Paige Ford of the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Plum Bayou Research Station, will present “Understanding the Study of Solar and Celestial Alignments in the Southeastern United States” at the April meeting of the Ouachita Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society. This talk will be held on Tuesday, April 2, at 7 p.m. in the Board Room at Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, 200 Whittington Ave., Hot Springs. The event is free and open to the public.
With a solar eclipse on the horizon, folks may be musing about how past peoples in the southeastern United States experienced such events, how they viewed the skies and stars overall, and what archaeological evidence we have of those views.
In this talk, Ford will discuss the fields of archaeology, archaeoastronomy, iconography, and more to illuminate the ways archaeologists seek to understand the significance of solar and celestial alignments. Within those discussions she will describe case studies from the southeastern United States – including at Plum Bayou Mounds in Arkansas – that show a deep history of connection with the consideration of the skies.
Ford is the Station Archeologist at the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Plum Bayou Research Station, located at Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park in Scott, Arkansas. She is a native of North Carolina and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2021, shortly before joining the Survey.
At her station, she focuses on the cultivation of the Plum Bayou Garden, the development of public outreach and education programs in collaboration with Arkansas State Parks staff and other local and regional entities, training interns from local universities, research relating to preservation and management of Plum Bayou Mounds, and studying Plum Bayou peoples and their activities in the region. In addition to these activities, her primary research involves reconstructing the regional relationships Indigenous peoples forged and maintained using social network analysis on data relating to how potters made and decorated their ceramics.
The Arkansas Archeological Survey’s research station at Henderson State University, 1042 Haddock St., Arkadelphia, holds regular Archeology Lab Days on Thursdays. Students and members of the public are invited to come by the research station on Thursdays between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. to learn more about archeology in Arkansas. For more information, contact Mary Beth Trubitt at 870-230-5510.