Neill J Wallis
Biographic Data
| ID | 110154 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neill J Wallis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neill J |
| FAMILY NAME | Wallis |
| SIGNATURE | WALLIS N J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida Museum of Natural History |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4740-286X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 181 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Secret Recipes
This article draws from multiple lines of evidence to highlight the role of technical knowledge and secrecy among migrant Mississippian (ca. AD 1000–1600) potting communities in Tampa Bay, Florida. We specifically present the results of compositional pottery analysis and radiocarbon modeling to argue for the emergence of a migrant-founded community of practice that safeguarded access to decorated pottery production. The chemical and petrographic …
Woodland platform mounds made of feasts
Platform mounds in the Woodland Southeast were often associated with feasting, including prior to and during coordinated ritual construction events and in ceremonies on their elevated summits. We observe that while many inland platforms were made for feasts, some coastal platforms were made of feasts. We argue this detail is an underexplored basis for understanding Woodland platforms’ significance as monuments. To illustrate how platform mounds m…
Accessibility and Exchange in Boriquén
Creating Standardized Guides for Pottery Temper Characterization
Many archaeological arguments are based on artifact identification, but to be replicable the categories must be well defined, with researchers able to consistently identify the relevant attributes. If data are to be compared across projects or researchers, the same training and reference material should be available. Standardized visual guides for specific artifact types and contexts are valuable tools for improving identification by individuals …
Local and long-distance ceramic exchange in early Puerto Rico
Investigating domestic economy and mobility at a Woodland period ceremonial center in Northwest Florida, USA, using Neutron Activation Analysis
The effect of survivorship bias on archaeological oyster valve size metrics
Breaking the mold
Using Neutron Activation Analysis to evaluate social connections during a period of transformative social change in the American Southeast
Island Colonization and Human-Environment Interactions on the Edges of the Tropics
Variability across frontiers and boundaries challenges the resilience of expanding populations. Here, we contribute to a broader understanding of global patterns of island colonization and expose the diversity of lifeways experienced across the Taíno culture area by exploring Lucayan settlement of the small subtropical islands of the northern Bahama archipelago. The results of this first comprehensive investigation document the rapid expansion an…
Sourcing Mississippian pottery among the complex maritime cultures of Florida’s peninsular Gulf coast
In eastern North America after ca. AD 1050, the spread of Mississippian cultures sparked widespread transformations to economy, material culture, political structure, and ideology. “Mississippianization” influenced the politically complex maritime polities of Florida’s peninsular Gulf coast, but the lack of maize agriculture indicates changes played out differently than among many inland polities. Mississippian-style pottery sherds deposited wide…
Sourcing ritual specialists in ancient Tampa Bay (AD 650-1550)
Understanding multi-sited early village communities of the American Southeast through categorical identities and relational connections
Early villages are often assumed to be economically and politically autonomous and equivalent to an archaeological socio-spatial unit that represents a maximum scale of cohesive residential communities. But the boundaries of some communities extended far beyond such sites of early population aggregation. In the coastal plain of the American Southeast, early village communities of the Middle and Late Woodland period (ca. 100 to 1000 CE) were locat…
Thoughts on Weeden Island pottery classification
The existing classification of Weeden Island pottery does not serve the needs of twenty-first-century archaeology and has long been in need of an overhaul. We propose that the type-variety classificatory system, used in the Southwestern US, the Maya region, and the Lower Mississippi valley, could be applied to Weeden Island ceramics. This robust hierarchical system classifies pottery into four nested units: varieties in types, types in ceramic gr…
Exploring the origins of coastal villages
Coastal subsistence and platform mound feasting on Florida’s northern Gulf Coast
Platform mounds during the Woodland period (ca. 200 BCE to 600 CE) of the American Southeast were integrative structures that included elevated stages for communal food consumption (feasting). While this pattern appears consistent across inland mound sites, food remains from contemporaneous coastal platform mounds have not been adequately studied and the activities associated with these monuments are poorly understood. To address this lacuna, we …
The History and Future of Migrationist Explanations in the Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands with a Synthetic Model of Woodland Period Migrations on the Gulf Coast
Early platform mound communalism and co-option in the American Southeast
Production origins and matrix constituents of spiculate pottery in Florida, USA
