Jasmine Birch
Biographic Data
| ID | 184469 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jasmine Birch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jasmine |
| FAMILY NAME | Birch |
| SIGNATURE | BIRCH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Georgia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9208-9783 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 296 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Negotiating power and community in Early Baekje
During the Three Kingdoms period of Korea, the Han River Basin in Korea—capital of the early Baekje state—experienced major transformations in settlement planning, shaped by the interactions between migratory ruling groups and local commoners amid the emergence of a new sociopolitical order. Previous studies have suggested that the region began as a dispersed cluster of agriculture-based villages which were rapidly consolidated into a capital dom…
Meeting the Urgent Need and Growing Demand for Archaeological Synthesis
Douglas Price-have made the journal our discipline's premier outlet for archaeological synthesis (Feinman and Nicholas 2026).Under their stewardship, the journal became a countervailing force against an ever-expanding range of regional and methodological specializations that create subgroups within our field.While specialization is necessary to improve our knowledge of the human past, it can also isolate practitioners into small communities and d…
Breaking Down the “Barbarian” Trope
Early modern history abounds with descriptions of “barbarians,” a term originating in ancient Greece and later applied to people deemed uncivilized. Historical knowledge about these groups comes largely from colonial or imperialist outsiders who mischaracterized them as irrational and violent. This characterization masks the fact that these decentralized groups achieved large-scale strategic coordination in the absence of centralized power. This …
Collaborative Archaeology, Public Parks, and the Importance of Chronology at Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park
Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, located in Macon, Georgia, is one of the most iconic cultural sites in the Southeast and is a Traditional Cultural Place (TCP) of the Muscogee Nation and other federally recognized Tribal Nations. Early work (1933–1941) revealed a network of earthen monuments and other features. Prior to our work, there were only two radiocarbon dates from the primary Native American occupation of Ocmulgee. Both were run …
Radiocarbon Database Offers New Perspectives on Ancient Oaxaca
We present a dataset of 1,119 radiocarbon dates and their contexts for Oaxaca, Mexico, a best effort to include all published dates, plus hundreds of unpublished samples. We illustrate its potential and limitations with five examples: (1) dated stratigraphy in stream cutbanks show how aggradation, downcutting, and stability responded to global climate and human activities; (2) 14C samples from Late/Terminal Formative contexts allow interregional …
Smoking Pipes as Indicators of Sociopolitical Changes in Huron-Wendat Social Networks
Ceramic smoking pipes are among the most distinctive artifacts recovered from Iroquoian sites dating from AD 1350 to 1650 in what is today New York, Ontario, and Quebec. In this study, we conduct network analyses of pipe forms to examine assemblages of relations among the ancestral and colonial-era Huron-Wendat during a period of coalescence, conflict, and confederacy formation. We bring these networks based on pipe form together with previous ne…
Problematizing 'alliance' in anthropological archaeology
Alliances are critical components of human sociality, often essential to social existence itself. It is no surprise therefore that alliance crops up everywhere in anthropological and archaeological discourse. Yet scholarship on alliance consists largely of case studies rather than analytical discussion of the phenomenon itself. While alliances can be difficult to identify with confidence in the archaeological record, they are too important in hum…
Placing radiocarbon dating at the center of collective archaeological practice
Radiocarbon analysis is a common tool used to obtain the absolute ages of materials from archaeological contexts. This method underlies the basis of most archaeological chronologies across the globe, allowing us to better understand the temporality of past events. However, in the American Southeast, research by a small number of academic archaeologists who are interested in specific kinds of sites, time periods, and research questions drive radio…
Evaluating the Timing of Early Village Development in New York
Five sites in present-day New York have played important roles in archaeological narratives surrounding the development of settled village life in northeastern North America. Excavated in the mid-twentieth century, the Roundtop, Maxon-Derby, Sackett or Canandaigua, Bates, and Kelso sites include evidence related to the transition from semisedentary settlement-subsistence patterns during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries AD to those associa…
The Global Dynamics of Inequality (Gini) project
The GINI project investigates the dynamics of inequality among populations over the long term by synthesising global archaeological housing data. This project brings archaeologists together from around the world to assess hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of inequality that are of relevance to contemporary societies globally
