Archaeological Survey of the Old Federal Road in Alabama

Chapter 11Conclusions and Recommendations fromthe Old Federal Road ProjectLandscape Archaeology and the Old Federal RoadThis ALDOT-sponsored on-the-ground survey of the Old Federal Road is, to our knowledge, thefirst large-scale landscape archaeology project conducted in the state of Alabama. Archaeologists havealways studied sites, discrete places where evidence of human activities can be found in the form ofartifacts and structures and other remnants of the past. Only in recent decades have archaeologists soughtbroader perspectives that look at the many ways humans and their environments interconnect.These broader perspectives first involved studies of settlement patterns, the various ways humanhave dispersed themselves to exploit their environments for foods and other resources, as well as thedifferent ways in which increasingly populous and politically complex societies organized theirexploitative activities. For instance, the campsites used for hunting and gathering during the last Ice Agewere organized differently to accomplish different goals than the village sites of the first farmers, andthose in turn vary in many ways from the small urban centers of the earliest civilizations. By studyingthese kinds of structural differences from a landscape perspective, archaeologists have been able to traceboundaries between ancient societies, document trade networks and dependencies, and understandsomething about the changing nature of warfare through time and space. Archaeologists have alsoexplored how early peoples viewed the landscape around them in symbolic terms, and how theysometimes altered their environment in more or less dramatic ways to craft a landscape that betterreflected their beliefs in the cosmos. The construction of pyramids in Old Kingdom Egypt, Stonehenge inNeolithic Britain, and Hopewellian earthworks of Middle Woodland North America all apparentlyexemplify aspects of the cosmological beliefs of their builders. 1Americans today are exposed to lessons about landscape archaeology of the ancient worldthrough television and internet, but few know the same approach can inform us about early U.S. history.Historical archaeologists have investigated the symbolic meaning of Mormon fencing in Utah, royalgovernor’s gardens in colonial Maryland, and the intermingled houses of Spanish colonists and chieflyIndians in seventeenth-century Florida. The Old Federal Road held different symbolic import for whiteAmerican settlers, for enslaved black Africans and African-Americans, and for different factions of theCreek Indians ... and symbolic values changed through time for each of those groups. A brief discussionof the Old Federal Road from the perspective of landscape archaeology will hopefully illustrate someaspects of life in early nineteenth-century America that are not widely known or appreciated.231