The research presented here seeks to better understand the relationship between the Macon Plateau site and Mossy Oak ceramics. The Early Mississippian period in central Georgia was a time of great change with emerging political centralization and social ranking. This thesis aims to better understand Macon Plateau’s relationship with outlying areas. To accomplish this objective the ceramic assemblage site from the site of Mossy Oak (11 Bi 17) is revisited and reanalyzed using spatial analysis and detailed investigations of Vining Simple Stamped pottery. Rather than taking a top-down, elite-focused approach, this thesis explores the impact of horizontal relationships between groups present at the inception of social institutions and social inequality at the dawn of the Early Mississippian and the rise of Macon Plateau.

Conventions of Culture-Historical archaeology have persisted in Florida's Indian River Region since the early twentieth century. Traditional ceramic typologies focusing on the superficial stylistic characteristics of pottery have dominated anthropological assessments of Indian River culture during the prehistoric Malabar Period (ca. 1000 BC-AD 1565). Using a practice-oriented approach to analyze technological attributes of St. Johns pottery from Malabar-period assemblages offers an opportunity to examine the communities of practice surrounding craft production as an avenue for elucidating prehistoric cultural identities. This study explores ceramic technology within the Malabar period assemblages of the Fox Lake Sanctuary, and intra-regional and inter-regional site comparisons are quantitatively tested to evaluate variation in technological attributes between assemblages. Statistical results suggest a differentiation between certain technological attributes of St. Johns pottery in Malabar and St. Johns assemblages, notably in the rim thickness and lip morphology of simple form St. Johns Plain vessels.

Poverty Point is a monumental earthwork center dating to the Late Archaic Period (ca. 3700-3100 Cal BP). The site is well known for its diverse collection of foreign lithic materials indicative of a wide-ranging acquisition network. Among the extra-local items recovered from the site are lithic raw materials that were used for bifaces in the form of projectile points and/or knives (PP/Ks). Here, I determined the atomic and molecular composition of 847 bifaces from the Alexander Collection using Visible/Near-Infrared Reflectance (VNIR) and Fourier-Transform Infrared Reflectance (FTIR) spectroscopy. The combined wavelength spectra datasets were compared to a raw material database to determine the location of the parent formations from which the raw materials were obtained. The PP/K raw materials analyzed were sourced to outcrops stretching across the Southeast, Mid-South and Mid-West.

As the focus in southeastern archaeology shifts away from large scale hierarchical analyses in favor of agency based approaches, our understanding of Mississippian settlements has changed. This research is an attempt to fill the “fuzzy gap” in Mississippian archaeological literature left by decades of research premised on Neo-evolutionary models and theories. In this thesis, I present my case study on Riverfront Village, a small Mississippian “hamlet” located in the Savannah River Valley. Through an analysis of subterranean pit features, I present a new feature classification scheme open to variability, and address how variations within the practice of subterranean storage relate to social complexity.