èßäÉçÇøAPP

Research Interests

• North American Archaeology
• Indigenous Cultures of the Southeastern United States
• Ceramics
• Landscape Archaeology
• Community and Identity
• Foodways

Biography

Dr. Erin Nelson is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, & Social Work at the èßäÉçÇøAPP. She received her B.A. from the University of Missouri, her M.A. from the University of Mississippi, and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Nelson is a specialist in the pre-contact archaeology of the southeastern United States. Her research examines the material remains of foodways, ceramics, monumental and domestic architecture, and the organization of space to understand how past people negotiated issues of kinship, group identity, leadership, and worldview in the context of their communities. Nelson is the author of Authority, Autonomy, and the Archaeology of a Mississippian Community (University Press of Florida, 2020), and is the 2023 recipient of the Southeastern Archaeology Conference’s Rising Scholar Award.

Currently, Dr. Nelson is the Lead PI of an NSF-funded study focused on understanding the origins and development of Pensacola culture, a Mississippian cultural tradition of the northern Gulf of Mexico Coast, ca. AD 1150-1700. The project traces networks of Pensacola people across the landscape and through time by examining the specific actions taken by potters in the course of creating, firing, and using pottery. Documenting potting practices can reveal the social relationships that structured migration, cultural coalescence, residential patterns, community gathering, ceremonial practice, and more. This research involves a collaborative partnership with potters from Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, who are working to replicate the Pensacola pottery found on archaeological sites while revitalizing their traditional potting practices. The project also provides opportunities for students to learn hands-on research skills in the field and lab.

Dr. Nelson also coordinates the èßäÉçÇøAPP’s NAGPRA effort, which involves working with sovereign tribal nations to achieve our mutual goal of returning ancestors and cultural objects in our care to descendants.

Selected Publications

• Lindsay C. Bloch, Erin S. Nelson, Neill J. Wallis, and Ashley Rutkoski (2025). Creating Standardized Guides for Pottery Temper Characterization. Accepted by Advances in Archaeological Practice.

• Nelson, Erin S. (2024). Authority, Autonomy, and the Archaeology of a Mississippian Community. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Paperback edition.

• Kowalski, Jessica and Erin S. Nelson (2024). Above and Below the Green Line: A Social History of Divergent Mississippian Cultures. Southeastern Archaeology 43(1):13-29.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens, Ashley Peles, and Mallory A. Melton (2023). A Mississippian Example of Harvest Renewal Ceremonialism. In Ancient Foodways: Integrative Approaches to Understanding Subsistence and Society in the Past, ed. C. Margaret Scarry, Dale Hutchinson, and Benjamin Arbuckle. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

• Waselkov, Gregory A., Donald A. Beebe, Howard Cyr, Elizabeth Chamberlain, Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, and Erin S. Nelson (2022). History and Hydrology of a Long-distance Canoe Canal in Alabama, ca. AD 600. Journal of Field Archaeology. DOI: 10.1080/00934690.2022.2090747.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens (2021). Negotiating Community at Parchman Place, a Mississippian Town in the Northern Yazoo Basin. In Reconsidering Mississippian Households and Communities, ed. Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser, pp. 63-80. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens and Philip J. Carr (2021). A History of Mobile in 22 Objects: Pottery from the Mobile-Tensaw Mounds. Mobile Bay Magazine, May 2021.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens (2021). Authority, Autonomy, and the Archaeology of a Mississippian Community. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens and Philip J. Carr (2020). Mound Builders: Fragment of a Pensacola Incised, variety Gasque ceramic vessel, c. 1200—1550. In A History of Mobile in 22 Objects, ed. Margaret McCrummen Fowler. History Museum of Mobile, Mobile, Alabama.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens, Ashley Peles, and Mallory A. Melton (2020). Foodways and Community at the Late Mississippian Site of Parchman Place. Southeastern Archaeology 39(1):29-50.        

• Megan C. and Erin Stevens Nelson (2016). Standing Posts and Special Substances: Gathering and Ritual Deposition at Feltus (22Je500), Jefferson County, Mississippi. Southeastern Archaeology 35(2):134-154.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens (2014). Intimate Landscapes: The Social Nature of the Spaces Between. Archaeological Prospection 21(1):49-57.

• Nelson, Erin Stevens and Megan C. Kassabaum (2014). Expanding Social Networks Through Ritual Deposition: A Case Study from the Lower Mississippi Valley. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 29 (1):103-128.

Courses

• AN 101: Introduction to Archaeology and Biological Anthropology
• AN 256: Anthropology of Food
• AN 305: Method & Theory in Archaeology
• AN 314: North American Archaeology
• AN 315: Maya, Aztec, Inca: Archaeology of Mesoamerica and the Andes
• AN 335: Field Methods in Archaeology
• AN 355: Gender and Anthropology
• AN 440: Advanced Archaeological Field Methods
• AN 445: Laboratory Methods in Archaeology
• MUM 201: Introduction to Museum Studies