North America - Plains (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (223 Records)
Chronology is key to understanding the story of the first Americans. Accurate and precise ages from sites are necessary to develop chronological relationships and overlaps among different Paleoindian complexes. Proper dating of any Paleoindian horizon requires an understanding of the geological context, geochemical environment and potential contamination factors, material and chemical fraction dated, number of ages obtained, and many other variables. Without understanding these factors of...
Bull Creek: A Paleoindian Camp in the Oklahoma Panhandle (2017)
Bull Creek is one of a handful of Paleoindian camps, which has survived the taphonomic consequences of time. In this presentation we will discuss our current understanding of the site and it’s inhabitants. The topics discussed include environmental reconstruction and the broader use and reuse of the surrounding region by Paleoindian people. Snapshots of butchering techniques have been captured at Bull Creek as well as differential seasonal use of the site. After the third season of excavation...
Buried Middle Archaic Period Occupations on the James River at 39BE122 (2015)
Evaluative test excavations were conducted at 39BE122 for the Bureau of Reclamation. One test unit and eight backhoe trenches were excavated. Six paleosols were documented in the upper 3 m of alluvium, four of which yielded evidence for cultural components. Four to five components were found from 140 to 290 cm below surface. Radiocarbon dates of 3690+/-30 B.P. from Component 2 and 5140 +/- 30 B.P. from Component 4 demonstrate a Plains Middle Archaic age for the site. The size, artifact...
BUTCHERING PATTERNS & SEASONALITY OF THE CERTAIN SITE, WESTERN OKLAHOMA (2016)
The Certain Site is a Late Archaic site in Western Oklahoma that contains at least five arroyo bison trap kills totaling over 200 animals. Numerous bison bones from these kills exhibit evidence of butchering – cut marks, green bone breaks, embedded tools. The butchering sequences associated with each kill was identified through thorough examination of these butchering marks from the site’s various arroyo kill localities. Combined with previously identified seasonality estimates for each kill, I...
Butchering practices at the Vore Buffalo Jump (48CK302): investigating organization with the nearest neighbor test (2017)
Spatial recognition of organization at mass kill sites is often commented on in the literature but is rarely systematically investigated. The goal of this paper is to investigate social organization of butchery with the nearest neighbor test. The lack of these sorts of methods in the literature is primarily due to the ever-changing methods of archaeological excavation and limited ability to easily analyze provenience data. In the literature, observations of organization and spatial patterning...
Ceramic Analysis at Chief Looking's Village (32BL3) in Bismarck, ND (2016)
Chief Looking’s Village (32BL3), also known as Ward Earth Lodge Village, is located near downtown Bismarck, ND. This site, occupied for a relatively short period in the mid-1500s, displays two distinctly different house types, one "local" and one "foreign" in design. Potential storage pits within two house outlines at Chief Looking’s Village, identified through remote sensing, were excavated by the Paleo Cultural Research Group during the 2015 summer field season, and the artifacts analyzed...
Changing Foodways in Culture Contact Contexts on the Northern Great Plains: Lipid Residue Analysis at the Double Ditch Site, North Dakota (2016)
Disentangling drivers of technological change and continuity in culture contact situations is complex. In the northern Great Plains, earthlodge village groups are reported to have abandoned traditional ceramic containers for certain tasks by the early 19th century. The veracity of these observations is confounded by other contact situation processes, such as epidemics, which also impacted ceramic production and use. Ethnoarchaeology has documented the use of particular vessel types exclusively...
Characterizing Cut Marks: A Comparison of Cooper and Badger Hole Butchery Patterns (2016)
By describing tool cut marks on bones, Eileen Johnson elevated such incisions to the status of artifact. The size, shape, and morphology provided more than just details of cutting but also came with controversy as to whether these marks alone indicated a human presence. Building on the procedures employed by Johnson on the Southern Plains Cooper site bison bones, the Badger Hole kill assemblage is analyzed to provide a comparison of Folsom bison butchery at sites separated by only 0.7 km...
