North American Archaeology

Course Description

North American Archaeology is an overview of archaeology of North America, with emphasis on patterns of development of regional cultures based on the archaeological record. The catalog states that the course is open to students in all majors.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix. UWF publishes this at 3 semester hours.

The phrase "based on the archaeological record" is doing deliberate work in that description. North America's deep past is frequently narrated through later written sources, oral tradition, and popular assumption — and the archaeological record is a partly independent line of evidence that sometimes agrees with those and sometimes does not. A course organised around it is asking what can actually be demonstrated from material remains, over a continent, across roughly fifteen thousand years, in societies of enormous diversity.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's course catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. There is therefore no institution-stated figure to quote, and every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived.

The figure shown applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, corroborated within this prefix by the live ANT2000 (Introduction to Anthropology) at 3 credits and 45 hours. Confirm the actual meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the peopling of the Americas and the evidence bearing on it.
• Evaluate competing models for initial entry and their evidential support.
• Describe Paleoindian adaptations and their archaeological signature.
• Describe megafaunal extinction and the debates about human involvement.
• Describe Archaic period adaptations and regional diversification.
• Describe the development of plant domestication in North America.
• Describe the emergence of pottery and its regional variation.
• Describe mound building traditions and their chronology.
• Describe Woodland period developments in the East.
• Describe Hopewell and interaction sphere interpretations.
• Describe Mississippian societies and their organisation.
• Describe Cahokia and debates about its scale and nature.
• Describe Southwestern sequences and their distinctive features.
• Describe Ancestral Puebloan settlement and its transformations.
• Describe Plains adaptations and their variability.
• Describe Northwest Coast societies and complexity without agriculture.
• Describe Arctic and Subarctic adaptations.
• Describe Southeastern sequences, including Florida.
• Describe contact-period archaeology and its evidence.
• Describe the archaeology of colonialism and its effects on Indigenous societies.
• Describe continuity between archaeological cultures and living descendant communities.
• Describe the relationship between archaeology and Indigenous peoples.
• Evaluate regional syntheses against the underlying evidence.
• Describe the legal and ethical framework governing this record.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe rock art and its interpretation.
• Describe zooarchaeological and palaeoethnobotanical evidence in depth.
• Describe exchange networks and sourcing studies.
• Describe bioarchaeological evidence for health and diet.
• Describe collaborative archaeology with tribal nations.
• Describe a specific regional sequence in depth.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Peopling of the Americas
• Models for initial entry
• Paleoindian adaptations
• Megafaunal extinction debates
• Archaic adaptations
• Plant domestication
• Pottery and its variation
• Mound building traditions
• Woodland developments
• Hopewell and interaction spheres
• Mississippian societies
• Cahokia
• Southwestern sequences
• Ancestral Puebloan settlement
• Plains adaptations
• Northwest Coast complexity
• Arctic and Subarctic
• Southeastern sequences
• Contact-period archaeology
• Archaeology of colonialism
• Continuity with descendant communities
• Archaeology and Indigenous peoples
• Evaluating regional syntheses
• Legal and ethical framework

Optional Topics

• Rock art
• Zooarchaeology and palaeoethnobotany
• Exchange and sourcing
• Bioarchaeology of health
• Collaborative archaeology with tribes
• Regional sequence in depth

Resources & Tools

• Society for American Archaeology (saa.org) — free Principles of Archaeological Ethics; read them in your first archaeology course, not your last. Student membership is inexpensive.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (rpanet.org) — free; the eligibility criteria tell you exactly what a professional archaeologist is expected to have done, including a field school.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources (dos.fl.gov/historical) — free; Chapter 267, the permitting process, and the Florida Master Site File.
• National Park Service preservation briefs and the Section 106 guidance (nps.gov, achp.gov) — free, and this is the process most professional archaeologists work inside every day.
• Florida Public Archaeology Network (fpan.us) — free public programmes and volunteer opportunities across the state; an unusually good route to real experience for a Florida student.
• Florida Anthropological Society and its journal — regional research, and a genuine route into the state's archaeological community.
• Get to a field school. It is the entry requirement for professional work, it is what employers and graduate programmes look for first, and nothing substitutes for it.

Career Pathways

• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091.
• ⚠ Cultural resource management is where the jobs are. The great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance archaeology for consulting firms, agencies, and tribes — driven by Section 106 and state equivalents rather than by research funding. Plan for that rather than for academia.
• Field technician ("shovelbum") — the entry-level role; project-based, travelling, and the standard first job after a field school.
• Crew chief, project archaeologist, and principal investigator — the CRM progression, with a graduate degree generally needed above field technician.
• State and federal agencies — State Historic Preservation Offices, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
• Tribal historic preservation offices — a growing and important sector.
• Museums, collections management, and curation — SOC 25-4012 and 25-4013.
• Historic preservation planning at local and state government level.
• Postsecondary teaching and research — SOC 25-1061; requires a doctorate and is highly competitive.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the entry conditions. Field technician work is seasonal, project-based, frequently far from home, and modestly paid; benefits are inconsistent. Many people do it for a few years and then either move up, move into agency or museum work, or leave. Knowing that in advance is better than discovering it.
• A graduate degree is effectively required to advance beyond field technician in this field — plan the pathway early.

