Tracking Trajectories: Charting Changes of Late Archaic Shell Ring Formation and Use

For the past fifty years the shell rings of the North American, southeastern, Late Archaic period, have been a continuous object of archaeological research. They have been studied within contexts of the initial creation and use of ceramics in North America, mounding and monumentality of hunter-gatherers, early sedentism and social complexity, forager feasting, ritual, and ceremonialism, and human-environment interactions. The aim of this project was to bring together the cumulative data generated by this continuous research focus and centralize it within a single database, the Late Archaic Shell Rings Repository. In utilizing this consolidated data set, it is possible to track and map, both chronologically and geographically, behavioral traditions surrounding the shell rings. This analysis posits that there are three discernable, overarching, behavioral trajectories within the shell rings of the Late Archaic period: an early, Floridian/Gulf Coastal trajectory of an open ended, large scale, social mounding tradition; a middle Savannah River centered, proto-sedentary, freshwater shell mounding, initial ceramics producing trajectory, the Stallings culture; and a subsequent Atlantic Coastal tradition that possesses a stricter maintenance of social practices that have smaller and more circular shell rings and that incorporates the social behaviors of the shell ring building trajectory and the initial ceramic using trajectory. In collecting these data together, this analysis also is able to highlight the existing gaps within the data from the shell rings, with the aim of helping to pinpoint foci for future research.