The materiality and temporality of St. Lawrence Iroquoian incorporation in late precolonial northern Iroquoia
Material Networks and Culture Change
Diachronic social network analysis (SNA) of archaeological data is increasingly being used to frame and explain processes of cultural change in multiple world regions. Whether implicitly or explicitly, such studies foreground the materiality of culture change in an attempt to infer the less-tangible properties of social and cultural dynamics. This chapter considers theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying cultural change through SNA…
Updating the Classic New York Lamoka Lake and Scaccia Sites
The Lamoka Lake and Scaccia sites in present-day New York have played important roles in the development of archaeology in New York, and in the case of Lamoka Lake, in eastern North America. Lamoka Lake is the type site for the “Archaic” period in eastern North American culture history and the “Late Archaic” “Lamoka phase” in New York culture history. The Scaccia site is the largest “Early Woodland” “Meadowood phase” site in New York and has the …
Content Analysis of Preferred Recovery Pathways Among Urban American Indians and Alaska Natives Experiencing Alcohol Use Disorders
Approximately three fourths of the American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) population lives in urban areas, and urban AI/ANs are disproportionately affected by alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. Although no studies have documented alcohol use disorder (AUD) treatment outcomes specific to urban AI/ANs, studies in other Native communities highlight concerns about the cultural acceptability of directive, abstinence-based approaches, such as …
The role of radiocarbon dating in advancing Indigenous-led archaeological research agendas
Archaeology is an inherently colonial discipline. The field has its roots in Western knowledge systems, social and racial hierarchies, colonisation, and the dispossession of Indigenous pasts from contemporary descendant and traditionally affiliated communities (Gosden, 2012 ; McNiven and Russell, 2005 ; Trigger, 1984 ). Calls for and efforts towards decolonising the production of archaeological knowledge have been reverberating in the discipline …
Keystone Institutions of Democratic Governance Across Indigenous North America
Defining and examining democracy in non-Western contexts is a conceptual challenge. This is largely because scholars of contemporary political systems outside of anthropology can envision no alternative pathways other than Western expressions of democracy. Such thinking inhibits our understanding of past, and indeed future, democratic systems. In this paper, we argue that there is no such thing as a “democracy, ” but rather there are institutions…
Premodern Confederacies
A confederacy is generally understood to be a formal, institutionalized alliance of peoples who act in mutual support to achieve common ends. While the emergence and maintenance of early and pre-modern states have received tremendous scholarly attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said for confederations. This paper examines common features of premodern confederacies as an initial effort towards developing a body of theory aimed at…
Changing Times
Recent radiocarbon redating of key sites and events in Huron-Wendat archaeology has shaken dominant accounts of early colonial history. This paper emphasizes the importance of storytelling in archaeology. I consider how refined date estimates for key Huron-Wendat archaeological sites have impacted understandings of conflict, confederacy-formation, and the reception (or not) of early European materials and persons. The paper highlights how this wo…
A Centennial Ambiguity
Considered in isolation, the radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates on short-lived plant remains from the Jean-Baptiste Lainé (formerly Mantle) site, Ontario, yield an ambiguous result: more or less similar probability around AD 1500 or alternatively around AD 1600. This village site, likely of no more than ca. 20–30 years total duration, illustrates the challenges of high-resolution dating across periods with a reversal/plateau in the 14 C calibration curve.…
Multiscalar Community Histories in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley
Strangers No More
In this paper, we consider how institutions of kinship facilitated the integration of peoples originating in the St. Lawrence Valley into ancestral Huron-Wendat communities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD. We present some general principles regarding the role of kinship in structuring social relations, processes of population movement, and the integration of newcomers. Data on the distributions and frequencies of characteristic St. La…
Refined Radiocarbon Chronologies for Northern Iroquoian Site Sequences
This article presents results to date of the Dating Iroquoia project. Our objective is to develop high-precision radiocarbon chronologies for northeastern North American archaeology. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling of 184 AMS radiocarbon dates derived from 42 Northern Iroquoian village sites in five regional sequences in order to construct new date estimates. The resulting revised chronology demands a rethinking of key assumptions…