Fine-grained “chalky” pottery containing microscopic sponge spicules is commonly recovered from archaeological sites throughout peninsular Florida, but many questions remain about its composition and origins. It is identified by different names, but most are associated with the St. Johns Type series. While it has been commonly assumed to originate in the St. Johns River drainage for which it is named, the prevalence of pottery with these characte…
Exploring the season of mound building through oxygen isotope geochemistry at the Garden Patch site, Gulf Coast Florida, USA
The American Southeast saw the development of large ceremonial village centers, the coalescence of households, and monumental architecture integrated into village layout during the Middle Woodland period (ca. AD 1–600). These shifts toward more sedentary lifeways occurred independently of, and prior to, the domestication of plants across the Southeast. This paper examines the seasonality of monumental construction at the Garden Patch site located…
A New History of Community Formation and Change at Kolomoki (9er1)
We present a revised chronology for the Kolomoki site (9ER1) in Georgia, occupied primarily during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. 200 BC to AD 1050). The considerable extent of the site has been noted for more than a century but came into sharper focus with the archaeological investigations by Sears (1956) and Pluckhahn (2003). The site includes at least nine mounds, a large central plaza, and a discontinuous habitation area nearly a k…
Social Networks and Networked Scholars
We describe the development of an open-access database for Swift Creek Complicated Stamped ceramics, a type of pottery common to Georgia, eastern Alabama, and northern Florida in the Middle and Late Woodland periods between ca. cal A.D. 100 and 800. The characteristic stamped designs on Swift Creek pottery, created by impressing a carved paddle into a clay vessel before firing, provide unique signatures that enable archaeologists to identify padd…
Comparative Clay Analysis and Curation for Archaeological Pottery Studies
We describe the curation and use of clay samples as part of the ceramic ecology program at the Florida Museum of Natural History's Ceramic Technology Laboratory (FLMNH-CTL). We outline the history of the comparative clay sample collection at the FLMNH-CTL and detail the standard operating procedure by which samples are processed, analyzed, and curated. We also provide examples of how the clay samples have been used in research projects as well as…
Swift Creek at a human scale
The interpretive potential of Swift Creek pottery, widely produced throughout Georgia, eastern Alabama, and northern Florida during the Middle and Late Woodland periods between ca. cal AD 100 and 800, has been apparent for many years. Much research has been focused on identifying paddle designs from the impressions left on sherds. Less attention has been devoted to the carving of the wooden paddles and its social context. Drawing inferences from …
Keeping Pace With Rising Sea
Low-gradient coastlines are susceptible to inundation by rising water, but they also promote marsh aggradation that has the potential to keep pace with sea-level rise. Synergies among hydrodynamics, coastal geomorphology, and marsh ecology preclude a simple linear relationship between higher water and shoreline transgression. As an archive of human use of low-gradient coastlines, archaeological data introduce additional mitigating factors, such a…
The Materiality of Signs
Archaeological examinations of symbolic meaning often have been hampered by the Saussurean concept of signs as coded messages of preexisting meanings. The arbitrary and imprecise manner by which meaning is represented in material culture according to Saussure tends to stymie archaeological investigations of symbolism. As an alternative, archaeologists recently have drawn on Peirce's semiotic to investigate how materiality is bound to the creation…
Woodland period ceramic provenance and the exchange of Swift Creek Complicated Stamped vessels in the southeastern United States
The History and Future of Migrationist Explanations in the Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands with a Synthetic Model of Woodland Period Migrations on the Gulf Coast
Keeping Pace With Rising Sea
Low-gradient coastlines are susceptible to inundation by rising water, but they also promote marsh aggradation that has the potential to keep pace with sea-level rise. Synergies among hydrodynamics, coastal geomorphology, and marsh ecology preclude a simple linear relationship between higher water and shoreline transgression. As an archive of human use of low-gradient coastlines, archaeological data introduce additional mitigating factors, such a…
Recovering the Forgotten Woodland Mound Excavations at Garden Patch (8DI4)
Forty-five years ago Timothy Thompson excavated at two of the six mounds at the Garden Patch site but results were never reported. We assembled data from Thompson's work and enhanced them with new test pits at Mound IV and re-excavation of a Mound V trench. Mound IV is a natural sand ridge where a village was established early, by the second century A.D. Mound V began as a naturally elevated platform for at least one burial and associated structu…
Big feasts and small scale foragers
Networks of history and memory
Many Archaic and Woodland period monuments in south-eastern North America were civic and ceremonial gathering centers. The built landscapes that emphasized these features are likely to have incorporated histories and memories in locally distinctive ways across the region. However, their attribution by archaeologists to broad temporal and social categories has tended to disguise this individuality. In this article I argue that the major structural…
