Research Projects

Miccosukee Town

Archaeology has a long history of taking a more colonialist approach to research about the past, often ignoring the perspectives and ideas of descendant communities. The Miccosukee Town project, however, is specifically designed with decolonization as both an explicit goal of the project and a reflexive methodology, achieved by working collaboratively with a descendant community to pursue research questions and goals at the intersection of interests to the descendant and scientific communities. The Center works alongside the Seminole Tribe of Florida to study the Miccosukee Town site, which is an ancestral site for both the Seminole and Miccosukee peoples.

Miccosukee Town (a.k.a., Kenhadjo’s/Kenhagee’s/Kinache’s Town) was established by nativist elements of the Lower Creeks in the 1760s and was one of the earliest settlements of the modern Seminole and Miccosukee peoples. It was a very dynamic place comprised of ten villages stretching along the shores of Lake Miccosukee that together comprised a single large community. In 1778, Purcell described Miccosukee Town as “Consisting of 60 houses, a square, 28 Families and 70 Gunmen… There are also several small villages… which are depending on the Towns” (Boyd 1938:23). However, Miccosukee Town was a very dynamic place and was interrelated with a number of towns along the shores of Lake Miccosukee. Combined, the towns had more than 300 houses and were home to nearly 1,600 people.

On April 1st, 1818, Andrew Jackson’s forces descended on Miccosukee Town and burned it to the ground as part of his campaign in the First Seminole War of 1817-1818. While the vast majority of its occupants escaped, Jackson’s forces burned more than 300 homes across the ten interrelated towns, and they seized more than 1,000 bushels of maize and over 1,000 head of cattle.

The goal of this project is to conduct a community-centered archaeological project with the Seminole Tribe of Florida to identify Miccosukee Town's importance in its history. The project involves an interdisciplinary team of researchers from University of West Georgia, Florida Museum of Natural History, Troy University, and Florida State University working alongside the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

UWG Campus Archaeological Site

UWG has an amazing campus with many resources, but possibly our favorite resource is the UWG Campus Archaeological Site. This small site has provided faculty, students, and interested community members with a highly accessible cultural heritage resource to study over the past several years.

This site was discovered by Dr. Andrew Ivester (UWG Geosciences) when he worked with UWG Facilities to dig a soil pit to teach students in his soil sciences class about pedogenic processes and soil stratification. When showing his students the different stratigraphic layers exposed by the pit, he noticed artifacts in the walls, which led him to contacting faculty at the Waring Center.

Since then, Waring personnel have led field schools and a number of public archaeology initiatives at the site. While the data is still in the process of being analyzed, the site seems to represent a small, temporary occupation during the Woodland Period. It is located on a remnant Pleistocene Terrace landform in the Little Tallapoosa floodplain. This landform would have provided people with a small island in the floodplain where they could hunt, fish, and resharpen their tools. Even today after heavy rains, the small landform creates an island in the floodplain, showcasing how useful this place would have been during hunting and fishing excursions in the past.

Spiculate-Tempered Pottery Project

Pottery is one of the most common materials encountered in the archaeological record. While there is a high level of variability in the types of pottery objects encountered at sites, vessels are perhaps the most common. Archaeological and ethnographic research has shown that both vessel morphology and the additional constituents, or tempers, added to clay play important roles in determining the performance characteristics and function of a vessel. While studies have shown that potters seek certain performance characteristics, they do not always know the relationship between temper material and performance characteristic. Because of this, experimental archaeology is the primary method to evaluate the relationships between tempers and performance characteristics.

Through archaeological experiments, researchers have quantitatively tested the relationship between temper and impact resistance or vessel, thermal shock resistance, abrasion resistance, and thermal conductivity. While studies have documented many performance characteristic-temper relationships, the tempers tested have been limited to quartz sand, crushed shell, limestone, organic materials, and grog (crushed pottery). Throughout the lower Southeastern United States and elsewhere in the world, pottery tempered with sponge spicules is commonly found at archaeological sites. However, no one has addressed the reasoning behind selecting spicules for tempering.

This project is aimed at implementing a series of experiments to designed to evaluate the performance characteristics associated with spicule tempering. This series of experiments will address the following research questions: R1) How do spicules affect the strength of pottery? R2) How do spicules affect thermal shock resistance in pottery? and R3) How do spicules affect thermal conductivity in pottery?

Experimental Use-Wear Study on Shark Tooth Tools

In coastal areas around the world, people often turned to shark teeth for manufacturing cutting-edged tools. Analyses of shark teeth recovered from archaeological sites have documented the presence of use-wear—modifications resulting from use in tasks—on the teeth, such as striations, enamel dulling, and fracturing of the dentin along the lateral edges or distal tip. However, the interpretation of the tasks that led to these patterns has been conjectural. The Waring Center is currently implementing an experiment aimed at addressing the question: What use-wear patterns develop in shark teeth with the tasks of carving wood, sawing wood, cutting meat, cutting shell, cutting bone, drilling shell, drilling wood, drilling bone, and scraping hide?

This experiment will result in the creation of an experimental assemblage of shark teeth that will be used as a type collection in the analysis of archaeological shark teeth. Waring personnel recreated a range of shark tooth tools found in the archaeological record using modern shark teeth from both tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier) and bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas) species and have been using those tools in a series of timed tasks. The use-wear that results from these tasks is being documented and analyzed using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) in the Geosciences Microscopy Laboratory. This analysis will provide the basis for interpreting the patterns of use-wear identified in archaeological samples of shark tooth tools.