When: April 8, 2014, 7pm
Where: The Magnolia Room, second floor of the Reynolds Center on the SAU Campus, Magnolia, AR
Dr. Elizabeth Horton, Research Station Archeologist at the Toltec Mounds Research Station will be our speaker this month.
The final speaker in our spring series will be Dr. Elizabeth Horton—the AAS Research Station Archeologist at Toltec Mounds State Park. Dr. Horton will be the last speaker to tackle our 2013-2014 theme: iconography. Given her research interest in prehistoric plant usage in the southeastern United State, it will come as no surprise that she will be tackling iconography as seen in preserved textiles and basketry in her talk entitled “God Baskets & Ancestors’ Shrouds: Motifs and Iconography in the Sacred & Ceremonial Textiles and Basketry of Southeastern Societies.”
While sites such as the Ozark Plateau Bluffshelters in Arkansas and Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma have long been known for yielding remarkably well-preserved textiles and basketry, these materials have largely not been given much attention in Southeastern archaeology. Horton’s research focuses on the production, use, and stylistic aspects of these perishable materials. This talk defines the social and ceremonial roles of select types of textiles and basketry, and integrates them into a broader body of Southeastern iconographic research that includes ceramics, rock art, and other media.
Dr. Horton became the AAS-TMRS Archeologist in 2011, but she had been working in Arkansas for some time before that. She completed her Ph.D. in at Washington University in St. Louis in 2010 with an Arkansas‐related dissertation topic—The Ties that Bind; Prehistoric Fabric Production and Fiber Use in the Ozark Plateau.
Come hear about iconography, plants, fabric and the prehistoric women who made them on Tuesday, April 8th, 7:00pm in the Magnolia Room on the second floor of the Reynolds Center on the campus of Southern Arkansas University.
