When: April 9, 2013, 7pm
Where: The Magnolia Room, second floor of the Reynolds Center on the SAU Campus, Magnolia, AR
Our April program will be given by John Samuelsen, an important member of the AAS Computer Services Program (CSP) and a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. John will be talking about past and recent work at the legendary Crenshaw Mounds Site here in southwestern Arkansas. The Crenshaw site, along the Red River in Miller County, Arkansas, has a long story, both as a Caddo ceremonial center and as a site of archeological investigations. Dr. Frank Schambach, the previous AAS-SAU archeologist, lead major excavations at Crenshaw in the late 1960s and the 1980s. Dr. Schmbach devoted a major part of his career to researching the Crenshaw site and he is still (while in retirement) working on reinterpreting the site’s archeology. Recent radiocarbon dating verifies that the site was occupied at least between A.D. 900 and 1400, during times typically considered to represent the Caddo tradition. Crenshaw is a multiple mound ceremonial center which originally had at least six mounds, based on Clarence Bloomfield Moore’s excavations there in 1912. Excavations in the 1930s first found evidence of a “Pre-Caddo” tradition at Crenshaw, igniting discussions about the origin of the Caddo (Lemley 1936). Since these discoveries, the site has continued to produce unanticipated cultural material and burial practices. It could be said that one should expect the unexpected from further research on this site.
John Samuelsen collecting remote sensing at Crenshaw Mounds in 2012.
The talk will cover past archeological research at the site, its impact on Caddo archeology, and the newest research being produced from the site. As part of his dissertation work, Samuelsen has thus far collected 18 hectares of gradiometry, covering nearly a third of the site’s area in order to find evidence of structures. The results challenge previous notions about Caddo settlement patterning and intra-site organization. Since the results are tied to our understanding of Caddo subsistence strategies and evidence of a “Pre-Caddo” occupation of the site, they will also be discussed based on new analyses.
Mr. Samuelsen is the Server Administrator with the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Computer Services Program. He received his BA (in both anthropology and computer science) from the University of Florida and received his MA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 2009 (his thesis was entitled “Archaeogeophysical Investigations of Early Caddo Settlement Patterning at the Crenshaw Site”). Following his MA work, John has been continuing his Crenshaw research for his dissertation topic.
You will want to come to this month’s meeting—Tuesday, April 9, 7:00pm in the Magnolia Room on the second floor of the Reynolds Center on the campus of Southern Arkansas University.
