North America - Plains (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (223 Records)
We analyze stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic data from over 200 foragers from inland, riverine, and coastal settings on the Texas Coastal Plain. Prehistoric foragers on the Texas Coastal Plain faced the challenge of maintaining a robust supply of food despite constant changes in their environments, including seasonal changes and changes that occurred over decades-to-centuries, like climate change and sea level rise. Given that coastal estuaries and inland river valleys had resources that...
Cooperation and Order among Communal Bison Hunters (2017)
This paper discusses the trajectories and intersections of cooperative practices and ordering strategies among prehistoric communal bison hunters. Utilizing the vast and ancient record of bison hunting in the region and particularly in Montana, the paper specifically focuses on the rise of large-scale bison harvests in the northwestern Plains of North America, and the effect of hunting technology on social cooperation at various scales (kin, band, supra-band). As well, the paper delves on the...
Cosmograms and Archetype Ancestors at the Pierson Creek & Yaremko Sites, Iowa (2015)
Recently discovered geoglyphs at two Late Woodland sites in northwestern Iowa take the form of anthropomorphic turtles, bison, thunderers and a "stickman" similar to the petroglyphs at Pipestone Monument in southern Minnesota. Excavations indicate the geoglyphs functioned as cosmograms where vision quests and other life-renewal rituals probably were conducted. The cosmograms and associated evidence for rituals are compared to ethnographic descriptions of Lakota tribal myths to reveal possible...
Creating a Community in Confinement: The Development of Neighborhoods in Amache, a WWII Japanese American Internment Camp (2015)
In 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers and designed to house around 10,000 individuals, these centers followed a rigid, gridded layout that allowed for the rapid construction of what were ostensibly cities. Residential sections were laid out in blocks, each containing twelve "apartment" buildings to which internees were assigned on...
CRM as Heritage in Communities on the Great Plains: Northern Cheyenne and Spirit Lake Nations (2015)
Federal Agencies have long been required to consult with Tribal Nations; however, true consultation has been lacking. The table was tilted in favor of local land managers who have been free to make decisions on consultation and resource management, often with little or no insight from the descendant communities; however, that is changing. Coinciding with the rise of Tribal Higher Education, Tribal Nations on the Great Plains have begun to take charge of the consultation process, and change the...
CRM as Heritage in Communities on the Great Plains: Northern Cheyenne and Spirit Lake Nations (2015)
Federal Agencies have long been required to consult with Tribal Nations; however, true consultation has been lacking. The table was tilted in favor of local land managers who have been free to make decisions on consultation and resource management, often with little or no insight from the descendant communities; however, that is changing. Coinciding with the rise of Tribal Higher Education, Tribal Nations on the Great Plains have begun to take charge of the consultation process, and change the...
Crossing Boundaries: Lubbock Lake Landmark as a Laboratory for the Study of Vertebrate Evolution (2016)
The unique characteristics of the Lubbock Lake Landmark offer a rare opportunity to ask questions about how vertebrates respond to changes in the environment. In order to address such questions in the fossil record several qualities are required including a continuous sequence of fossils, reliable dates for the stratigraphic layers, large sample sizes of well preserved and homogenous skeletal elements, and a detailed understanding of the environmental conditions associated with each...
DECIPHERING WPA ARCHAEOLOGY ON THE NORTHWESTERN PLAINS: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE CULTURAL CHRONOLOGY OF PICTOGRAPH CAVE (2015)
Pictograph Cave (24YL0001) located in south-central Montana was excavated by Works Progress Administration (WPA) crews between 1937 and 1941. Excavations extended to depths of 23 feet, yet no radiocarbon dates for the site were available until recently. Efforts to re-catalog and process the artifact collection to professional standards were undertaken along with the creation of three-dimensional models of the excavations rendered from WPA stratigraphy maps. Newly created databases allowed for...