Using hearths for temper
Exploring the season of mound building through oxygen isotope geochemistry at the Garden Patch site, Gulf Coast Florida, USA
The American Southeast saw the development of large ceremonial village centers, the coalescence of households, and monumental architecture integrated into village layout during the Middle Woodland period (ca. AD 1–600). These shifts toward more sedentary lifeways occurred independently of, and prior to, the domestication of plants across the Southeast. This paper examines the seasonality of monumental construction at the Garden Patch site located…
Provenance of Weeden Island “sacred” and “prestige” vessels
Weeden Island mortuary ceremonialism united distinct cultures across the Late Woodland social landscape. The Weeden Island pottery series is central to recognizing regional ceremonial parity, with prestige (elite) and sacred (cult) wares showing strong similarities among distant sites. Finely made vessels and their ostensibly shamanistic themes led archaeologists to consider the liturgical and political roles of ritual specialists, whose tasks mi…
Challenges in the Analysis of Heterogeneous Pottery by La – Icp – MS
Tempers added to pottery have the potential to obscure geographical variation in the chemistry of exploited clay resources when analysed using bulk methods. A pilot study was conducted to assess the possibility of using LA – ICP – MS to analyse clay matrix in pottery with extremely subtle partitions between INAA chemical groups. LA – ICP – MS was used to analyse the clay matrix of 32 pottery samples from seven Middle and Late Woodland period ( c.…
Comparative Clay Analysis and Curation for Archaeological Pottery Studies
We describe the curation and use of clay samples as part of the ceramic ecology program at the Florida Museum of Natural History's Ceramic Technology Laboratory (FLMNH-CTL). We outline the history of the comparative clay sample collection at the FLMNH-CTL and detail the standard operating procedure by which samples are processed, analyzed, and curated. We also provide examples of how the clay samples have been used in research projects as well as…
Sourcing ritual specialists in ancient Tampa Bay (AD 650-1550)
Understanding multi-sited early village communities of the American Southeast through categorical identities and relational connections
Early villages are often assumed to be economically and politically autonomous and equivalent to an archaeological socio-spatial unit that represents a maximum scale of cohesive residential communities. But the boundaries of some communities extended far beyond such sites of early population aggregation. In the coastal plain of the American Southeast, early village communities of the Middle and Late Woodland period (ca. 100 to 1000 CE) were locat…
Sourcing Interaction Networks of the American Southeast
In the lower American Southeast, regional scale social interactions burgeoned alongside the growth of nucleated villages, widespread mound-building projects, and conspicuous mortuary ceremonialism during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. A.D. 100-800). A premier material for understanding the scale and significance of social interactions across the southern landscape comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, a ubiquitous class o…
Radiocarbon dating the pace of monument construction and village aggregation at Garden Patch
Ritualized Deposition and Feasting Pits
Interactions with the bodies of hunted animals often follow prescriptions pertaining to social relationships among human and non-human persons. Despite this, deposits of archaeological food remains are seldom considered in terms of deliberate placement, instead serving primarily as reflections of preparation and consumption activities. The residues of feasts, in particular, are often highlighted as indexes of special consumption events, although …
Foundations of the Cades Pond Culture in North-Central Florida
The River Styx site was an important Middle Woodland ceremonial center in north-central Florida that included a horseshoe-shaped earthen embankment, a burial mound containing only cremations, and diverse nonlocal artifacts. The site was recorded more than forty years ago but a report was never written. This article presents a summary of excavation results at River Styx and analysis of the pottery assemblage based on archived notes and collections…
Production origins and matrix constituents of spiculate pottery in Florida, USA
Fine-grained “chalky” pottery containing microscopic sponge spicules is commonly recovered from archaeological sites throughout peninsular Florida, but many questions remain about its composition and origins. It is identified by different names, but most are associated with the St. Johns Type series. While it has been commonly assumed to originate in the St. Johns River drainage for which it is named, the prevalence of pottery with these characte…
Inter-ethnic social interactions in 16th century La Florida
Sourcing Mississippian pottery among the complex maritime cultures of Florida’s peninsular Gulf coast
In eastern North America after ca. AD 1050, the spread of Mississippian cultures sparked widespread transformations to economy, material culture, political structure, and ideology. “Mississippianization” influenced the politically complex maritime polities of Florida’s peninsular Gulf coast, but the lack of maize agriculture indicates changes played out differently than among many inland polities. Mississippian-style pottery sherds deposited wide…
