The Western River Steamboat Heroine, 1832–1838, Oklahoma,USA: excavations,summary of finds,and history

This paper describes the excavation, discoveries relating to the hull, machinery, and artefacts, and the history of an early steamboat wreck discovered in the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas. The wreck has been identified as the side‐wheel steamer Heroine, a vessel in service on the Mississippi, Ohio, and other western rivers of North America during the 1830s. It is the earliest example of this famous type of vessel yet studied.     

Posted: the campaign sign landscape,race, and political participation in Mississippi

Cultural landscapes offer potential insights into cultural processes. As a cultural/political landscape element, the domestic campaign sign is linked to a variety of socio-cultural and political processes. Examination of the geographical distribution of 2004 presidential election campaign signs posted throughout the town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, illustrates that race is a factor in understanding who chooses to post signs. Historically, limitations on political participation in the South would have included use of landscape for communication, imposing a sort of metacommunicative landscape hegemony. Further, patterns of sign postings and voter turnout indicate that both activities are forms of political participation that are embraced differently by different social groups.     

Prehistoric Molluscan Faunas of the Yazoo River,Mississippi, USA: Archaeological Perspectives for Modern Conservation

Archaeological faunal assemblages can provide data valuable to modern conservation ecology. For example, while freshwater mussels (Bivalvia: Unionidae, Margaritiferidae) are common constituents in the archaeological record of North America, today they are one of the world’s most imperiled faunal groups. Efforts to aid habitat restoration, population growth, and species reintroduction can be informed by studies of prehistoric mussel assemblages. These data can provide a historical perspective, cataloging communities as they existed prior to extensive modern impacts, thus representing an ecological baseline to be compared with modern populations. This study focuses on two late prehistoric (ca. 300–600 AD) sites on the Yazoo River, where nearly 24,000 freshwater mussel valves were recovered. Though modern data are extremely limited for the river, analysis revealed it once supported a diverse mussel community containing numerous species currently considered rare, endangered, or extinct in Mississippi. In total, the combined shell assemblages yielded 23 new river records for the Yazoo River. One species in particular, Quadrula fragosa, represents the second such occurrence in Mississippi, and bolsters its candidate status as a new state record, as argued in a recent report from a neighbouring river in the Yazoo Basin.     

Applied Zooarchaeology of Freshwater Mussel (Bivalvia: Unionidae) Shell from Golson (22HU508), A Deasonville-Period Site on the Yazoo River,Mississippi

Excavations at Golson (22HU508), an archaeological site on the Yazoo River in western Mississippi, USA, produced an assemblage of over 4000 freshwater mussel shells, 77 percent of which were identifiable to species. Although limited spatial sampling of the deposits limits what can be said about past mussel community characteristics, twelve new river records for mussel species are derived from the assemblage. This typical result emphasises the value of archaeological shell assemblages for conservation biology and provides a rationale for why sites containing shell may be considered significant based upon their potential contributions to environmental history.     

Standing Posts and Special Substances: Gathering and Ritual Deposition at Feltus (22Je500), Jefferson County,Mississippi

Because it immediately precedes the Mississippi period, Coles Creek (A.D. 700–1200) culture is often viewed through the lens of Mississippian social organization. In particular, early platform mound-and-plaza complexes have long been understood as elite compounds due to their physical similarities with later sites. However, evidence regarding the construction and use of the monumental landscape at the Feltus site (22JE500) in Jefferson County, MS, suggests that platform mound construction was but one aspect of a broader ritual sequence aimed at gathering the dispersed Coles Creek community. In addition to mound building, this sequence included the setting and removal of freestanding posts, ritual feasting, and burial of the dead and focused on explicit deposition of meaningful objects and substances. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic analyses of the objects and substances included in the ritual deposits at Feltus suggest that they helped forge relationships between an extended kin network, including non-human fictive kin and non-living human kin. In this context, we find a metaphor of gathering to be useful in understanding the archaeological remains of a ritual sequence focused on bringing together social, cosmological, and temporal domains. This provides a distinctly different take on the meaning and use of platform mounds based on a review of Native beliefs and practices that looks beyond the traditionally relied upon sources.     

From Hanover to Gibraltar: Cato’s Letters (1720–23) in International Context

Originally composed as a series of polemical essays to a weekly newspaper called The London Journal, appearing from November 1720 to July 1723, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon's Cato's Letters (1724 in book form) had a lasting influence on the development and evolution of Country ideology. It was, as is well known, one of the most widely read and influential books in Revolutionary America. Because of the enduring influence it had on the dissemination of the civic humanist tradition from Britain to North America, Cato's Letters has been more often than not taken out of historical context. This article revisits Cato's Letters by placing it against the background of the War of the Quadruple Alliance of 1718–20. What Trenchard and Gordon strove to do was to construct a distinctively Whig vision of Britain's maritime future that in a fundamental way rested on the Hanoverian Succession of 1714 and justified the conduct of foreign policy under George I and, more especially, the controversial alliance with France in 1716. The focal point of Cato's foreign-policy platform was Gibraltar. But were it not for the timely burst of the Mississippi Bubble in 1720, Trenchard and Gordon could not have retrained their civic humanist association of libertas and imperium with such assurance and confidence.     

Sourcing galena from a Middle Woodland habitation site in northeast Mississippi

Galena has been recovered mostly in mortuary contexts – burial mounds, burial caves, and associated mortuary facilities – from Middle Woodland sites in the Southeast. Three small pieces of galena from the Cork site (22OK746) in northeast Mississippi came from midden deposits at a site with no mound or burials. Lead isotope analysis was used to source the samples to the Central Missouri-Tri-State-North Arkansas region. Isotopes provide an excellent sourcing method because their ratios are stable and large comparative source datasets are available. Recovery bias may have led to underestimation of galena presence in Middle Woodland habitation sites.     

The Western River Steamboat Heroine, 1832–1838, Oklahoma,USA: construction

This paper describes the design and construction of the side‐wheel steamer Heroine, a representative of the ‘western river steamboat’ type and the earliest example of its kind to undergo archaeological study. Heroine was built at New Albany, Indiana, in 1832 and sunk on the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas in 1838. The extensive remains of the lower hull show assembly practices in use during the developmental era of Mississippi River steamboats. The wreck also reveals a heretofore‐unknown technique for longitudinally strengthening these long, narrow, and very lightly built hulls.