Characterizing Eighteenth Century Technological Changes in Pawnee Pottery (2015)
The pottery produced by the Pawnee of the central Great Plains of North America underwent extensive modification in the eighteenth century. Although twentieth-century archaeologists described the "early" and "late" materials, they did not adequately characterize how Pawnee potters modified their craft in terms of vessel morphology or technological practice, nor did they consider pottery function. Thus, we have no satisfactory account of this change. Situated in the context of technological...
Characterizing Micaceous Vessels on the Central High Plains (2016)
Ceramic vessels made from micaceous materials appear at many Protohistoric Dismal River (Ancestral Apache; AD 1600-1750) sites in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming. Dismal River groups were participants in large social and economic exchange networks linking them to other peoples on the Plains and U.S. Southwest. Previous scholars considered the micaceous pottery recovered from these Central High Plains sites as evidence of interaction with northern Rio Grande pueblos and assumed that all...
Cheval Bonnet: A Crow Calling Card in Blackfeet Country (2017)
Cheval Bonnet is a small petroglyph site on Cut Bank Creek, just east of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation that shows a Crow Indian coup counting scene and three other horses, two of which can be identified as the products of Crow artists by their form and the stylized war bonnet worn by each animal. Located in a hidden canyon adjacent to a major stream crossing, the site represents a "calling card" similar to other biographic images drawn both as petroglyphs and arborglyphs during the late...
Chien Opératoire: Dogs as Technological Systems in the Northern Great Plains (2017)
In the past, like today, dogs (Canis familiaris) were not only human companions, they were also tools, beasts of burden, alarm systems, sources of food, and ritual elements. Since first domesticated, humans have shaped dogs physically and behaviorally, and they have, in turn, shaped our societies. As such, domesticated canines can be treated as a form of technology, regardless of their own forms of agency. By technology we refer to objects (i.e., dogs and linked artifacts), related practices,...
Children's Health in Archaic Texas: A Paleopathological Analysis of Juvenile Remains (2017)
While many dissertations, theses, and publications have repeatedly touted the relatively low number of juvenile burials at Texas mortuary sites, this research project serves to reconsider their importance in the archaeological record. The Archaic Period mortuary sites of Ernest Witte and Morhiss on the Western Gulf Coastal Plains of Texas have an abundance of juvenile skeletons on which to conduct an analysis. Juvenile bones are especially susceptible to extrasomatic stress where adult bones may...
Circling the Wagons for the Santa Fe National Historic Trail - Partnering for Preservation (2016)
Since its designation as a National Historic Trail in 1987, partnerships between government agencies, preservation organizations, contractors, local communities, and individuals have been essential for identifying, marking, preserving, protecting physical traces and historical landscapes as well as, recognizing, interpreting, and promoting research and recreation along the Santa Fe National Historic Trail. In southwest Kansas and southeast Colorado, these diverse partnerships have been...
A CLG in the Wilderness: Cooperative Local Preservation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (2016)
The Shoshone National Forest (Northwestern Wyoming) encompasses some of the most remote, inaccessible landscapes in the continental United States with 56% (1.4 million acres) designated Wilderness. Documenting, researching, and managing heritage resources in these Wilderness areas provides special challenges. A fundamental issue is that little basic archaeological inventory has been conducted and working in the area is logistically difficult. Over the last several years, a partnership between...
Clovis and Folsom from the Central Plains: Projectile point breakage, distributions, and material types as indicators of prehistoric land use and subsistence strategies (2016)
Clovis and Folsom artifact distributions, particularly projectile points, are not homogenous throughout the Central Plains. Uneven artifact distributions are in part attributed to diverse land use and hunting techniques that resulted in distinct artifact breakage patterns. Lithic material use and transportation is also unique. These differences are partially driven by changing ecosystems during the terminal Pleistocene. Models of Clovis and Folsom land use are explored to account for the...