Conflict, Population Movement, and Microscale Social Networks in Northern Iroquoian Archaeology
We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations i…
Iroquoian Archaeology
Statement and Commitments from SAA Editors to Change the Underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and Other Scholars from Diverse Backgrounds in Our Publications
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Coalescent Communities
This paper explores processes of settlement aggregation among ancestral Huron-Wendat populations in south-central Ontario, Canada. During the fifteenth century A.D., numerous small communities came together, forming large, fortified village aggregates. In order to understand these processes a multiscalar analytical approach was combined with a conceptual framework emphasizing cross-cultural perspectives on coalescent societies, the archaeology of…
An institutional approach for archaeology
Resolving the migrant paradox
Current Research on the Historical Development of Northern Iroquoian Societies
Navigating ancestral landscapes in the Northern Iroquoian world
Refined Radiocarbon Chronologies for Northern Iroquoian Site Sequences
This article presents results to date of the Dating Iroquoia project. Our objective is to develop high-precision radiocarbon chronologies for northeastern North American archaeology. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling of 184 AMS radiocarbon dates derived from 42 Northern Iroquoian village sites in five regional sequences in order to construct new date estimates. The resulting revised chronology demands a rethinking of key assumptions…
Social Networks and Northern Iroquoian Confederacy Dynamics
The Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacies of northeastern North America are often presented as functionally equivalent political formations despite their having distinct cultural traits and unique geopolitical and developmental histories. In this article we employ social network analysis of collar decoration on ceramic vessels both to examine organizational differences in the social network that composed each group and to eval…
Dimensions of inequality. Comparing the North Atlantic and the US Southwest
A Centennial Ambiguity
Considered in isolation, the radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates on short-lived plant remains from the Jean-Baptiste Lainé (formerly Mantle) site, Ontario, yield an ambiguous result: more or less similar probability around AD 1500 or alternatively around AD 1600. This village site, likely of no more than ca. 20–30 years total duration, illustrates the challenges of high-resolution dating across periods with a reversal/plateau in the 14 C calibration curve.…
Contact-Era Chronology Building in Iroquoia
Radiocarbon dating is rarely used in historical or contact-era North American archaeology because of idiosyncrasies of the calibration curve that result in ambiguous calendar dates for this period. We explore the potential and requirements for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis to create a time frame for early contact-era sites in northeast North America independent of the assumptions and approximations involved in temporal constructs based…
Resolving Time Among Non-Stratified Short-Duration Contexts on a Radiocarbon Plateau
Reversals and plateaus in the radiocarbon ( 14 C) calibration curve lead to similar 14 C ages applying to a wide range of calendar dates, creating imprecision, ambiguity, and challenges for archaeological dating. Even with Bayesian chronological modeling, such periods remain a problem when no known order—e.g., a stratigraphic sequence—exists, and especially if site durations are relatively short. Using the reversal/plateau AD 1480–1630 and the ar…
Conflict, Population Movement, and Microscale Social Networks in Northern Iroquoian Archaeology
We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations i…
A Comparative Analysis of the Late Woodland–early Mississippian Settlement Landscape in Northern Georgia
To understand the development of complex socio-political phenomena, we need to study not just the origins of central places, but also their emergence. This can be accomplished by taking an historical perspective where we position ourselves before the occurrence we wish to study. Data from the Georgia Archaeological Site File are presented to explore the Late Woodland and Early Mississippian (ca. A.D. 600–1,100) settlement landscape which contextu…
Keystone Institutions of Democratic Governance Across Indigenous North America
Defining and examining democracy in non-Western contexts is a conceptual challenge. This is largely because scholars of contemporary political systems outside of anthropology can envision no alternative pathways other than Western expressions of democracy. Such thinking inhibits our understanding of past, and indeed future, democratic systems. In this paper, we argue that there is no such thing as a “democracy, ” but rather there are institutions…
Premodern Confederacies
A confederacy is generally understood to be a formal, institutionalized alliance of peoples who act in mutual support to achieve common ends. While the emergence and maintenance of early and pre-modern states have received tremendous scholarly attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said for confederations. This paper examines common features of premodern confederacies as an initial effort towards developing a body of theory aimed at…
