North America - Plains (Geographic Keyword)
201-223 (223 Records)
The identification of cutmarks has been integral to expanding the understanding of hominin behavior ranging from the origins of meat eating to megafaunal extinctions and the peopling of Australia and the Americas. However, paleoanthropological and archaeological research has demonstrated that while cutmark placement may be indicative of activity, cutmark morphology is more complex and influenced by multiple variables such as raw material, tool shape, and bone density. Further, significant...
Tracing the Emergence of Pan-Indian Conventions of Dress in the Collections of the American Museum of Natural History (2017)
During the late-19th and early- 20th centuries, professional ethnographers/archaeologists and amateur collectors amassed more than 3,000 artifacts of dress and adornment from 17 cultural groups that are now part of the "Plains" collections at the American Museum of Natural History. These objects constitute a material record of conventions of dress that were inconsistently recorded at the time of artifact collection. Drawing on archaeological and ethnographic records, historical documents, and...
Trarsh or Treasure? A Critical Analysis of Hell Gap Zooarchaeology (2016)
Over the past century archaeologists have treated faunal remains differentially:either discarding all bones as unimportant, selectively collecting the informative ones, or treasuring all for eternity and future research. Studies at the stratified Paleoindian Hell Gap site in southeastern Wyoming included several of these treatment options. Our presentation investigates the different treatment of bones at Hell Gap over more than 60 years (1960-2015) of site studies. Such treatment is argued to...
Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs of Bringing Project Archaeology to Oklahoma (2015)
In conjunction with Secretary of the Interior’s new Play, Learn, Serve and Work Initiative, the Bureau of Land Management’s Oklahoma Field Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma has vastly expanded its archaeological outreach program by partnering with Project Archaeology. This partnership marks the first occasion Project Archaeology has been represented in the state of Oklahoma. Initially, we felt creating a new Project Archaeology Program in a state that has had none before would present a monumental task...
Two Paleoarchaic Sites along Wind Creek in Riley County, Kansas (2016)
CEMML archaeologists recently identified and tested two closely related Paleoarchaic sites, 14RY8129 and 14RY8130, on the Fort Riley Installation. These sites are positioned on the south side of Wind Creek, which is a minor perennial tributary of Wildcat Creek, and part of the larger Kansas River watershed. Survey and testing at the two sites recovered several fragmentary projectile points diagnostic of the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods, including a unifacially fluted Clovis point; a...
UAS Vehicles (Drones) and the Documentation Rock Art Effigies on the Great Plains (2016)
The identification and documentation of anthropomorphic rock art effigies on the Great Plains of North America has long been a compelling yet understudied area of research for archaeologists and anthropologists. The recent advent of new technologies, like UAS vehicles (Drones) have enabled new ways for researchers to gather data on such sites and identify locations adapting photogrammetric and remote sensing techniques alongside traditional site documentation practices. The research presented...
Upper Republican and Apishapa Interaction on the High Plains (2016)
On the High Plains of North America, geographical separation and cultural isolation were not the same phenomena. Upper Republican and Apishapa archaeological units, for example, represented separate ethno-linguistic groups, but they were not isolated. Apishapa pottery at the Wallace site (Upper Republican) and Upper Republican pottery at Cramer (Apishapa) demonstrate reciprocal interaction. We argue that the calumet ceremony facilitated this interaction, rather than residential mobility....
Use of Old Photos in Rock Art Recording and Analysis: The Adams Collection of Central Wyoming (2016)
Historic photographs are particularly useful in rock art studies for assessing early and changing site conditions that show effects, rates, and chronology of natural weathering and vandalism. This includes such alterations as removed and added figures, altered figures, entire affected panels, chalking, latex recording, and deleterious effects of well-intentioned physical conservation. Such changes indicate not only physical changes in the art but also influences on possible direct dating and...
Use of Ultraviolet Imaging to Enhance Analysis of Incised Stone Artifacts (2017)
Monochrome ultraviolet (UV) photography provides a new method in the analysis of incised imagery on stone artifacts. In this study, the technique is used to enhance the interpretation of figures on a collection of finely incised catlinite tablets from the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota. The nine hand-sized tablets included here are commonly associated with the Oneota tradition, although these display designs rooted in Plains themes. These tablets are ideal for the method as...
Using GIS in Archaeological Research: A New Look at Hunting Rock Art Sites (2015)
Place, space, and movement are core concepts for analyzing how cultural behaviors of traditional hunting societies shape a landscape. Sites mark the use of a landscape and connect people to particular events, movements, or places on this landscape. Analysis of rock art must consider who created and used this art and the roles it played in shaping landscape use. Panels depicting hunting scenes have been recorded at communal hunting sites, in rockshelters that served as habitation areas, and as...
Using Petrographic Analysis to Identify Pottery Production: Shoshone Pottery Making at the Ravens Nest (48SU3871) Southwestern Wyoming (2016)
Petrographic analysis has been commonly used to identify trade in ceramics and stone tools. At the Raven’s Nest site petrographic analysis was used to characterize the compositional variation in the ceramic assemblage recovered during excavation. The homogeneous nature of the ceramic pastes of the assemblage prompted additional petrographic study of local soils and geologic outcrops. Comparison of the local resources with the ceramics indicated the possibility for the local production of pottery...
Weaponry Standardization and the Potential for Sharing at the Agate Basin Site (2017)
This study explores the potential for sharing of weaponry elements during communal hunts, and the implications of sharing pertaining to the overall technological organization of Agate Basin hunting groups. K-means cluster analysis was utilized to determine whether hafted-area morphologies on Agate Basin points were standardized and displayed properties consistent with expectations we might have if sharing of weaponry elements incorporated into the preparation for a communal hunt. I argue two...
