Steven Meredith: Chert formations to Indian Quarries in Muscle Shoals and Lauderdale county Alabama

The Muscle Shoals Chapter of the Alabama Archaeological Society will meet at 2pm at the Florence Indian Mound Museum on Sunday, January 14th. Steven Meredith will present his talk on: “Chert formations to Indian Quarries in Muscle Shoals and Lauderdale county Alabama”

Muscle Shoals is in the center of an area of abundant high-quality knappable chert. Over the millennia, people living in the area developed various strategies for gathering this stone that changed as to meet its role in their societies. There will be a discussion of the geologic setting of the area and of quarrying sites. Archaeological sites that have provided information about stone quarrying at different intervals of time will be discussed to outline trends in knappable stone acquisition in the area over a span of several thousand years.  

Steve Meredith has spent over 20 years as an archaeologist, primarily in the cultural resources management field with the role of Principal Investigator, Field Director, and/or Lab Director for archaeological surveys of more than 32,000 acres in seven southeastern US states, as well as many excavations, mostly in Alabama. He owns and manages Cedars Consulting, LLC. He is a part in several archaeological research projects, centered primarily in southeastern North America. His research is focused on archaeological prospection, geologic sources of lithic raw materials and the use of artifact form and decoration as an expression of cultural identity in pre-Colonial Native American groups.