Asa Randall

• Archaic (10,000—3000 years ago) Communities of the Southeastern United States 
• Hunter-Gatherer Complexity, Mobility, and Exchange 
• Monumentality and Social History 
• Remote Sensing
• Modern land use and Community Archaeology

I examine the ways in which hunter-gatherers of deep antiquity interacted at multiple scales. In particular, I am interested in the material dimensions of community coalescence, dispersion, and ritual integration. My geographic focus is the the St. Johns River in Northeast Florida, best known for scores of shell mounds constructed by hunter-gatherers. The goal of my field research in Florida is to document the histories of Archaic (7300-3000 years ago) shell mounds—which range from habitation spaces to monumental shell and earthworks — and to place them in their environmental and social contexts. As part of this research I am engaged in the analysis of objects (stone tools and marine shell in particular), which can reveal the origins and connections of involved communities. I am also developing a regional geodatabase of Archaic mounds using historic observations, excavation results, and contemporary geospatial data. Prior to working in Florida, my research centered on the technology and mobility practices of Paleoindian and Early Archaic societies (12,000—9000 years ago) along Alabama's middle Tennessee River Valley.

Randall, Asa R.

2019 Gathering for Nine Millennia along the Atlantic Coast and St. Johns River of Northeast Florida. In The Archaeology of Human-Environmental Dynamics on the North American Atlantic Coast, edited by Leslie A. Reeder-Myers, John A. Turck, and Torben C. Rick, pp. 199–231. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL.  

2015 Constructing Histories: Archaic Freshwater Shell Mounds and Social Landscapes of the St. Johns River, Florida. Ripley P. Bullen Series. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Randall, Asa R. and Zackary I. Gilmore

2018 The Itineraries of Late Archaic Shell and Ceramic Cooking Vessels. In Investigating the Ordinary: Everyday Matters in Southeast Archaeology, edited by Sarah E. Price and Phillip J. Carr, pp. 95–111. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

Randall, Asa R. and Kenneth E. Sassaman

2017 Terraforming the Middle Ground in Ancient Florida. Hunter Gatherer Research 3(1):9–29.

Sassaman, Kenneth E. and Asa R. Randall.

2020 Cosmic Abandonment: How Detaching from Place was Requisite to World Renewal in the Ancient American Southeast. In Detachment from Place: A Comparative Approach to Settlement Abandonment and Beyond, edited by Maxime Lamoureux St-Hilaire and Scott McRae. University of Colorado Press, Boulder.

Stephens et al.

2019 Archaeological Assessment Reveals Earth’s Early Transformation Through Land Use. Science 365(6456):897–902.

Trachtenberg, Zev, Antonio Castro, Kiza Gates, Asa R. Randall, Ingo Schlupp, Lynn Soreghan, Noah Theriault, and Meigan Wieters.

2017 (Inter)facing the Anthropocene: How to Represent an Interdisciplinary Interaction. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 5:18–38.

Trachtenberg, Zev M., Thomas J. Burns, Kirsten de Beurs, Stephen E. Ellis, Kiza K. Gates, Bruce W. Hoagland, Jeffrey F. Kelly, Thomas M. Neeson, Asa R. Randall, Ingo Schlupp, Peter S. Soppelsa, Gerilyn S. Soreghan and James J. Zeigler.

2017 The Anthropocene Biosphere: Supporting ‘Open Interdisciplinarity’ through Blogging. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 32(1):1–3.

Wallis, Neill J. and Asa R. Randall (editors)

2014 New Histories of Pre-Columbian Florida. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

• ANTH 1413 — Great Discoveries in Archaeology
• ANTH 4783 — Landscape Archaeology
• ANTH 4863 — Southeastern Archaeology
• ANTH 4953 — Landscape Archaeology
• ANTH 5203 — Hunter-Gatherers
• ANTH 5413 — Public Archaeology
• ANTH 5863 — Southeastern Archaeology
  
• ANTH 6713 — Archaeological Theory
• ANTH 6803 — Advanced Archaeological Theory