Seth Grooms - Archeology Series presenter
Seth Grooms, “The Lumbee River Archaeology Project (LRAP)”
About the lecture: The Lumbee Tribe, one of the largest tribes in the US, has a rich history in the Carolinas, yet a recent executive memorandum from President Trump has reignited debates around federal recognition policies. This talk will situate the current discourse around the Lumbee Tribe within the historical framework of evolving federal policies on recognition, and introduce the Lumbee River Archaeology Project. Founded in 2024 in collaboration with the Lumbee Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO), LRAP aims to provide archaeological training to the THPO staff, document and preserve ancestral sites, pursue research questions developed with tribal leaders, and share our findings with the community in addition to publishing in academic journals.
About the speaker: An anthropological archaeologist, Dr. Seth Grooms works primarily in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. His research focuses on crafting archaeological narratives of Native histories that are, as much as possible, informed by Native American perspectives. He uses methods from geoarchaeology, landscape archaeology, and chronological modeling, and he interprets the resulting data within a theoretical framework comprising traditional anthropological theory as well as Native American philosophies and epistemologies. Grooms’ work in Mississippi and Louisiana has focused on early monumentality in North America at sites that participated in the Poverty Point phenomenon (ca. 4500-3000 cal yr BP). His interests in community-based archaeology led him to work with the Crow Tribe (Apsáalooke) in Montana in 2016. Dr. Grooms’ most recent project is the Lumbee River Archaeology Project.
Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, with funding from the Davidson College Public Lectures Committee, the Dean Rusk Program, the Humanities Program, and the departments of Art, Classics, Economics, Educational Studies, and History.
Free and open to the public.