Special Information

⚠⚠ These are descendant communities, not extinct peoples — and it changes the practice

• The archaeological cultures in this course are the ancestors of living nations, and those nations have their own histories, their own authority over their heritage, and legitimate interests in how it is studied and described.
• ⚠ The past tense is frequently used wrongly here. Writing about Indigenous peoples of North America only in the past tense implies a disappearance that did not happen — and it is one of the most common failures in student writing on this subject.
• ⚠⚠ The discipline's history with these communities is genuinely bad. Remains and objects were removed without consent for well over a century, and NAGPRA exists as a legal correction to that rather than as an administrative inconvenience.
• Consultation is a legal requirement and a professional norm, and it works best when it begins before a research design is fixed rather than after.
• Tribal historic preservation offices are professional peers, and increasingly the people commissioning and directing work.
• ⚠ Oral tradition is evidence. It is a different kind of evidence with different properties from archaeological data, and where the two converge that is a strong result; where they diverge, that is a question rather than a verdict on either.
• Use the names communities use for themselves, and be aware that archaeological culture names are analytical labels imposed by the discipline rather than identities anyone claimed.
• Interpretations carry consequences. Claims about who was where, when, and for how long bear on land, recognition, and repatriation — which is a reason for care with the evidence, not a reason to avoid the questions.
• Collaborative archaeology produces better results, and it is now standard practice rather than an ethical extra.

⚠⚠ Excavation is destruction — this is the discipline's founding constraint

• An archaeological site can be excavated once. Removing an artefact destroys its context permanently, and context is where nearly all the information is — an object without its associations is a curiosity rather than evidence.
• ⚠ Which is why recording is the actual work. The excavation produces notes, drawings, photographs, elevations, and samples; the site itself is gone, and the record is all that survives of it. A dig with poor records has destroyed a site and produced nothing.
• ⚠⚠ Do not excavate what does not need excavating. Modern practice presumes preservation in place: survey, non-invasive methods, and leaving the deposit for better techniques later are frequently the professionally correct answer, and a research question that could be answered without digging should be.
• Sample deliberately and leave some of the site intact where you can, so future archaeologists with better methods have material to work with. Everything we can do now, someone will do better in fifty years.
• ⚠ Excavation without a curation plan is destruction with extra steps. See the curation note below — artefacts that cannot be housed, catalogued and kept accessible have not been saved.
• Publish, or the destruction was for nothing. Unpublished excavation is a recognised and serious failure in this discipline, and a substantial amount of twentieth-century fieldwork sits unreported in boxes.
• Record what you did not find as well as what you did. Negative evidence is evidence, and it is routinely discarded.
• ⚠ Stratigraphy cannot be reconstructed after the fact. If the layers were not recorded as they were removed, the sequence is lost, and with it the chronology.

⚠⚠ The antiquities market, human remains, and the curation crisis

• ⚠⚠ Do not buy, sell, or appraise antiquities. The professional societies' ethics principles treat commercialisation of the archaeological record as incompatible with the discipline, because market demand is what funds looting — and looting destroys context, which destroys the information, permanently.
• An artefact with no provenance is frequently a looted artefact, and authenticating or publishing one raises its market value and rewards the destruction that produced it.
• ⚠ Human remains require consultation, not just permits. Descendant communities have legitimate authority over the treatment of their ancestors, and the discipline's history here is genuinely bad — remains were collected, measured, and retained without consent for well over a century.
• Consult early and continuously, not at the end. Consultation presented as a formality after decisions are made is not consultation, and it is recognised as such.
• Treat remains with the care you would want for your own relatives, including in photography, in storage, and in how they are discussed.
• ⚠⚠ The curation crisis is real and it is the discipline's quiet failure. Repositories across the country are full; excavated collections sit uncatalogued, inaccessible, and in some cases deteriorating, and some institutions will no longer accept new material. Curation is expensive, it is permanent, and it must be funded before excavation, not after.
• Budget for curation in the project, and confirm a repository will accept the collection before a trowel goes in the ground.
• Existing collections are an underused research resource. A great deal of publishable work can be done on material already excavated and never analysed — and it costs no new destruction.
• ⚠ Archaeology has been used to support political claims about land and identity, sometimes disastrously. Interpretations carry consequences beyond the discipline, and stating the strength of the evidence honestly matters.

⚠⚠ Archaeology is heavily regulated — and most American archaeological work exists because of it

• The National Historic Preservation Act, and particularly its Section 106 process, requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. ⚠ This is the single largest driver of archaeological employment in the United States — the great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance, not academia.
• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) governs archaeological resources on federal and tribal land, requires permits for excavation, and makes unauthorised excavation, removal, and trafficking a federal offence with substantial penalties.
• ⚠⚠ NAGPRA — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — governs human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. It creates consultation and repatriation obligations and it changed the discipline profoundly. Understand it as a legal requirement and as an ethical correction to a real history, not as an obstacle.
• ⚠ Florida: Chapter 267, Florida Statutes vests authority in the Division of Historical Resources and declares archaeological resources on state-owned land and on state-owned submerged land to be state property. Collecting from them without a permit is unlawful.
• ⚠⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. Unmarked burials are common on Florida sites, and if human remains are encountered, work stops and the process defined by that statute is followed — this is one of the most important things a Florida archaeologist knows.
• The Florida Master Site File is the state's inventory of archaeological and historical sites; recording sites into it is a professional obligation, and consulting it is the first step of any project.
• State and local permits, and tribal consultation, apply on top of the federal framework.
• ⚠ Metal detecting and surface collecting are restricted on public land and prohibited on many sites; a hobby elsewhere is an offence here.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Preservation law, regulations, and tribal consultation requirements change — verify with the State Historic Preservation Office and the relevant agency rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live across this prefix, most of which sits at the upper-division levels.

ANT3153 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida and is open to students in all majors.

See this repository's ANT3158 (Florida Archaeology) guide for the regional detail.