Excerpt from Beneath These Waters: Archeological and Historical Studies of 11, 500 Years Along the Savannah River Two federal agencies, in consultation with our state governments, have played key roles in these endeavors: the National Park Service and the u.s. Army Corps of Engineers. With the Richard B. Russell Dam and lake Cultural Resource Investigations Program, these agencies combined forces to produce a truly outstanding result. This multi-million dollar, twenty-year program has yielded a vast array of invaluable information on the cultural history of the upper Savannah River in the central Piedmont of Georgia and South Carolina. The National Park Service and the Corps have placed heavy emphasis on producing a popular account that is both informative and entertaining. This volume is easy to read and successfully informs the reader. To the extent that this popular account has been prepared for the inspiration and benefit of the people, we believe it to be an exemplary effort. We applaud these efforts to inform the public of the rich cultural heritage of our states. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This volume explores political change in chiefdoms, specifically how complex chiefdoms emerge and collapse, and how this process—called cycling—can be examined using archaeological, ethnohistoric, paleoclimatic, paleosubsistence, and physical anthropological data. The focus for the research is the prehistoric and initial contact-era Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States, specifically the societies occupying the Savannah River basin from ca. A.D. 1000 to 1600. This regional focus and the multidisciplinary nature of the investigation provide a solid introduction to the Southeastern Mississippian archaeological record and the study of cultural evolution in general.