From Santa Elena to St. Augustine : indigenous ceramic variability (A.D. 1400-1700) : proceedings of the Second Caldwell Conference, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, March 30-April 1, 2007

Archaeologists have long known that important changes took place in aboriginal ceramic assemblages of the northern Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina coast after the arrival of Europeans. New pottery designs emerged and aboriginal demographics became fluid. Catastrophic population loss occurred in some places, new groups formed in others, and movements of people occurred nearly everywhere. Although culturally and linguistically diverse, the native inhabitants of this region shared the unwelcome encounter with Spanish people and colonial institutions, beginning in the early decades of the 16th century and continuing into the 18th century. Spanish missions and military outposts were established at native communities throughout the area, and these sites have been studied by both archaeologists and historians for decades. As a consequence, the lower southeastern Atlantic coast offers one of the most intensively studied episodes of multicultural colonial engagement in America. The Second Caldwell Conference was organized to bring researchers working in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida together to address and more precisely define aboriginal ceramic change throughout the region as a baseline for approaching a more broadly based anthropological perspective on the consequences of encounter. The scope of inquiry was restricted to late prehistoric and early historic (A.D. 1400-1700) aboriginal ceramic wares from Santa Elena (South Carolina) to St. Augustine (Florida). The primary objective was to more precisely establish the technology, form, and design of the archaeological ceramic evidence. Without devolving into semantic and/or taxonomic wrangles, we examined how well (or poorly) archaeological labels used throughout the region to identify pottery serve as reliable proxies for the physical examples of those ceramic traditions. We also attempted to define the time-space distribution of the various ceramic traditions and pottery types throughout the south Atlantic coast. Specifically, we asked: (1) Did the indigenous ceramic complexes change fundamentally with the arrival of the Spaniards? (2) Or did indigenous ceramic traditions essentially persist, and merely shifted geographically? The eight contributions of this volume examine, on a case-by-case basis, the most important aboriginal ceramic assemblages from Santa Elena southward to St. Augustine, across the region, contextualizing each assemblage with the relevant physical stratigraphy, radiocarbon dates,