Koster-N Horizon 8A-10B Macro Identified File

Part of the Koster Site, IL (11GE4) project

Creator(s): Sarah Neusius

Year: 1981

Summary

Data includes Faunal Analysis at Site.

Site Description:

The Koster site is a deeply stratified site located in the lower Illinois River valley containing cultural deposits that span most of the Holocene. This site has provided significant information about the Archaic period in the Midwest as well as human-environment interactions at this time. Due to excellent preservation Koster gives us a complex record of the technologies and food sources of its inhabitants over time.

The Koster site is located in Section 21, T 9 N, R 13 W Greene County adjacent to eastern bluffline of the lower Illinois Valley. The Site was test excavated in the summer of 1969, under the direction of Stuart Struever of Northwestern University. Originally it was defined on the basis of debris from a Late Woodland occupation, but the 1969 tests made it clear that older occupations stratified beneath the Late Woodland occupation were significant. Major excavations were undertaken at the site between 1969 and 1979 under the direction of Struever and James A. Brown, and a large number of student archaeologists received training at Koster through field schools of Northwestern University. During this time Koster also was a significant attraction for public education about archaeology through the Foundation for Illinois Archaeology (now the Center for American Archaeology) based in Kampsville, IL.

The faunal database available here spans the Middle Archaic from ca. 8300-6850 BP or Horizons 10B-8B. This appears to have been a crucial period for subsistence and settlement change in the Midwest.

Cite this Record

Koster-N Horizon 8A-10B Macro Identified File. Sarah Neusius. 1981 ( tDAR id: 2755) ; doi:10.6067/XCV8WD3XHT

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Data Set Structure

Measurement Column
Count Column
Coded Column
Filename Column
Integration Column (has Ontology)

