GEOARCHAEOLOGY OF CREEKS AND STREAMS IN THE EASTERN US: UNDERESTIMATING THE MAGNITUDE OF OVERBANK DEPOSITION FOR PRESERVATION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES AND PALEOENVIRONMENTAL DATA (Invited Presentation)

Any segment along the path of a drainage network has the capacity to flood regardless of channel width, depth, or discharge. Flooding is a natural attribute of low order streams and should be expected. However, it is not always a source of erosion. Overbank flooding can be constructive for low order stream floodplains. This is especially true throughout drainages of the eastern United States which were also widely occupied by humans extending back to the Late Pleistocene. Floodplains adjacent to small drainages consisting of predominantly fine sediments were produced cumulatively under low energy depositional environments over long periods of time. Recent coring and radiocarbon dating of alluvial stratigraphy of multiple low order streams in the North Carolina Piedmont have demonstrated this occurred since the Late Pleistocene and there is high potential for containing well preserved archaeological sites within these floodplains. These small drainages also contain very deep deposits (up to 65 feet deep) that overly sediments potentially deposited by eolian processes during the Late Pleistocene. These stratigraphic and chronologic data provide a preliminary model for the regional stratigraphic, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental records for the Southeast.