Clovis Points, Trade Beads, and Everything in Between: Collections at the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository (2016)
This poster details the archaeological collections housed at the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository (UWAR) located in Laramie. The repository houses approximately 3 million artifacts from 15,000 different Wyoming sites as well as comparative, replica, experimental, and educational materials. We highlight our extensive suite of artifacts from across the state, which includes artifacts from all time periods from the Paleoindian to the Historic. Many of these objects are submitted...
Clovis-Killed Mammals (2017)
Published opinion pieces about Clovis prey choices are unintentionally misleading. Over 120 individual animals from 8 extinct megafaunal species (or 12, depending upon taxonomy) were killed by Clovis people in a relatively short time span, according to conservative estimates -- and the number is even higher in some lists. The 11 Clovis sites said to have acceptable evidence for human predation on mammoths actually contain 50-53 separate individuals, some being discrete kills that should be...
"Come Together, Right Now:" The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network and Its Role in Oklahoma Public Archaeology (2017)
Like many other states, Oklahoma has a long history of productive public archaeology, with citizen and professional stakeholders working side-by-side to further archaeological research and preservation. However, the changing nature of archaeology (most particularly the shift to a heavy emphasis on compliance work) has led to miscommunication and misunderstanding among the many stakeholders in Oklahoma’s archaeological community and to less-productive working relationship among them than existed...
Coming-for-the-Bison, Going-to-the-Sun – Evolution and Significance of Staging Places on the Northern Rocky Mountain Front (2015)
As early as the terminal Pleistocene, the northern Rockies witnessed human movement across mountain passes and high terraces overlooking expanses of boreal forest, tundra, and melting ice. Applying lessons learned from David H. Thomas’ work in the central Great Basin, we combine the archaeology, geomorphology, and ethnohistory of the St. Mary River Bridge Site (24GL203) and other sites in the vicinity of east Glacier National Park to discuss how mobile groups colonized a landscape characterized...
Communal Hunting and Teasing Out Signs of Cooperation in the Past (2017)
Communal hunting represents an intensification on particular prey species requiring significant cooperation and coordination, but identifying the social organization of this extinct mode of terrestrial hunting in North America leaves inquiries relegated to evidence derived from archaeology and ethnohistory. One tangible line of evidence used to identify social interaction between participants in hunting activity has been meat sharing. Yet observing meat sharing in the archaeological record has...
Community Archaeology at the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp, Park County, Wyoming (2017)
Heart Mountain was one of ten confinement camps established by the U.S. government during World War Two to incarcerate Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. Located in northwest Wyoming, the camp had a peak population of nearly 11,000 incarcerees, making it the third largest settlement in the state at that time. The Park County Historic Preservation Commission recently partnered with the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center to carry out mapping and test excavations at...
A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Instrumental Techniques at Differentiating Outcrops of Edwards Plateau Chert at the Hyper-Local Scale (2015)
Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) has become a common tool in compositional studies of archaeological materials due to its quick analytical time and ever-increasing capability with new models and technology. Additionally, pXRF is also beginning to see widespread use for sourcing archaeological materials. This study compares pXRF with two other widely accepted analytical techniques, Laser Ablation – Inductively Coupled Plasma – Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and Instrument Neutron Activation...
A Comparison of Two Bluff Top Prehistoric Sites at Fort Riley, Kansas (2017)
We compare two sites (14RY3180 and 14RY3184), located on the bluffs above the Kansas River valley on the Fort Riley Military Installation. We examine how these sites were initially interpreted and reassess their significance. This reassessment is based on recent field work at 14RY3184, while our insights about 14RY3180 derive from a reexamination of its lithic assemblage and a new AMS date. We demonstrate through this comparison that 14RY3180 and 14RY3184 were used for different activities, even...
Conservation and Preservation Issues Post Fire (2017)
Wild fire damage to rock art can have long term effects. Panels may continue to spall over time from the fire damage or from the effects of soluble salts that were activated and spread during the fire. Rock outcrops and slopes may become destabilized after fire denudes vegetation. Panels can be buried or have ashy sediments washed down from the cliff tops above. What happens over time after wild fire kills lichen growing on rock art? Observations and studies following two large wild fires that...