Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley addresses the approximately 7,000 years of the prehistory of eastern North America, termed the Archaic Period by archaeologists.

Falls of the Ohio River presents current archaeological research on an important landscape feature: a series of low, cascading rapids along the Ohio River on the border of Kentucky and Indiana. Using the perspective of historical ecology and synthesizing data from recent excavations, contributors to this volume demonstrate how humans and the environment mutually affected each other in the area for the past 12,000 years. These essays show how the Falls region was an attractive place to live due to its diverse ecological zones and its abundance of high-quality chert. In chronological studies ranging from the Early Archaic to the Late Mississippian periods, contributors portray the rapids as at times a boundary between Native American groups living upstream and downstream and at other times a hub where cultures converged and blended into a distinct local identity. The essays analyze and track changes in stone tool styles, mortuary traditions, settlement patterns, plant consumption, and ceramic production. Together, the chapters in this volume illustrate that the Falls of the Ohio was a focal point on the human landscape throughout the Holocene era. Providing a foundation for future work in this location, they show how the region’s geography and ecology shaped the ways humans organized themselves within it and how in turn these groups impacted the area through their changing social, economic, and political circumstances. Contributors: Anne Tobbe Bader | Rick Burdin | Justin N. Carlson | Richard W. Jefferies | Michael French | Robert G. McCullough | Greg J. Maggard | Stephen T. Mocas | Cheryl Ann Munson | David Pollack | Jack Rossen | Christopher W Schmidt| Claiborne Daniel | Duane B. Simpson | C. Russell, Stafford | Gary E. Stinchcomb | Jocelyn C. Turner A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Archaeological sites throughout southern Illinois provide a chronicle of the varying ways people have lived in that area during the past 10,000 years. This book focuses on the results of a five-year archaeological investigation in a 143-acre area known as the Carrier Mills Archaeological District. This area, rich in archaeological treasures, offers many keys to the prehistoric people of southern Illinois. Archaeologists in this study have sought to learn the ages of the various prehistoric occupations represented at the sites; to better understand the technology and social organization of these prehistoric people; to collect information about diet, health, and physical characteristics of the prehistoric inhabitants; and to investigate the remains of the 19th-century Lakeview settlement.

Through a detailed examination of the archaeological evidence and written records, this comprehensive text aims to develop a common understanding of what complexity means to archaeologists, and the methods by which they identify and analyze it. In this first new undergraduate textbook on ancient complex societies in two decades, the authors use vivid writing, textboxes on key themes and sites, and a glossary to keep students thoroughly engaged.

Although it has been occupied for as long and possesses a mound-building tradition of considerable scale and interest, Muller contends that the archaeology of the lower Ohio River Valley—from the confluence with the Mississippi to the falls at Louisville, Kentucky – remains less well-known that that of the elaborate mound-building cultures of the upper valley. This study provides a synthesis of archaeological work done in the region, emphasizing population growth and adaptation within an ecological framework in an attempt to explain the area’s cultural evolution.

This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series represents a period-by-period synthesis of southeastern prehistory designed for high school and college students, avocational archaeologists, and interested members of the general public. It also serves as a basic reference for professional archaeologists worldwide on the record of a remarkable region.

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence—an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.