A public lecture presenting an overview of Alabama's Moundville will take place at 3 p.m. Feb. 18 in Gambrell Hall Auditorium.

Sponsored by the Archaeological Society of South Carolina (ASSC), the conference will be held Feb. 19 and will include a daylong meeting, a lunch session, and an evening banquet.

The day session will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will feature speakers covering topics spanning consumer behavior in archaeology to the earliest mound center in central South Carolina.

The lunch session will feature Jean Guilleux, who will speak on his experience working on a French early man site, and Kenneth Kelly, an associate professor in the U.S. Department of Anthropology, who will speak, and lead a discussion, of archaeological work in West Africa and the Caribbean and its relationship to South Carolina.

The banquet will begin with a social hour from 5 to 6:30 p.m. followed by dinner from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Clarion Town House on Gervais Street. Vincas Steponaitis will discuss his recent work on Mississipian Palettes, American Indian high status items dating to A.D. 1000–1600. He is director of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Steponaitis’ current research includes the history and political economy of Moundville, a large Mississippian town in Alabama that was occupied from the 11th to the 17th centuries A.D. His research attempts to reconstruct patterns of craft production and trade by attempting to identify the geological sources of the raw materials used to make "prestige goods" at Moundville.

The pre-registration deadline for the conference is Feb. 14. The conference cost is $10, students $5. The lunch session is $7, and the banquet is $20. Seating is available for participants who do not want to eat at Saturday's lunch session and banquet.

Steponaitis also will present a public lecture at 3 p.m. Feb. 18 in Gambrell Hall Auditorium. He will provide an overview of Moundville and his work in Alabama.

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