Descendant Communities and Curriculum Development; Working Towards a Culturally Relevant Development Process (2017)
Archaeological excavations at the Absaroka Agency, a Crow Indian Agency located near present-day Absaroka, Montana, provided an opportunity to develop educational materials using authentic archaeological data. Staff from Project Archaeology, a national archaeology education program, designed and developed curriculum materials for upper elementary students using the archaeological evidence from the excavations at the agency site. These materials use archaeology to teach students historical and...
Developing A Minimally Invasive Protocol For Assessing Site Eligibility On The North Training Area, Camp Guernsey, Wyoming (2015)
The North Training Area of Camp Guernsey is located within the Hartville Uplift of eastern Wyoming, an area rich in archaeological resources particularly extensive formations of toolstone quality raw materials. Because of the potential for live training exercises to impact cultural resources, the Wyoming National Guard proposed the development of an experimental testing protocol of selected sites using minimally invasive methodologies that included geophysics and small diameter auger probes. ...
Differentiating History: Criteria to Distinguish Between Historic Euro and Native American Sites in Wind Cave National Park (2016)
Wind Cave National Park, just north of Hot Springs, South Dakota, became a National Park in 1903. Because of its location in the heart of the Black Hills, the land now protected by the National Park System has been a hotbed of human activity for thousands of years and is the location of many archaeological sites, both prehistoric and historic. However, some of the most intriguing sites that can be found within the park’s boundaries are those of indeterminate origin. Sites with both historic (ie....
Discovery Bias, Excavation Bias, Clovis Diet, and Archaeological Mythmaking (2016)
The myth of Paleoindian big-game specialization has deep roots in our field. None of these roots run deeper than for the Clovis Period, where the vision of humans armed with stone-tipped spears attacking animals the size of extinct elephants has enchanted the public and professional imaginations almost equally. But issues of differential site discovery and investigation run equally deep, and this is especially so for Clovis archaeology. Ancient archaeological sites left by mobile hunters can be...
The Dismal River Complex and the Continuing Debate of Early Apachean Presence on the Central Great Plains (2017)
Great Plains Apachean groups have a strong documentary presence between the mid-1500s to the early 1700s, but the archaeological record of these groups is poorly understood. Early researchers such as James Gunnerson and Waldo Wedel argued strongly that Dismal River sites represented the earliest expression for Apachean groups in the Central Great Plains. These claims are still widely accepted, in part because there is little recent work to contradict them. The exciting research on early Navajo...
Documenting the Legendary 1844 Flood from a Kaw Village in the Kansas River Valley (2015)
Geoarchaeological fieldwork has documented an alluvial deposit associated with a flood event which overtopped a relatively high terrace in the Kansas River Valley near present day Topeka, Kansas. The deposit, defined as an overwash phase, exhibits structures indicative of flowing water. The overwash phase’s position, overlying a historic Kaw Village, corroborates second hand historic accounts which date its origin to a flood in the year A.D. 1844. This flood event probably resulted in the rapid...
Dog Days to Horse Days: Evaluating the Rise of Nomadic Pastoralism among the Blackfoot (2016)
This paper will examine the extent to which the adoption of the horse created a transition in Blackfoot modes of production from hunting and gathering to incipient nomadic pastoralism by tracing the horse’s effect on Blackfoot settlement patterns and landscape uses during the protohistoric and historic periods in the northwestern Plains. While the socio-economic consequences of the horse’s introduction have been studied from a historical perspective, the archaeology of this transition remains...
Domesticated Animals as a Source of Cultural Change during the Contact Period on the Northwestern Plains (2017)
Despite functioning as pack animals, guards, religious figures, and even companions, dogs were never as integral to Blackfoot culture as the horse became. To date, researchers have most often characterized the relationship of Blackfoot people and their horses by framing the horse as an "upgraded model"—a "new and improved" dog. While prior experience with domesticated dogs did facilitate the incorporation of horses into the daily lives of Blackfoot people, this paper argues that the fundamental...
