation of the types of artifacts present, together with radiocarbon dates, helped to define the sequence of occupations at the site.
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