Press Release - For Immediate Release

Media Contact: Hayley Richards

(334) 353-1881 or hayley.richards@archives.alabama.gov

Montgomery, AL (09/20/2023) – The Alabama Department of Archives & History (ADAH) will continue its 2023 Food For Thought lunchtime lecture series on Thursday, September 21, at 12 p.m. CT. Greg Waselkov will present Discovering An Ancient Dugout Canoe Canal in South Alabama. The program will be held in the ADAH’s Joseph M. Farley Alabama Power Auditorium in Montgomery. It will also be livestreamed on the ADAH’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. Admission is FREE.

Dr. Greg Waselkov will discuss a recent public archaeology project in Gulf Shores that discovered and documented a rare fourteen-hundred-year-old canal that once enabled travel via dugout canoe between Mobile Bay and the protected waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The exploration of this ancient engineering feat, one of just seven known examples in the Southeast and the only example outside of Florida, has unveiled valuable insight into the indigenous peoples and coastal landscape of the northern Gulf region during the Middle Woodland period (approximately AD 200-650).

Dr. Waselkov is an esteemed professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of South Alabama, where he dedicated twenty-nine years to teaching. Before his tenure at South Alabama, Waselkov spent a decade as a research associate at Auburn University. He has published extensively on the archaeology and ethnohistory of the colonial and Native Southeast. His topics of focus include coastal shell middens, Native American maps, French colonial Mobile, William Bartram, and the Old Federal Road. Dr. Waselkov currently lives and writes in Stockton with his wife, Lin, who is a talented and prolific quilter.

For additional information, contact Alex Colvin at archives.alabama.gov or (334) 353-4689. A complete schedule of our 2023 lunchtime lecture series is available at archives.alabama.gov. Food for Thought 2023 is sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Alliance and the Friends of the Alabama Archives. 

The Alabama Department of Archives and History is the state’s government-records repository, a special-collections library and research facility, and home to the Museum of Alabama, the state history museum. It is located in downtown Montgomery, directly across Washington Avenue from the State Capitol. The Museum of Alabama is open Monday through Saturday from 8:30 to 4:30. The EBSCO Research Room is open Tuesday through Saturday from 8:30 to 4:30. To learn more, visit www.archives.alabama.gov or call (334) 242-4364.

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Alabama Department of Archives & History

624 Washington Ave.

Montgomery, AL 36130

www.archives.alabama.gov