Steatite characterization using X-ray fluorescence and insights into Northern Iroquoian interregional interaction
Problematizing 'alliance' in anthropological archaeology
Alliances are critical components of human sociality, often essential to social existence itself. It is no surprise therefore that alliance crops up everywhere in anthropological and archaeological discourse. Yet scholarship on alliance consists largely of case studies rather than analytical discussion of the phenomenon itself. While alliances can be difficult to identify with confidence in the archaeological record, they are too important in hum…
Interpreting Iroquoian site structure through geophysical prospection and soil chemistry
Radiocarbon Database Offers New Perspectives on Ancient Oaxaca
We present a dataset of 1,119 radiocarbon dates and their contexts for Oaxaca, Mexico, a best effort to include all published dates, plus hundreds of unpublished samples. We illustrate its potential and limitations with five examples: (1) dated stratigraphy in stream cutbanks show how aggradation, downcutting, and stability responded to global climate and human activities; (2) 14C samples from Late/Terminal Formative contexts allow interregional …
Changing Times
Recent radiocarbon redating of key sites and events in Huron-Wendat archaeology has shaken dominant accounts of early colonial history. This paper emphasizes the importance of storytelling in archaeology. I consider how refined date estimates for key Huron-Wendat archaeological sites have impacted understandings of conflict, confederacy-formation, and the reception (or not) of early European materials and persons. The paper highlights how this wo…
Breaking Down the “Barbarian” Trope
Early modern history abounds with descriptions of “barbarians,” a term originating in ancient Greece and later applied to people deemed uncivilized. Historical knowledge about these groups comes largely from colonial or imperialist outsiders who mischaracterized them as irrational and violent. This characterization masks the fact that these decentralized groups achieved large-scale strategic coordination in the absence of centralized power. This …
Placing radiocarbon dating at the center of collective archaeological practice
Radiocarbon analysis is a common tool used to obtain the absolute ages of materials from archaeological contexts. This method underlies the basis of most archaeological chronologies across the globe, allowing us to better understand the temporality of past events. However, in the American Southeast, research by a small number of academic archaeologists who are interested in specific kinds of sites, time periods, and research questions drive radio…
The Global Dynamics of Inequality (Gini) project
The GINI project investigates the dynamics of inequality among populations over the long term by synthesising global archaeological housing data. This project brings archaeologists together from around the world to assess hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of inequality that are of relevance to contemporary societies globally
Content Analysis of Preferred Recovery Pathways Among Urban American Indians and Alaska Natives Experiencing Alcohol Use Disorders
Approximately three fourths of the American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) population lives in urban areas, and urban AI/ANs are disproportionately affected by alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. Although no studies have documented alcohol use disorder (AUD) treatment outcomes specific to urban AI/ANs, studies in other Native communities highlight concerns about the cultural acceptability of directive, abstinence-based approaches, such as …
Strangers No More
In this paper, we consider how institutions of kinship facilitated the integration of peoples originating in the St. Lawrence Valley into ancestral Huron-Wendat communities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD. We present some general principles regarding the role of kinship in structuring social relations, processes of population movement, and the integration of newcomers. Data on the distributions and frequencies of characteristic St. La…
The Contribution of the City University Test (1st and 2nd Editions) in a Clinical Test Laboratory
Comments on the Use of the Standard Pseudoisochromatic Plates and the New Color Test of Lanthony
Mantle Site
This is the first detailed analysis of a completely excavated northern Iroquoian community, a sixteenth-century ancestral Wendat village on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The site resulted from the coalescence of multiple small villages into one well-planned and well-integrated community. Jennifer Birch and Ronald F. Williamson frame the development of this community in the context of a historical sequence of site relocations. The social proces…
Coalescent Communities
This paper explores processes of settlement aggregation among ancestral Huron-Wendat populations in south-central Ontario, Canada. During the fifteenth century A.D., numerous small communities came together, forming large, fortified village aggregates. In order to understand these processes a multiscalar analytical approach was combined with a conceptual framework emphasizing cross-cultural perspectives on coalescent societies, the archaeology of…
