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Thomas Pluckhahn | |
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Born | 1966 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Anthropologist |
Thomas Pluckhahn is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. [1] Pluckhahn specializes in the field of anthropology include Eastern United States Prehistory, Mesoamerican Prehistory, Cultural Resource Management, Settlement Pattern Studies, Archaeology of Households, Environmental Anthropology, Ceramic Analysis, and GIS Applications for Anthropology.
Pluckhahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1966. In 1984, he received an alumni scholarship to the University of Georgia, from which he graduated in 1988 with an A.B., cum laude with honors in Anthropology.
From 1989 until 1992, he worked as an archaeological field technician for various firms in the eastern United States and Europe. From 1993 until 1994, Pluckhahn worked as a Project Archaeologist for Brockington and Associates in Norcross, Georgia. He then became a consulting archaeologist for Southern Research at Fort Stewart Military Reservation in Georgia, and a senior archaeologist for Southern Archaeological Services, Athens, Georgia; he served in the latter position until 2003. After two years Pluckhahn returned to his alma mater in 1996 to become a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia. [2]
While working as a teaching assistant Pluckhahn did some fieldwork at the Shoulderbone Tract located in Hancock County. While the work was not long, only lasting from 6 January 1997 until the end of the month, it would provide the basis for his first fully published book. Written in 1997 "An Archeological Survey of the Shoulderbone Tract, Hancock County, Georgia" describes the work that was done in the Tract which was a mound complex located on a terrace north of Whitten Creek. While Pluckhahn described the work as “minimal, and focusing on defining and demarcating the limits of the site so that it may be fenced.” [3] he does go on to admit that “Most of the fieldwork, however was devoted to an extensive archeological survey of the property.” [4]
In 1998, Pluckhahn became an instructor at Georgia, and in 1999 became the field supervisor at the Mixteca Alta Settlement Pattern Survey in Oaxaca, Mexico. In the same year he traveled back east to become the field director of the Kolomoki: Learning about a Woodland Ceremonial Center located in Georgia. During this time he helped excavate the famed mound site of Kolomoki in the lower Chattahoochee River Valley of southwest Georgia. From 1999 until 2001, he served as a field director at Kolomoki in a study founded by the National Geographic Society.
During his time at Kolomoki, Pluckhahn worked with others to excavate the site of Kolomoki examining everything from pottery to the mounds themselves. This excavation was intended to discover how Native Americans lived during Kolomoki's days as an important cultural center. After extensive studies on the evidence uncovered during the excavation, an important discovery was made involving the dating that had previously been applied. Before the excavation, previous archaeologists had placed the date of the Kolomoki mounds in the Mississippian Period (c. 1000-1500 AD), but Dr. Pluckhahn however, discovered that the main date of occupation was closer to the Woodland Period (c. 350-750 AD).
In 2002, Thomas earned his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, writing his dissertation on his experiences and findings at Kolomoki. After working as an instructor for Georgia, Pluckhahn became the visiting assistant professor of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma in 2003. He served in this position until 2004 when he became the assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology.[ citation needed ]
While at Oklahoma, Pluckhahn released "Kolomoki: Settlement, Ceremony, and Status in the Deep South, A.D. 350 to 750". He applied his fieldwork from the Kolomoki site, as well as his discoveries of the new timeline of the Kolomoki mounds. The analysis in the book supports the evidence of Kolomki's actual occupation, while also answering questions about middle-range societies, their use of ceremony and its effect on status. [5]
Pluckhahn served as the visiting assistant professor of the Department of Anthropology until 2004, when he became the assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He served in this position for two more years. In 2006 he released the book "Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians". In this book Pluckhahn, along with Robbie Ethridge, provide new ideas for viewing the history of Native Americans in the Southeast.
A major component of the book deals with the recent ability to connect the periods of the sixteenth-century Late Mississippian period to the eighteenth-century colonial period. Pluckhahn and Ethridge claim in the book to be able to bridge the two centuries together, while filling in the previously mysterious seventeenth-century. This linkage has provided a crucial new way to view the ancestry of the southeastern United States that is invaluable to not only archaeologist and anthropologist, but historians as well.
Early County is a county located on the southwest border of the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 10,854. The county seat is Blakely, where the Early County Courthouse is located. Created on December 15, 1818, it was named for Peter Early, 28th Governor of Georgia. The county is bordered on the west by the Chattahoochee River, forming the border with Alabama.
Edward Palmer was a self-taught British botanist and an Early-American archaeologist.
Etowah Indian Mounds (9BR1) are a 54-acre (220,000 m2) archaeological site in Bartow County, Georgia, south of Cartersville. Built and occupied in three phases, from 1000–1550 CE, the prehistoric site is located on the north shore of the Etowah River.
