Why This Archaeologist Cares about Geoarchaeology: Some Pasts and Futures of St. Catherines Island

relationship with a concrete, material entity. 7. In fairness, we must point out that Marquardt does “not suggest that the Tanner record is the only source on which we should depend. In fact, we should all endeavor to keep pace with the fast-emerging paleoclimate literature, which now includes multiple records based on everything from ice cores to dendrochronology.” He also notes that “Archaeologists can benefit from consideration of such high-resolution sea level records, but it is important to keep in mind that global climate fluctuations can have variable local effects, depending on topography, hydrology, and established human adaptations to local regions.” That said, he expressed his belief that “Tanner’s Jerup record has numerous advantages, in that it provides relatively fine-grained data on sea level fluctuations (therefore, implicit climate fluctuations) through much of the Holocene” (Marquardt, 2010: 253–271). 8. To make Tanner’s curve “more intuitive and readable for archaeological purposes” Marquardt smoothed Tanner’s raw data using a five-sample moving average, then averaged individual pairs of the resulting data in order to reduce the width of the graph. The result (Marquardt, 2010: fig. 14.2) portrays relative sea level at a periodicity of 100 years, from 7550 to 50 cal b.p. (5600 cal b.c.–cal a.d. 1950). 9. “Jumping inlets, spits, and islands” is borrowed, with acknowledgment, from Chowns (2002). 10. We note that the closing of the paper mill at St. Marys (Georgia) has allowed the cone of depression beneath that community to rapidly fill and force artesian flow at the surface. It is not outside the realm of possibility that a similar closing of the noneconomic Riceboro paper mill may revitalize the artesian hydrology of St. Catherines Island (Gale Bishop, personal commun.). 11. We also noted the steep falloff in documented mortuary activities during the Irene period, but this was an obvious sampling problem. We know that burial mounds persisted throughout the late prehistoric (Irene), but we simply had not processed the appropriate 14C dates on these deposits. We have since remedied this problem (Thomas,