Dr. Paige Ford conducts archeogeophysical surveying at Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park. | Submitted photo
Special to arkadelphian.com
Dr. Paige Ford of the Arkansas Archeological Survey will present “Investigating Communities: Preparing for the 2025 Training Program on Plum Bayou Culture” at the February meeting of the Ouachita Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society. This talk will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 4, at 7 p.m. in the Rainey Room in the new CIC Building at Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, 200 Whittington Ave., Hot Springs.
The event is free and open to the public.
The 2025 Arkansas Archeological Society Training Program is set to focus on increasing our understandings of Plum Bayou culture in several ways. The excavations will focus primarily on Plum Bayou Mounds (formerly known as Toltec Mounds), where investigations will fill in gaps in our knowledge of these Late Woodland peoples and their use of this ceremonial site. Simultaneously, smaller excavations will occur at a nearby Plum Bayou village site aimed at better understanding the everyday lives of these communities. In all, this training program aims to illuminate new data and information about community experiences and interactions in central Arkansas during the Terminal Late Woodland period (AD 650-1050).
In this talk, Ford will discuss Plum Bayou culture and those gaps in our knowledge, as well as the plans for the 2025 AAS annual training program and her research design to help inform and prepare us for the field season to come.
Since 1964, the Arkansas Archeological Society has cooperated, first with the University of Arkansas Museum in Fayetteville and now with the Arkansas Archeological Survey (a unit of the University of Arkansas System) to provide an opportunity for its members to learn the techniques of scientific archeology and work alongside professionals on research. The annual training program is held for two weeks each June at an archeological site in Arkansas.
Ford is the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Station Archeologist at the Plum Bayou Research Station, located at Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park outside Little Rock. She is a native of North Carolina and earned her PhD 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, as well as studying Plum Bayou communities and their activities in the region. In addition, her primary research involves reconstructing the regional relationships that Native 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 Archaeology 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 archaeology in Arkansas. For more information, contact Mary Beth Trubitt at 870-230-5510.
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
