About the Southeastern Paleoamerican Survey
Under construction.
The Southeastern Paleoamerican Survey (SEPAS), founded in January of 2005, is a consortium of researchers and others interested in the early human occupations of the Southeastern United States. While SEPAS is primarily coordinated and organized as a research program within the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology and the University of South Carolina, it includes faculty and staff from the University of Tennessee, Mississippi State University, and the University of West Georgia.
The general purposes of SEPAS are broad: to search for, discover, and study evidence for the early human occupation of the southeastern United States. The program involves professionals and the interested public in research activities in the field and laboratory as well as dissemination and presentation of data and information at conferences, online, and through traditional publication.
Understanding the early hunting-gathering peoples of the Southeastern United States is of fundamental importance both for telling the story of the Americas in particular and for understanding the characteristics of human hunting-gathering societies in general. Generating that understanding is no simple task, however. The nature of archaeology and the archaeological record of the Southeast present us with challenges that must be overcome through sustained efforts to collect multiple kinds of data, to innovate new methods of analysis, and to build robust theory that allows us to confidently interpret archaeological and environmental data in terms of the past human societies of the region.
The Southeastern Paleoamerican Survey (SEPAS), founded in January of 2005, is a consortium of researchers and others interested in the early human occupations of the Southeastern United States. While SEPAS is primarily coordinated and organized as a research program within the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology and the University of South Carolina, it includes faculty and staff from the University of Tennessee, Mississippi State University, and the University of West Georgia.
The general purposes of SEPAS are broad: to search for, discover, and study evidence for the early human occupation of the southeastern United States. The program involves professionals and the interested public in research activities in the field and laboratory as well as dissemination and presentation of data and information at conferences, online, and through traditional publication.
Understanding the early hunting-gathering peoples of the Southeastern United States is of fundamental importance both for telling the story of the Americas in particular and for understanding the characteristics of human hunting-gathering societies in general. Generating that understanding is no simple task, however. The nature of archaeology and the archaeological record of the Southeast present us with challenges that must be overcome through sustained efforts to collect multiple kinds of data, to innovate new methods of analysis, and to build robust theory that allows us to confidently interpret archaeological and environmental data in terms of the past human societies of the region.
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Environment
The Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene environments of the Southeast were significantly different than those of today and fluctuated dramatically at the end of the last Ice Age. Understanding what those environments were like and how they changed through time allows us to ask how the early hunting-gathering peoples of the Southeast configured their societies to colonize the Southeast, exploit their environments, and adapt to changing conditions. |
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Archaeological Data
Archaeological data relevant to the early hunting-gathering peoples of the Southeast can be collected at many scales. Large-scale datasets (such as geographically-extensive data about particular styles of projectile points or patterns of lithic raw material use) are essential for describing broad patterns of social interaction and landscape use. Data collected at smaller scales (such as from excavations of individual sites) can reveal aspects of community structure, family- and group-level social behavior, subsistence economics, and gender relationships. Multiple scales of data collection and analysis are necessary to understand the characteristics of the spatially-extensive hunting-gathering societies of the Southeast and how those societies changed over time. |
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Interpretation
The broad goal of anthropological archaeology is to answer questions about past human cultures and societies. Meeting that goal requires developing theoretical frameworks that can be used to link the dynamic human behaviors of past societies (which we want to understand but can no longer observe) with the static material remains that they left behind (which we can collect, observe, and analyze). Our knowledge of the early hunting-gathering peoples of the Southeast will continue to accumulate and be refined though ongoing work to collect data, construct interpretations that explain those data, and develop avenues to test our explanations. |