The Mississippian culture was a Native American civilization that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 to 1600, varying regionally. It was known for building large, earthen platform mounds, and often other shaped mounds as well. It was composed of a series of urban settlements and satellite villages linked together by loose trading networks. The largest city was Cahokia, believed to be a major religious center located in what is present-day southern Illinois.
The Weeden Island cultures are a group of related archaeological cultures that existed during the Late Woodland period of the North American Southeast. The name for this group of cultures was derived from the Weedon Island site in Old Tampa Bay in Pinellas County.
Moundville Archaeological Site, also known as the Moundville Archaeological Park, is a Mississippian culture archaeological site on the Black Warrior River in Hale County, near the modern city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Extensive archaeological investigation has shown that the site was the political and ceremonial center of a regionally organized Mississippian culture chiefdom polity between the 11th and 16th centuries. The archaeological park portion of the site is administered by the University of Alabama Museums and encompasses 185 acres (75 ha), consisting of 29 platform mounds around a rectangular plaza.
Key Marco was an archaeological site (8CR48) consisting of a large shell works island next to Marco Island, Florida. A small pond on Key Marco, now known as the "Court of the Pile Dwellers" (8CR49), was excavated in 1896 by the Smithsonian Institution's Pepper-Hearst Expedition, led by Frank Hamilton Cushing. Cushing recovered more than 1,000 wooden artifacts from the pond, the largest number of wooden artifacts from any prehistoric archaeological site in the eastern United States. These artifacts are described as some of the finest prehistoric Native American art in North America. The Key Marco materials are principally divided between the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania; the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; and the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida. The original pond was completely excavated and refilled. It is now covered by a housing subdivision. Excavations of small parts of the site were also conducted in 1965 and 1995.
The Belle Glade culture, or Okeechobee culture, is an archaeological culture that existed from as early as 1000 BCE until about 1700 CE in the area surrounding Lake Okeechobee and in the Kissimmee River valley in the Florida Peninsula.
The Westo were an Iroquoian Native American tribe encountered in what became the Southeastern U.S. by Europeans in the 17th century. They probably spoke an Iroquoian language. The Spanish called these people Chichimeco, and Virginia colonists may have called the same people Richahecrian. Their first appearance in the historical record is as a powerful tribe in colonial Virginia who had migrated from the mountains into the region around present-day Richmond. Their population provided a force of 700–900 warriors.
Charles Melvin Hudson Jr. (1932–2013) was an anthropologist, a professor of anthropology and history at the University of Georgia. He was a leading scholar on the history and culture of Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the present-day United States. He is known for his book mapping the expedition of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in the mid-16th century in the Southeast, based on both the expedition's records and sites identified through archeology and anthropology.
David G. Anderson is an archaeologist in the department of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who specializes in Southeastern archaeology. His professional interests include climate change and human response, exploring the development of cultural complexity in Eastern North America, maintaining and improving the nation's Cultural Resource management (CRM) program, teaching and writing about archaeology, and developing technical and popular syntheses of archaeological research. He is the project director of the on-line Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA). and a co-director, with Joshua J. Wells, Eric C, Kansa, and Sarah Whitcher Kansa, of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA)
Phyllis Morse (Anderson) is an American archaeologist.
The Jere Shine site (1MT6) is an archaeological site on the Tallapoosa River near its confluence with the Coosa River in modern Montgomery County, Alabama. Based on comparison of archaeological remains and pottery styles, scholars believe that it was most likely occupied from 1400–1550 CE by people of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture.
Fort Center is an archaeological site in Glades County, Florida, United States, a few miles northwest of Lake Okeechobee. It was occupied for more than 2,000 years, from 450 BCE until about 1700 CE. The inhabitants of Fort Center may have been cultivating maize centuries before it appeared anywhere else in Florida.
Charles Harrison McNutt III was an American archaeologist and a scholar of the prehistoric Southeastern United States. He conducted fieldwork and published works on the archaeology of the American Southwest and the Great Plains in South Dakota. His work emphasized on a strong understanding of cultural history and statistical analysis.
David Judson Hally is an American archaeologist known for his work at several southeastern sites. He retired from the University of Georgia in 2010 and currently resides in Athens, Georgia.
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.
Bennie Carlton Keel is an American archaeologist who has made contributions to the foundational understanding of Cherokee archaeology and culture, North Carolina archaeology, and to the development of Americanist cultural resource management (CRM).
The Roberts Island complex is an archaeological site in Citrus County, Florida, near the Gulf of Mexico, dating from the late Woodland period. It is located on an island in the Crystal River midway between the springs at the head of the river and the mouth of the river on the Gulf of Mexico. The site is a geographically separate unit of the Crystal River Archaeological State Park. The site includes three shell mounds and three middens. Two of the mounds may have had stepped sides. The Roberts Island complex was developed as the Crystal River site declined and most other ceremonial sites in the region were abandoned during the 7th or 8th century.