![]() ![]() One little-known element of these ancient networks is still visible at a few places in southeastern North America. The two systems-trails and rivers-complemented each other and were so thoroughly intermeshed, with river fords and crossings connecting land routes and overland portages linking discontinuous waterways, as to form a single expansive system of dry and wet paths (Carr 2012, 100 Cobb and Ransley 2019 Duggins 2019, 91 Rodning 2003 Tanner 2006). ![]() Extensive systems of footpaths, recorded on maps and in travelers’ reports (or modeled from settlement locations and terrain constraints), interconnected with water routes. Transportation and communication throughout southeastern Native North America depended for millennia upon dugout canoe travel on the region’s waterways, documented by oral and written accounts from the last five centuries and by discoveries of hundreds of dugout canoes. Long-Distance Canoe Canals in Southeastern North America We present our approaches to canal dating, as well as our interpretations of canal sediments, hydrology, construction, and abandonment in the hope of raising awareness of this rarely recognized form of hydraulic engineering and monumentality. Establishing dates of construction and abandonment of canoe canals has been problematic in this part of the world. 600, well prior to the earliest evidence for cultivation of plant domesticates on the north-central Gulf coast (Gremillion 2018, 36, 136 Price 2008, 306–307). ![]() We discuss our observations of one such long-distance canoe canal on the Alabama coast of the Gulf of Mexico created during the Porter phase of the late Middle Woodland period, ca. Most canals designed principally for navigation and transportation are likewise attributable to complex hierarchical societies, including several associated with the socially stratified, non-agricultural Calusas of southern Florida, in southeastern North America (Luer 1989 Marquardt and Walker 2013 Thompson, Marquardt, and Walker 2014 also see Bond 2007 Ortloff 2009 Sulas and Pikirayi 2018).Īrchaeologists have devoted far less attention to canal-building and use by non-hierarchical, non-agricultural societies. Whether designed for irrigation or drainage, canals skillfully engineered for pre-industrial water management have played significant roles in the development of many of the world’s hierarchically organized agricultural societies (e.g., Dillehay, Eling, and Rossen 2005 Huckleberry, Caramanica, and Quilter 2018 Neely and Lancaster 2019 Stoner et al. Canals implicated in agricultural intensification have figured prominently in archaeological theory and practice for at least a century. ![]()
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