1 Ethnoscience of Time and Space in the Late Archaic Southeast Kenneth E. Sassaman DRAFT Oct. 21, 2013 Unabridged version of paper presented in symposium “Measuring Materiality: Toward an Integration of Archaeometry and Social Theory” organized by Zackary I. Gilmore and Neill J. Wallis for the 70 th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Tampa, Florida November 6-10, 2013. Abstract. Relationships among settlements, monuments, cemeteries, and caches encode the logic of time- space mapping that enabled Late Archaic communities of the lower Southeast to mobilize past experience in futures planning. The ethnoscience of futures is exemplified in their responses to sea-level rise. After centuries of experiencing transgressive sea at a rate noticeable in a human lifetime, coastal communities relocated their past landward to make future settlements meaningful in a solstice-referenced grid of fractal qualities. This futurescape was transposed over increasingly larger scales of interaction, arguably growing with the trans-Gulf exchange of soapstone vessels and culminating in Poverty Point’s Mound A. We are asked in this session to consider the integration of archaeometric data and social theory in the construction of narratives about the past and in that sense explore the intersection of science and humanism. For many a modern person, this is unfamiliar terrain. It is the unversed intercourse of objectivity and subjectivity, of absolutism and relativism, and of fact and fiction. It is, to be sure, anathema to western sensibilities about proof, certainty, and universal knowledge. It is the same loathing over matters contingent that handicaps the efficacy of nonwestern knowledge about the “natural” world, what is now referred to as “traditional ecological knowledge,” or was once called “ethnoscience.” Indeed, the term “ethnoscience” lost its credibility not long after being coined in the 1960s for both implying that science could be subject to the contingencies of culture and that observations and explanations about the world among nonwestern people would resemble anything scientific (Sturtevant 1964). I want to consider here that ethnoscience among those fortunate enough to have missed the Enlightenment—in this case indigenes of the Gulf Coast of the Southeast U.S. dating 5,500– 3,200 years ago—was indeed scientific in the sense that observations about processes in the world were organized and mobilized to solve problems. Ethnoscience, in this sense, was applied science, as is engineering today, insofar as it was deployed to intervene against uncertain futures. The problem I want to consider today is global warming and its manifestations in rising seas, among the greatest uncertainties of our own future and an unfortunate entanglement of science. Neither the weight of scientific data about past climate change, nor its projections as probable futures are enough these days to overcome the politicization of such knowledge (Giddens 2009; Hulme 2009), or to attenuate the temporality of futures planning. Temporalities beyond the election cycle or market quarter require sensual experience with enduring change. Enduring change in sea level is exactly what the ancient inhabitants of the Gulf Coast of the Southeast experienced over many generations, centuries, even millennia. From the time humans arrived on the scene no later than 14,000 years ago until today, sea levels have risen by over 80 m (Donoghue 2011). For the first two millennia rates were comparable to some of the upper projections for the next century, that is, devastatingly fast. The next five millennia