Archaeology Sources

State of CRM Archaeology in the Alabama Portion of the Chahta Homelands

Two primary questions, constantly posed during this project, served to guide this effort. First, how can Section 106 or “contract” archaeology “do better” regarding the information put forth and work conducted in the Chahta homelands. Second, what does a contract archaeologist who may be unfamiliar with the archaeology of the Chahta (Choctaw) homeland need in order to “do better?”

A central tenet of archaeology is looking to the past for understanding the present and to better inform the future. The Chahta Archaeology Item Set examines of the basic tools of contract archaeology: the state site files and gray literature. We must examine the archaeology that has come before to better understand the tasks at hand and move forward productively. To that end, we assembled an annotated bibliography of archaeological sites and reports. Some of these sources are not publicly available and a request can be submitted from the Home page for access.

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (CNO) defines their ancestral homelands in Alabama as the following modern-day counties: Baldwin, Bibb, Choctaw, Clarke, Conecuh, Dallas, Escambia, Fayette, Greene, Hale, Lamar, Marengo, Mobile, Monroe, Perry, Pickens, Sumter, Tuscaloosa, Walker, Washington, and Wilcox. CNO considers all archaeological sites, artifacts, and human remains from these counties as having a potential affiliation with the ancestral Chahta (Choctaw). Forefronting the ancestry of the archaeological record, an important and often overlooked consideration in CRM archaeology, accurately centers compliance projects. This orientation of work in the Chahta (Choctaw) homelands of Alabama does not preclude other ancestral affiliations.

The Archaeology Item Set is the product of a pilot study and the scope is limited currently to an examination of Chahta (Choctaw) archaeology in Mobile, Baldwin, Clarke, Choctaw, and Washington counties and temporally within the last five centuries. As this project develops it will expand to include the remainder of the ancestral Chahta (Choctaw) archaeological record in Alabama.

Using the Archaeological Item Set

Turning to the body of archaeological literature, a list of sites and research publications of relevance to the ancestral Chahta (Choctaw) was compiled. The Archaeology Item Set includes archaeological reports, books, and journal articles that pertain to Chahta (Choctaw) archaeology. It is an imperfect dataset, there are certainly omissions due to how resources are reported on, the level of investigaitons, and the structure of the repositories.

Based on an initial review of Alabama’s archaeological literature, there is truly little work in the spaces between the archaeological and ethnohistorical/ethnographic literature. Research either focuses on archaeology (and mostly survey at that) or results in a hybrid historical/ethnohistorical study. Even when there are thorough discussions of archaeological work and historical/ethnohistorical sources by authors, the linkage and synergy between these data rarely come to fruition.  This is not to say that these works are faulty per se, but rather to point to areas for future endeavors to address.