Were the Wichita Using Ilex Vomitoria While Living Along the Arkansas River In Kansas (2015)
Were the Wichita consuming Ilex vomitoria in a ritual context while living in the Arkansas River Basin in Kansas? Prior to moving into the Arkansas river basin the Caddoan speaking tribes of Wichita were located further south in Oklahoma and Texas where Ilex vomitoria grows naturally and was consumed, however it is not a plant that naturally thrives in Kansas. To determine if there is evidence of Ilex vomitoria use FTIR Testing was performed on pottery shreds around one small vessel found at...
What if the restaurant isn’t at the end of the universe but in a much nicer place? (2015)
In their 2012 paper, 'The restaurant at the end of the universe,' O’Connell and Allen developed a speculative and far-reaching model for the colonization of Sahul, one that sees initial populations as small, spatially concentrated in scattered ‘sweet’ spots, and which exhibited only occasional growth spurts and geographic expansion along extant coastlines. Although granting the obvious differences between the environmental stage and historical conditions under which the Pleistocene colonization...
When Charismatic Megafauna Meet: The Relationship between Archaeologists and Proboscideans in North America (2015)
Archaeologists have a unique relationship with the faunal record of proboscideans. The interpretative histories associated with mammoths and mastodons, particularly in North America, are wholly unlike those of other zooarchaeological species both extinct and extant. Distinctively divisive, consequential, and enduring, the interpretive attention and rhetoric focused on proboscideans has proceeded largely independent of the known inventory of sites and assemblages in Pleistocene North America....
Where Men Get Their Meat: Predicting Jump Locations at the Grapevine Creek Buffalo Jump Complex (2016)
Buffalo jumps have long been part of Crow oral histories. In 1962, at Grapevine Creek in Montana, Joseph Medicine Crow recounted oral histories to identify two buffalo jumps and associated drive lines above cliffs overlooking the floodplain. In 2015, a team of archaeologists, and Crow tribal monitors from the Tribal Historic Preservation Office employed geoarchaeological methods to investigate whether bison bones might be preserved in primary context in the drainage. We focused on recorded oral...
Where Rivers Flow: Mandan and Hidatsa Subsistence Economies from an Archaeomalacological Perspective (2015)
Three classes of molluscan data generated from Mandan and Hidatsa villages along Heart and Knife river drainages in North Dakota are reviewed: freshwater bivalve, marine, and fossil gastropod shell. An outline of Mandan and Hidatsa ethnomalacology obtained from native collaborators is found in the writings of anthropologists Gilbert L. Wilson and Alfred W. Bowers and corresponds with the aforementioned molluscan classes. Mandan and Hidatsa subsistence economies are diverse during the longue...
Where the Buffalo Groan: Topographic Variables Governing the Placement and Spatial Organization of Wold Bison Jump, Wyoming (2016)
The Wold Bison Jump in Johnson County, Wyoming, is one of many prehistoric, mass kill sites scattered across the Plains. At Wold, a foraging basin of prime ungulate grazing habitat abuts the gently sloping backside of a bluff. Funnel-shaped drivelines of cairns extend across the top of the bluff towards a treacherous cliff. The drive was configured to constrain stampeding bison (Bison sp.) as prehistoric hunters communally drove them from the foraging basin to the precipice. Previous GIS...
Where the Buffalo Still Roam: Archeology of a Buffalo Jump and Prehistoric Village Site at Wind Cave National Park (2015)
In 2011 Wind Cave National Park acquired new lands that include an important prehistoric site where American Indians once made their homes and practiced communal hunting. Two seasons of work at the site have resulted in the discovery of drive lines, rock cairns, processing areas, stone circles, ceremonial features and much more. What has been found at the site is equally as important as the way the work has been conducted, including the involvement of tribal monitors and volunteers, tribal...
"Where the Mountains Meet the Plains": Plains-Pueblo Connections on the Park and Chaquaqua Plateaus During the Diversification Period, AD 1050-1450 (2015)
The Park and Chaquaqua Plateaus—politically bisected by the Colorado-New Mexico state line—are distinctive geographical features that demarcate the transition from the Rocky Mountains to the Llano Estacado and High Plains. Regional archaeology has emphasized interpretation of sites as part of a cultural demarcator between the Northern Rio Grande Pueblos and residents of the Southern and Central Plains. Yet there has been limited work to examine local, between-household interactions and the...
Working Together to Save Our Culture: Creating a Tribal Register of Historical Places (2017)
Not long ago, the Spirit Lake Oyate and Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate were a single band, part of the Dakota Nation, living in the homeland we had occupied for millennia. Manifest Destiny, greed, and racism led to war and the establishment of reservations. Over the decades, the US Government separated our people as they divided the land for settlement. Today, we are working together to bring our people back together based on the places that matter the most. Together the Spirit Lake Tribe and the...
Wyoming Dinwoody Tradition Rock Art Superimpositions (2016)
This poster presents superimposition sequences of Dinwoody Tradition Rock Art. The sites discussed are located in west central Wyoming. The superimpositions include those of styles within the Dinwoody Tradition and with styles that predate and postdate the Dinwoody Tradition. The poster also addresses difficulties associated with the evaluations of superimpositions within the Dinwoody Tradition. The sequences establish a relative chronology for the images.
X-Ray Analysis of Mandibles from a 2000 Year-Old Bison Kill Site in Western Oklahoma (2015)
The seasonality of the kill events from Certain site in Beckham County, Oklahoma is determined through x-ray analysis of bison mandibles. The distribution of bison dentition at archaeological sites has been studied extensively to provide information about seasonality, age, diet, and migration patterns. Because bison calf at roughly the same time during the year, understanding the age at death determines the seasonality of the kill. Knowing the seasonality of a bison kill reveals when a site was...