News from the Field 2023

analysis (being conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Horton) and for AMS radiocarbon dating (University of Georgia’s Center for Applied Isotope Studies, CAIS). These analyses will contribute to reconstructing subsistence practices and habitation chronology for the archaeological sites she has been investigating in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley in Georgia.

Swisher spent part of her summer at the University of Georgia’s Laboratory of Archaeology pulling macrobotanical samples for this research from existing site collections and visiting colleagues and archaeological sites in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley. She also spent a week at Indiana University, where she was accepted to the Intensive NAGPRA Summer Training and Education Program (INSTEP). This was a pilot training program to help those attending learn best practices related to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Swisher is currently continuing her dissertation research and writing and is looking forward to sharing the results of the analyses.

During the summer, graduate student Hannah Hoover conducted a third and final field season for her dissertation at an early 18th-century Yamasee capital town in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Over the course of nine weeks, Hannah and a rotating crew of 15 student volunteers excavated in six areas (across the 45-ha site) to identify and sample domestic contexts. Three structures were identified, including two households that likely constituted a residential unit with nearby activity areas. Portions of Hannah’s fieldwork were funded by the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and UMMAA’s James Bennett Griffin Endowment Fellowship. Two awesome U-M undergraduate students accompanied her, as well as the Museum graphic artist’s son, Harrison Worden.

Curator Rob Beck’s work at the Berry site in North Carolina continued in summer 2023 with excavations in another large building, Structure 9, which has a fired clay floor and a large prepared hearth. The building likely dates to the late 16th century and may be a Native American structure from the town of Joara, where Spanish Captain Juan

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