Eastern New Mexico University Archaeological Collections (2016)
Home of the Clovis type-site and the Blackwater Draw Museum, as well as the Agency for Conservation Archaeology, Eastern New Mexico University serves as a repository for varied collections from within the state of New Mexico and from farther afield. Numerous well-known and respected archaeologists have held positions at the university and conducted fieldwork in the region, leaving their archaeological materials in trust. Additionally, the USDA Forest Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers...
El Sauz chert: physical and chemical characterization of a long-used lithic resource in south Texas (2016)
El Sauz chert is a lithic resource in south Texas that was used to make stone tools dating from Early Archaic (3500-6000 BC) to Late Prehistoric (AD 700) times. Located in Starr County, Texas a few miles north of the Rio Grande are two chert quarries associated with altered rhyolitic ash of the Catahoula Formation. Given its restricted occurrence, El Sauz chert offers a unique opportunity to study prehistoric exchange and resource procurement. Tools of this chert are common east of the...
Endscrapers Across the Folsom World (2015)
This paper explores variability in Folsom adaptive strategies by examining endscraper technology throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Common reconstructions based on highly curated projectile points and bifaces as well as presence of exotic raw material portray Folsom people as highly mobile and technologically organized in the sole pursuit of bison. Recent studies have begun questioning such a rigid perspective concerning Folsom life ways. Utilizing endscraper assemblages from...
Entangled complexity: Spiro, religion, and food (2017)
Understanding past peoples – those living in different places, spaces and times – requires archaeologists to reorient how we see and experience the world. We have the ability to move beyond recording the physical traces of past lives to get to the central goal of our discipline – understanding how people lived, participated in and tied themselves to communities, and connected to larger systems. Instead of forming stagnant images of the past, we need to remember the dynamism of choices made and...
Equus ferus caballus during the Protohistoric in Wyoming: Looking for the Horse in the Archaeological Record (2017)
The introduction of Equus caballus (modern horse) into North America during European-American contact altered Native American life on the Plains. The horse influenced a variety of cultural practices including the distance at which resources could be exploited, the amount of material goods that could be transported and war practices. Considering the importance of the horse it should be expected that horse remains would be prevalent in the archaeological record. Despite the impact of the horse on...
Ethics and Artifact Collecting: Interviews with Montana Collectors (2017)
Why do people collect artifacts? This paper summarizes the results of twenty interviews with artifact collectors and tribal members regarding the non-professional collection of artifacts of American Indian heritage in Montana. The results of this research are relevant to the current debates regarding the ethical considerations surrounding collaborations among professional archaeologists and artifact collectors. In particular, this research highlights divergent perspectives regarding the meaning...
Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives on Folsom Households (2015)
Over the few decades, households have been identified in a handful of Folsom sites. Although it should surprise no one that the Pleistocene inhabitants of North America built, lived in, and used domestic structures, it may be surprising we know relatively little about how those household spaces were organized. This problem is hardly unique to Folsom. It could be argued that this is true of hunter-gatherer household archaeology as a whole. Part of the difficulty we encounter in interpreting...
Etzanoa: A Northern Caddoan Town (2017)
Documents associated with the Juan de Oñate expedition of 1601 allow identification of the proto-Wichita (Quiviran) town that he visited. Described by natives as taking two or three days to walk through, the Spanish saw only parts of it. Still, they counted 1,700 to 2,000 houses in the southern end of the community, which was described as about two leagues (five miles) long. Above that point, the Spanish traveled away from the river for another three leagues, and when scouts returned to the...
An Examination of Pocket Gopher Use at the Woodland Period Rainbow Site (13PM91), Iowa (2016)
The Rainbow site (13PM91) is a multi-component Woodland site situated within the tallgrass prairie of northwest Iowa. Excavated in the late 1970’s, the site remains one of few examples within the region for Woodland period habitation sites with substantial recovered faunal collections. The current study focuses on the seemingly unusual concentration of pocket gophers (Geomys bursarius) found within Cultural Horizon C (~1400-1370 BP). Recent reanalysis of the faunal assemblage reveals a presence...