Coastal subsistence and platform mound feasting on Florida’s northern Gulf Coast
Platform mounds during the Woodland period (ca. 200 BCE to 600 CE) of the American Southeast were integrative structures that included elevated stages for communal food consumption (feasting). While this pattern appears consistent across inland mound sites, food remains from contemporaneous coastal platform mounds have not been adequately studied and the activities associated with these monuments are poorly understood. To address this lacuna, we …
A New History of Community Formation and Change at Kolomoki (9er1)
We present a revised chronology for the Kolomoki site (9ER1) in Georgia, occupied primarily during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. 200 BC to AD 1050). The considerable extent of the site has been noted for more than a century but came into sharper focus with the archaeological investigations by Sears (1956) and Pluckhahn (2003). The site includes at least nine mounds, a large central plaza, and a discontinuous habitation area nearly a k…
Forager Interactions on the Edge of the Early Mississippian World
This study integrates disparate geographical areas of the American Southeast to show how studies of Early Mississippian (A.D. 900-1250) interactions can benefit from a multiscalar approach. Rather than focus on contact and exchanges between farming communities, as is the case with most Mississippian interaction studies, we turn our attention to social relations between village-dwelling St. Johns II fisher-hunter-gatherers of northeastern Florida …
Life among the tides
494 pages : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 26 cm. Conference sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the St. Catherines Island Foundation
Networks of history and memory
Many Archaic and Woodland period monuments in south-eastern North America were civic and ceremonial gathering centers. The built landscapes that emphasized these features are likely to have incorporated histories and memories in locally distinctive ways across the region. However, their attribution by archaeologists to broad temporal and social categories has tended to disguise this individuality. In this article I argue that the major structural…
Woodland period ceramic provenance and the exchange of Swift Creek Complicated Stamped vessels in the southeastern United States
Using hearths for temper
Inter-ethnic social interactions in 16th century La Florida
Challenges in the Analysis of Heterogeneous Pottery by La – Icp – MS
Tempers added to pottery have the potential to obscure geographical variation in the chemistry of exploited clay resources when analysed using bulk methods. A pilot study was conducted to assess the possibility of using LA – ICP – MS to analyse clay matrix in pottery with extremely subtle partitions between INAA chemical groups. LA – ICP – MS was used to analyse the clay matrix of 32 pottery samples from seven Middle and Late Woodland period ( c.…
Life among the tides
494 pages : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 26 cm. Conference sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the St. Catherines Island Foundation
The Materiality of Signs
Archaeological examinations of symbolic meaning often have been hampered by the Saussurean concept of signs as coded messages of preexisting meanings. The arbitrary and imprecise manner by which meaning is represented in material culture according to Saussure tends to stymie archaeological investigations of symbolism. As an alternative, archaeologists recently have drawn on Peirce's semiotic to investigate how materiality is bound to the creation…
New Histories of Pre-Columbian Florida
Foundations of the Cades Pond Culture in North-Central Florida
The River Styx site was an important Middle Woodland ceremonial center in north-central Florida that included a horseshoe-shaped earthen embankment, a burial mound containing only cremations, and diverse nonlocal artifacts. The site was recorded more than forty years ago but a report was never written. This article presents a summary of excavation results at River Styx and analysis of the pottery assemblage based on archived notes and collections…
The ceramic ecology of florida
The success of pottery provenance studies is fundamentally dependent upon spatially patterned variation in the composition of exploited clay resources. Uniformity in clay composition within a region and recognizable differences between regions of interest are essential requirements for determining provenance, but these parameters are difficult to satisfy in study areas such as the coastal plain of the southeastern USA in which chemical and minera…
Radiocarbon dating the pace of monument construction and village aggregation at Garden Patch
Ritualized Deposition and Feasting Pits
Interactions with the bodies of hunted animals often follow prescriptions pertaining to social relationships among human and non-human persons. Despite this, deposits of archaeological food remains are seldom considered in terms of deliberate placement, instead serving primarily as reflections of preparation and consumption activities. The residues of feasts, in particular, are often highlighted as indexes of special consumption events, although …
Forager Interactions on the Edge of the Early Mississippian World
This study integrates disparate geographical areas of the American Southeast to show how studies of Early Mississippian (A.D. 900-1250) interactions can benefit from a multiscalar approach. Rather than focus on contact and exchanges between farming communities, as is the case with most Mississippian interaction studies, we turn our attention to social relations between village-dwelling St. Johns II fisher-hunter-gatherers of northeastern Florida …
