In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 25 Epilogue: Future Directions for Woodland Archaeology in the Southeast David G. Anderson and Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. The contributors to this volume examine the Woodland period occupation of the Southeast from a variety of perspectives, ranging from geographical and topical overviews of cultural developments and archaeological research, to considerations of how this record of research and interpretation has been shaped by our approaches to systematics and taxonomy, to how the world view and cosmology of the Southeast’s prehistoric Woodland inhabitants underlay and structured their societies and helped shape transformations that were occurring within them. As editors, our goal has been not only to present a summary of current knowledge, but also to show the array of approaches by which this knowledge has been obtained and interpreted. At our direction, many of the authors herein suggest avenues for future research in their regional areas or topics of concern. Here we offer our own suggestions and concluding thoughts on the current state of Woodland period archaeology in the Southeast. First and foremost, we believe that far more problem-oriented and theoretically well-informed primary research on the Woodland period is needed all across the region, covering both existing collections (many of which remain unanalyzed) and fieldwork. The latter is a particularly urgent need given the rate of archaeological site destruction throughout the region. Field research is at the core of our discipline and it should remain so. If we are to successfully evaluate our ideas about the past and develop new ones, evidence must continue to be collected and older data reexamined. But we must be flexible in our thinking about what we are recovering and be open to new ideas and approaches in field research, analysis, and interpretation. In our theoretical and analytical diversity there is indeed strength, and southeastern archaeology’s tolerance of differing approaches to archaeological inquiry should by all means continue (I. Brown 1994), albeit closely linked to our region’s equally strong insistence that interpretations of the past be well grounded—securely linked to data compiled and evaluated in the field and in the laboratory (e.g., Peebles 1990; Watson 1990). Epilogue: Future Directions for Woodland Archaeology in the Southeast 541 Perhaps the most influential monograph on southeastern archaeology produced in the twentieth century, Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–1947 (Phillips et al. 1951), exemplified these ideals and yielded appreciable insight about Woodland as well as later occupations in the region. The work is a monument to careful field data collection , analysis, and interpretation, and the differing theoretical approaches and interpretations of the three authors are clearly evident and candidly presented , producing a standard of scientific reporting that should be read and emulated by every southeastern archaeologist (see especially Phillips et al. 1951:425–29). As archaeology is increasingly a multidisciplinary team endeavor , presenting the views of teams rather than individuals will become a hallmark of our work. Open and honest debate between project participants, and among scholars in the regional professional community in general, is an important part of this process. Also in the realm of primary data compilation, we must develop a better handle on site and artifact distributions at local to regional scales if we are to successfully construct models of settlement, subsistence, and political geography . This can be facilitated by careful attention to collections and record management, including efforts to ensure data comparability from state to state and between researchers. Such data will allow us to examine empirically such questions as where people were on the landscape during various Woodland subperiods; whether there were buffer zones between societies, as unquestionably occurred during the subsequent Mississippian period; and what geographic and organizational scales of the societies were present in the region. The full potential of the suggestions offered above cannot be fully realized if analysis of archaeological materials remains mired in the quagmire of culture history that has dominated southeastern archaeology for over half a century (Dunnell 1990). The call for reevaluating and perhaps discarding current systematics (O’Brien et al., this volume) clearly is a challenge that must be met if we are to increase our understanding of the Woodland Southeast . The same approaches to artifact typology and the formulation of culture -historical units (phases) that have been used successfully to identify long-term changes over broad areas are not well suited for measuring variation on the finer scales necessary for addressing many of the research topics mentioned by the contributors to this volume. For example...

Share