Table Information: koster1a

Column Name Data Type Type Category Coding Sheet Ontology Search
Species for Resource Type Should be identical tot he previous column.
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna : Taxon Koster Site Species Coding Sheet Eastern Archaic Resource type ontology true
Species for Eastern Taxa taxonomic identifications
BIGINT  Coded Value uncategorized Coding sheet for Species Eastern Taxa (KOS-N Priority Horizon Identified) Fauna Taxon Ontology - Eastern US true
Age BIGINT  Coded Value uncategorized Coding sheet for Age (KOS-N Horizon 8A-10B Identified) Fauna Age Ontology true
Weath This value was created by copying relevant comments about good or poor preservation. This was done by SWN in June 2016.
VARCHAR  Coded Value uncategorized Coding sheet for Weath (KOS-N Horizon 8A-10B Identified) Fauna Weathering Ontology true
FTMid indicates whether the bone was found in a Feature or Midden
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna Koster Site Fauna Feature/Midden Coding Sheet Eastern Archaic Context Types true
Meas Fish Total length was recorded by Fred Hill in inches and generally recorded by Hewitt in the Comment Column. These measurements are copied in this column. There also are measurements in millimeters for otoliths that have been placed in this column. SWN did this in June, 2016
VARCHAR  Uncoded Value uncategorized none none true
Prov Provenience: not coded Generally the first 3 digits give the square number and the next three give the level. If it is a feature the first 4 digits give the Feature number and the next 2 give the level. the last column is for a level or feature part with 1=Part A and 2=Part B etc.
BIGINT  Uncoded Value Fauna none none true
Comment Many of the comments are about whether the bone is a shaft fragment/shaft, breakage, modification, gnawing, and add more specificity to generic categories like a bone might be categorized as tooth, the comment might be incisor. These have been left basically as recorded by J. Hewitt even though much of this information has been duplicated in various columns added in June, 2016 to the dataset. It does appear that Hewitt simply duplicated lines including comments when the count was more than 1. This can make them a little hard to follow. For instance ant. 1/3, ant. frag will appear on two identical lines when obviously one frag is 1/3 of the bone and the other is a smaller frag.
VARCHAR  Uncoded Value Fauna none none true
Complt This column records percentage proportions given in the comments in the original Hewitt File. Entries were created by SWN in 2016. This information is rarely available, however.
VARCHAR  Coded Value uncategorized Coding sheet for Complt (KOS-N Horizon 8A-10B Identified) Fauna Completeness Ontology true
Certain This as an arbitrary number 1 = certain 2= not as certain that refers to the taxonomic identification. Generally a code of 2 could be considered cf the taxon.
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna Koster Site Fauna Certainty Coding Sheet Fauna Confidence in Identification Ontology true
Analyst Fred Hill (and his lab workers) or Sarah Neusius only in the case of this dataset.
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna Koster Site Fauna Analyst Coding Sheet none true
NItems Number of Items. For this dataset the number generally = 1. When a bone fragment was recently broken into multiple pieces they still were coded as one specimen. There are notations in the comments concerning this. These were made by J. Hewitt and are not always clear, so we have generally assumed the count is correct.
BIGINT  Count Fauna : Count none none true
Side BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna : Side Koster Site Fauna Side Coding Sheet Fauna Side Ontology true
Axiality Again any information about dorsal-ventral or anterior-posterior portions in the Comments has been used by SWN to create this column in 2016.
VARCHAR  Coded Value uncategorized Boon Hor 11 Axiality Fauna Dorsal-Ventral Ontology true
Recovery Recovery methods have been added by SWN in June, 2016 based on information from James brown and Mike Wiant. This file does not include any flotation materials and most of the dpeosits in Horizons 8A-10B were excavted in 3" levels with sediments being passed through the then standard 1/2" mesh. Some piece plotting in three dimensions for all materials was done and when this happened, it is recorded here.
VARCHAR  Coded Value uncategorized Coding sheet for Recovery (KOS-N Horizon 8A-10B Identified) EAFWG Recovery Method Ontology true
Element Standard elements, but note that specific teeth have been recorded under comment and in this column only named vs unnamed teeth are recorded. In future analyses teeth could be pulled from comments column. There may be other instances where more specific information is in the comments, but codes have also been added to accommodate the research of the EAFWG. .
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna : Element Koster Site Fauna Element Coding Sheet Fauna Element Ontology true
OtherInfo This variable is a bit of a catch-all that captures some things like whether the item is an artifact, immature or an articulated portion of a skeleton. It functions almost as a specialized comment column. For the purposes of EAFWG analyses, columns have been made for Animal Age, Other Human Modification, Animal Modification, and codes from this column are duplicated in these new columns, but this column has been left as originally recorded by J.Hewitt.
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna Koster Site Fauna Other Info Coding Sheet none true
Portion This variable records the portion of the skeletal element present in terms of proximity. Codes for dorsal and ventral have been added from original coding used by Hewitt in order to accommodate information in comments
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna : Portion/Proximal/Distal Kos-N Priority Ident Portion Coding Fauna Proximal-Distal/Portion Ontology true
Laterality SWN used Boon's laterality codes to create this column from rare information in the Comment columns in Hewitt's original file. this was done in June, 2016
BIGINT  Coded Value uncategorized Boon Hor 11 Laterality none true
HZ The original file created by Hewitt used Horizon designations in 5 digits generated by the Koster Project. These have been replaced to more self explanatory designations based on these original codes by SWN in June, 2016. These cans till be mapped to the EAFWG Chronology
VARCHAR  Coded Value Provenience and Context : Horizontal Location Coding sheet for HZ (KOS-N Horizon 8A-10B Identified) EAFWG Chronology Ontology true
Burn The two coded items include the "number Burned" and none. However, because lines record only one bone, this really operates like a present/absent field. If there is burning then it is a 1 if not then it is a 0. This field DOES not indicate to what extent the bone was burned. Indeterminate bones that are burned are entered on separate lines than those which are not.
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna : Cultural Modification Coding sheet for Burn (KOS-N Horizon 8A-10B Identified) Fauna Burning Intensity Ontology true
Integ This variable records whether or not the specimen is complete. Additional percentages of the bone have been recorded in the variable Completeness as added in June, 2016.
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna : Completeness Koster Site Fauna Integrity Coding Sheet none true
ProvStat Koster Provenience coding, but there is nothing in this column although it may be added in the future to link it more directly to other Koster files.
BIGINT  Coded Value Fauna Coding sheet for ProvStat (KOS-N Horizon 8A-10B Identified) Eastern Archaic Site Type true
Animal Modification Animal modification was not recorded in the original Hewitt file and has been added from Comments by SWN in 2016 using the Boon coding.
VARCHAR  Coded Value uncategorized Boon Hor 11 Animal Modification Fauna Gnawing Ontology true
Butchering Butchering also was only given in comments in the original Hewitt file. SWN created this column in 2016 using the Boon Butcher Mark codes.
VARCHAR  Coded Value uncategorized Boon Hor 11 Butcher Marks Fauna Butchering Ontology true
Other Human Modification This column also was created from comments in 2016 by SWN. It also is rare. The format used for these comments uses IUP Cultural Modification codes.
VARCHAR  Coded Value uncategorized IUP Cult Modification Fauna Worked Bone Ontology true

Keywords

Culture
Archaic

Material
Fauna

Site Name
Koster

Investigation Types
Data Recovery / Excavation

Geographic Keywords
Section 21, T 9 N, R 13 W Greene County in the lower Illinois Valley

Temporal Keywords
Archaic • Mississippian • Woodland

Temporal Coverage

Calendar Date: -7500 to 1200

Spatial Coverage

min long: -90.584; min lat: 39.157 ; max long: -90.49; max lat: 39.265 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Sarah Neusius

Notes

General Note: This dataset includes identifications done by Sarah Neusius in conjunction with her dissertation (1982) as well as some done by Fred Hill. The computer file was created by John Hewitt in conjunction with his own dissertation and does not include the indeterminate specimens or flotation materials used in Neusius' dissertation. These other materials have been recorded in other datasets available under the Koster Project. Researchers using this dataset should combine it with these other datasets for completeness.

File Information

  Name Size Creation Date Date Uploaded Access
Horizon-8A-10B-Ident-07202016.xlsx 765.87kb Jan 19, 2017 7:57:26 PM Public
Koster dataset from Neusius dissertation
  • Translated version Horizon-8A-10B-Ident-07202016_translated.xlsx (1.99mb)
    Data column(s) in this dataset have been associated with coding sheet(s) and translated: