Posters

Maureen Vaughan (Belle Meade Historic Site)
Taylor Lee (Belle Meade Historic Site)

Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery is planning on expanding its Journey to Jubilee program by building a new curation and office space on the property. Because there are archaeologists on staff, we have been able to survey the potential build site and use this project as a stepping stone to larger and more long-term archaeological projects. We are building contacts with local universities and planning new outreach projects that will bring archaeology to the public using Belle Meade as the lens. The poster will describe the current work in medias res as well as describe in detail what future surveying and research projects are in the works.

Richard Mooney (Independent Researcher/ESRARA)

This Poster presentation of the MoonShadow Mapping Project provides an up-close and personal look at the 3D imaging of the Tennessee MoonShadow Petroglyph, the associated Solar and Lunar Extreme alignments, and the spreadsheet equations allowing vector projections into the celestial realm. Further discussions could involve the point selection process and required corrections for alignment, or in-depth understanding of the inscribed lines which demonstrate intended use by the indigenous maker to push the inscribed line to the left in chasing the extreme positions of the sun and the moon. Future work can be discussed, including display options for rendering of shadow projections, and possible "workshop" themes including Ethnological discussions and Iconography patterns providing more evidence of intent.

Lori Robbins (University of Tennessee - Knoxville)
Kelly Santana (University of Tennessee- Knoxville)
Timothy Baumann (McClung Museum, University of Tennessee)
Kandace Hollenbach (University of Tennessee - Knoxville)
Eleanora Reber (University of Tennessee - Knoxville) 

Funded by a 2022 EXARC grant, the McClung Museum is currently conducting an experimental archaeology project to identify the presence of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in the New World using absorbed residue in pottery. This method is necessary because the recovery of beans on archaeological sites is rare and fragmentary due to poor preservation, or the entire bean was consumed, leaving nothing behind. Absorbed residue in pottery may provide a new way to identify the occurrence of beans in Tennessee. The first step of this experiment was cooking beans with 10 pottery sherds from a broken replica Mississippi Plain jar and then burying them in the ground for a month. Five of the sherds were cooked with beans only, and the second group were cooked with beans, maize, and deer meat. The absorbed residue analysis will be completed in early 2023 and will hopefully find clear bean biomarkers.