| Established | May 1938 |
|---|---|
| Founder | James Bennett Griffin and James A. Ford |
Region served | Southeastern United States, Eastern woodlands of the United States |
| Website | https://www.southeasternarchaeology.org/ |
The Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) is a professional organization of archaeologists focused on the archaeology of the Southeastern United States and neighboring regions, from its earliest occupations to today. The organization puts on an annual conference hosted by a different city and different group of archaeologists every year, and it publishes a biannual journal, Southeastern Archaeology. Since 2002, the Conference has had more than 1000 members and more than 450 attend the annual meeting.
Many researchers from the rest of the eastern woodlands, including the Midwest and to a lesser extent the Northeast are also members, because of the strong cultural relationships between the Woodland period and Mississippian period indigenous peoples across the region. As a result archaeologists working in the region around Cahokia Mounds and related sites outside of the Southeast proper are included in the conference.
In the 1930s, the pace of archaeology had rapidly increased in the eastern United States due to urban development, a growing number of professionals, and government-funded research activities associated with the widespread labor of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the growing Tennessee Valley Authority. James Bennett Griffin and James A. Ford organized the first Conference in order to organize the growing body of ceramic data created by this new outpouring of research. The first meeting was held May 16-17, 1938 in the Ceramic Repository at the University of Michigan, where Griffin was a professor. Notables at the meeting other than Ford and Griffin included David L. DeJarnette, Charles H. Fairbanks, Arthur Randolph Kelly, Preston Holder, and Thomas Lewis (husband of Madeline Kneberg Lewis), among others. This meeting was successful, leading to the development of a newsletter starting in 1939, a supplementary Bulletin starting in 1964 that included conference proceedings, and eventually the biannual journal beginning in 1982.
The Conference hosts an annual student paper competition and gives out a variety of annual awards, including awards in honor of notable regional archaeologists Patty Jo Watson and Charles M. Hudson.