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CHRIS RODNING

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Christopher B. Rodning, Ph.D.

Professor
Department of Anthropology
Tulane University
101 Dinwiddie Hall
6823 Saint Charles Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70118 USA


crodning@tulane.edu
http://www.tulane.edu/~crodning/


office 504.862.3051
department office 504.865.5336
department fax 504.865.5338
mobile 504.606.3788
LINK | for archaeology graduate students

LINK | for undergraduate anthropology majors


INTERESTS
archaeology
architecture
culture contact and colonialism
mortuary practices
gender
chiefdoms
southeastern North America
western North Carolina
Southern Appalachians
Gulf South



COURSES
Ancient Societies
North American Prehistory
Southeastern U.S. Prehistory
Introduction to Archaeology
Proseminar in Anthropology
Archaeology of Gender
Disasters and Past Societies
Culture Contact and Colonialism
Archaeology of Cultural Landscapes
Roots of Western Civilization
Research Design in Anthropology
Honors Thesis Boot Camp


PROJECTS


Lower Mississippi Valley Landscape Archaeology Project
Resilience and Monumentality



English publication of D'anville's map of La Louisiane, 1788 (http://www.knowla.org/).


Resilience is the capacity of cultural systems to regenerate themselves after catastrophe, crisis, collapse, and disturbance. Given the dynamics of landscapes and waterscapes created by deltaic cycles and changes in sea levels, the changing courses of rivers, and periodic storms, Native American earthworks in the Lower Mississippi Valley and coastal Louisiana represent some of the most durable landmarks in these areas of the Gulf South. Mounds and moundbuilding created persistent monumental places in dynamic environments, and they were sources of cutlural stability and resilience.




The Protohistoric Southeast
Entanglement, Ethnogenesis, and Chaos Theory



Native American groups of southeastern North America.


Chaos theory posits that changes in dynamic systems are unpredictable, but not random, and that those changes are highly sensitive to initial conditions. This latter property of chaotic systems is known as the butterfly effect. This perspective offers an interpretive framework for studying the long-term trends and shorter-term events and developments that shaped the emergence of historically known Native American groups in the American South.




Exploring Joara
Native American Towns and Early European Contact in the Western North Carolina Piedmont
(with David G. Moore, Ph.D., and Robin A. Beck, Ph.D.)



Map of La Florida, by Geronimo Chaves, published by Abraham Ortelius, 1584 (http://dcc.newberry.org/).


During the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and colonists explored and settled the southern Appalachians, and encounters and entanglements between them and Native American groups altered the course of European colonial history and Native American history in the Southeast. Archaeology at the Berry site sheds significant light on this episode of cultural history in the American South. This site, in the upper Catawba Valley of western North Carolina, is the location of the Native American town of Joara (1400-1600) and the Spanish colonial outpost of Cuenca and Fort San Juan (1566-1568).




Cherokee Towns
The Cultural Landscape of the Appalachian Summit Province in Southwestern North Carolina



Appalachian Summit landscape in southwestern North Carolina.


The archaeology of earthen mounds, public structures known as townhouses, and other aspects of the built environment of Cherokee towns demonstrate deep connections between places, placemaking, memory, and ethnogenesis in the Cherokee landscape.





NEWS



2018




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2012




2011




2010




2009




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2006




2005




2004




2003




2002




2001




2000


  • Ring of Fire, Sarasota, Florida.

  • Spear, Blaine, Minnesota.



1996


  • Darkside, Princeton, New Jersey.

  • Darkside, Williamsburg, Virginia.

  • Darkside, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.



1994




1990


 
Tulane Anthropology
New Orleans
www.cityofno.com
www.nola.com
 
Chris Rodning 18 April 2018 Tulane University