Current Research on the Historical Development of Northern Iroquoian Societies
Navigating ancestral landscapes in the Northern Iroquoian world
Relations de pouvoir et de production au sein des communautés ancestrales Wendat
Durant la fin du XVe et le début du XVIe siècles, les sociétés iroquoiennes du nord-est de l’Amérique du Nord ont été confrontées à une généralisation des conflits et au regroupement des petites communautés villageoises en agglomérations densément peuplées. Régionalement, ces processus résultaient du réalignement du paysage géopolitique et de l’émergence de nations distinctes. Afin d’apprécier la manière dont le regroupement se déploya au niveau …
Interpreting Iroquoian site structure through geophysical prospection and soil chemistry
A Comparative Analysis of the Late Woodland–early Mississippian Settlement Landscape in Northern Georgia
To understand the development of complex socio-political phenomena, we need to study not just the origins of central places, but also their emergence. This can be accomplished by taking an historical perspective where we position ourselves before the occurrence we wish to study. Data from the Georgia Archaeological Site File are presented to explore the Late Woodland and Early Mississippian (ca. A.D. 600–1,100) settlement landscape which contextu…
Relations of power and production in ancestral wendat communities
During the late 15th and early 16th centuries AD, the Iroquoian societies of northeastern North America experienced widespread conflict and the coalescence of small village-communities into densely populated settlements. Regionally, these processes resulted in realignment of the geopolitical landscape and the emergence of distinct nations. To assess how coalescence unfolded at the household level, insights from one well-studied ancestral Wendat c…
Iroquoian Archaeology
The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America
Steatite characterization using X-ray fluorescence and insights into Northern Iroquoian interregional interaction
Resolving the migrant paradox
Social Networks and Northern Iroquoian Confederacy Dynamics
The Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacies of northeastern North America are often presented as functionally equivalent political formations despite their having distinct cultural traits and unique geopolitical and developmental histories. In this article we employ social network analysis of collar decoration on ceramic vessels both to examine organizational differences in the social network that composed each group and to eval…
An analysis of network brokerage and geographic location in fifteenth-century AD Northern Iroquoia
Iroquoian villagers living in present-day Jefferson County, New York, at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River and the east shore of Lake Ontario, played important roles in regional interactions during the fifteenth century AD, as brokers linking populations on the north shore of Lake Ontario with populations in eastern New York. This study employs a social network analysis and least cost path analysis to assess the degree to which geographica…
Archaeological reconnaissance through multi-method geophysical and geochemical survey at two Iroquoian village sites, southern Ontario, Canada
Salute to Reviewers 2017–2018/ Hommage aux évaluateurs de 2017–2018
Contact-Era Chronology Building in Iroquoia
Radiocarbon dating is rarely used in historical or contact-era North American archaeology because of idiosyncrasies of the calibration curve that result in ambiguous calendar dates for this period. We explore the potential and requirements for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis to create a time frame for early contact-era sites in northeast North America independent of the assumptions and approximations involved in temporal constructs based…
Dimensions of inequality. Comparing the North Atlantic and the US Southwest
Iroquoian Archaeology
Statement and Commitments from SAA Editors to Change the Underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and Other Scholars from Diverse Backgrounds in Our Publications
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Statement and Commitments from SAA Editors to Change the Underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and Other Scholars from Diverse Backgrounds in Our Publications
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Resolving Time Among Non-Stratified Short-Duration Contexts on a Radiocarbon Plateau
Reversals and plateaus in the radiocarbon ( 14 C) calibration curve lead to similar 14 C ages applying to a wide range of calendar dates, creating imprecision, ambiguity, and challenges for archaeological dating. Even with Bayesian chronological modeling, such periods remain a problem when no known order—e.g., a stratigraphic sequence—exists, and especially if site durations are relatively short. Using the reversal/plateau AD 1480–1630 and the ar…
An institutional approach for archaeology
Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (30 works) · Archaeology (29 works) · Geography (29 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (25 works) · History (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Indigenous Studies and Ecology (14 works) · Political science (12 works) · History (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works)