Environmental Archaeology Lab

at the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University

Dr. Evan Peacock, sorting land snails under a high power microscope in the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory, Mississippi State University.

Environmental archaeologists study how humans relate to the environment over the long term: over decades, centuries, or even millennia. Understanding past cultures depends upon understanding what sort of physical settings people inhabited in the past. For example, large parts of what is now the Sahara desert in north Africa were once lush grasslands teeming with animal life. Obviously, the prehistoric groups living there at the time had a much different lifestyle than later nomadic groups who contended with dry desert conditions. Environmental archaeologists also study the impacts that pre-industrial peoples had upon the landscape. Those impacts could be profound. Ancient Polynesians, for example, knowingly or unknowingly caused the extinction of numerous species of birds as the Pacific islands were colonized in prehistoric times. The vast, treeless expanse of Dartmoor, in southern England, boasted a dense forest before Neolithic sheepherders cleared the land for grazing thousands of years ago.

In order to reconstruct past environments, the remains of plants and animals are retrieved from the soil and analyzed in the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory at the Cobb Institute of Archaeology, Mississippi State University. The habitat requirements of the species thus identified are used to assess what environmental conditions were like at the site where the remains were found. The types of remains currently being analyzed at MSU include freshwater mussels, land snails, pollen, charred plant remains, and insects.

One current project involves analyzing thousands of land snails from Native American sites around Starkville, Mississippi. Beginning about 1000 years ago, groups in the area adopted an agricultural lifestyle, growing maize and other crops on the thin, upland soils. Today, those soils are covered with a cedar-dominated woodland, but evidence suggests that in the past the hill tops were covered with stands of oak and hickory. As the landscape changes, so too do the snail species occupying the landscape. Dr. Evan Peacock, with the aid of student workers, is studying the snails to determine when this dramatic change in environmental conditions occurred, and whether it was initiated by prehistoric Native American farming practices. Research over the next few years should shed light on how the fragile prairie ecosystem of the Starkville area was altered by human activities in the past.

Modern [left] and archaeological (ca. 1000 years old) shells of the freshwater mussel Ligumia subrostrata.

Weevils from an 18th century Choctaw site in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Land snails from an archaeological site in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Specimens are several hundred years old.