Big feasts and small scale foragers
Keeping Pace With Rising Sea
Low-gradient coastlines are susceptible to inundation by rising water, but they also promote marsh aggradation that has the potential to keep pace with sea-level rise. Synergies among hydrodynamics, coastal geomorphology, and marsh ecology preclude a simple linear relationship between higher water and shoreline transgression. As an archive of human use of low-gradient coastlines, archaeological data introduce additional mitigating factors, such a…
Recovering the Forgotten Woodland Mound Excavations at Garden Patch (8DI4)
Forty-five years ago Timothy Thompson excavated at two of the six mounds at the Garden Patch site but results were never reported. We assembled data from Thompson's work and enhanced them with new test pits at Mound IV and re-excavation of a Mound V trench. Mound IV is a natural sand ridge where a village was established early, by the second century A.D. Mound V began as a naturally elevated platform for at least one burial and associated structu…
Provenance of Weeden Island “sacred” and “prestige” vessels
Weeden Island mortuary ceremonialism united distinct cultures across the Late Woodland social landscape. The Weeden Island pottery series is central to recognizing regional ceremonial parity, with prestige (elite) and sacred (cult) wares showing strong similarities among distant sites. Finely made vessels and their ostensibly shamanistic themes led archaeologists to consider the liturgical and political roles of ritual specialists, whose tasks mi…
Sourcing Interaction Networks of the American Southeast
In the lower American Southeast, regional scale social interactions burgeoned alongside the growth of nucleated villages, widespread mound-building projects, and conspicuous mortuary ceremonialism during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. A.D. 100-800). A premier material for understanding the scale and significance of social interactions across the southern landscape comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, a ubiquitous class o…
Social Networks and Networked Scholars
We describe the development of an open-access database for Swift Creek Complicated Stamped ceramics, a type of pottery common to Georgia, eastern Alabama, and northern Florida in the Middle and Late Woodland periods between ca. cal A.D. 100 and 800. The characteristic stamped designs on Swift Creek pottery, created by impressing a carved paddle into a clay vessel before firing, provide unique signatures that enable archaeologists to identify padd…
Comparative Clay Analysis and Curation for Archaeological Pottery Studies
We describe the curation and use of clay samples as part of the ceramic ecology program at the Florida Museum of Natural History's Ceramic Technology Laboratory (FLMNH-CTL). We outline the history of the comparative clay sample collection at the FLMNH-CTL and detail the standard operating procedure by which samples are processed, analyzed, and curated. We also provide examples of how the clay samples have been used in research projects as well as…
Swift Creek at a human scale
The interpretive potential of Swift Creek pottery, widely produced throughout Georgia, eastern Alabama, and northern Florida during the Middle and Late Woodland periods between ca. cal AD 100 and 800, has been apparent for many years. Much research has been focused on identifying paddle designs from the impressions left on sherds. Less attention has been devoted to the carving of the wooden paddles and its social context. Drawing inferences from …
A New History of Community Formation and Change at Kolomoki (9er1)
We present a revised chronology for the Kolomoki site (9ER1) in Georgia, occupied primarily during the Middle and Late Woodland periods (ca. 200 BC to AD 1050). The considerable extent of the site has been noted for more than a century but came into sharper focus with the archaeological investigations by Sears (1956) and Pluckhahn (2003). The site includes at least nine mounds, a large central plaza, and a discontinuous habitation area nearly a k…
Early platform mound communalism and co-option in the American Southeast
Production origins and matrix constituents of spiculate pottery in Florida, USA
Fine-grained “chalky” pottery containing microscopic sponge spicules is commonly recovered from archaeological sites throughout peninsular Florida, but many questions remain about its composition and origins. It is identified by different names, but most are associated with the St. Johns Type series. While it has been commonly assumed to originate in the St. Johns River drainage for which it is named, the prevalence of pottery with these characte…
Exploring the season of mound building through oxygen isotope geochemistry at the Garden Patch site, Gulf Coast Florida, USA
The American Southeast saw the development of large ceremonial village centers, the coalescence of households, and monumental architecture integrated into village layout during the Middle Woodland period (ca. AD 1–600). These shifts toward more sedentary lifeways occurred independently of, and prior to, the domestication of plants across the Southeast. This paper examines the seasonality of monumental construction at the Garden Patch site located…
Archaeology (37 works) · Geography (36 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (34 works) · Geology (22 works) · Pottery (22 works) · Ecology (18 works) · History (18 works) · Woodland (18 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (14 works) · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies (12 works)