North America - Midwest (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (329 Records)
Research into Late Prehistoric subsistence strategies used by residentially mobile hunter-foragers in the Upper Great Lakes region indicate that there is a complex interplay in the choices made between the exploitation of natural resources and the incorporation of maize and other domesticated plants into those economies. Recent excavations of food processing and storage features coupled with soils analysis elucidating their depositional histories at two Late Prehistoric sites have provided new...
Lawrenz Rising: Preliminary Assessment of a Site Development Chronology for a Mississippian Village in West-Central Illinois (2016)
Recent investigations at Lawrenz Gun Club (11Cs4), a palisaded Mississippian village and earthwork complex in the central Illinois River valley, highlight the importance of integrating landscape-scaled geophysical survey with site formation processes to develop chronologies derived from diverse archaeological and geoarchaeological investigations. A comprehensive geophysical survey of the fortified village complex and surrounding landscape revealed extensive habitation beyond the site palisade....
Learning NAGPRA and Teaching Archaeology (2016)
In 2014 and 2015, researchers from Indiana University received National Science Foundation funding through their Cultivating Cultures of Ethical STEM initiative to study how repatriation is taught and learned, and to work toward interventions to improve the resources available. The “Learning NAGPRA” project prioritizes a more thorough understanding of the challenges and bottlenecks in preparing professionals for work related to NAGPRA and repatriation. It also seeks better ways to assist...
Learning NAGPRA: Nationwide Survey Results (2016)
Although the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed as federal legislation in 1990, it seems that many students do not receive comprehensive coverage of the law and its connections to the broader disciplinary histories of anthropology and museum studies and to professional research ethics. Indiana University was awarded NSF grants in 2014 and 2015 to conduct a nationwide study on NAGPRA teaching and training and to collaborate with specialists in preparing...
"Left Behind": The Transition of a Farming Community Into Camp Atterbury (2015)
On 6 January 1942, the United States Army announced that it would build a 40,000 acre training camp in rural central Indiana. The residents of the farming community were given less than six months before they were displaced from their ancestral land for the construction of the camp. Once gone, several hundred vacated farmsteads were left behind. These farmsteads were demolished and would in 50 years time become archaeological sites. This poster will highlight some of the historic archaeological...
Life During Wartime: Children, Violence, and Security at Morton Village (2017)
Children are not immune to the violence of war. They can be incidental victims, prime targets, active participants, beneficiaries of fierce protection, or the recipients of warfare-related symbolic action. Though not subject to the same high rates of violent trauma as their adult counterparts, the available osteological data show that a small number of children interred in the late prehistoric Norris Farms #36 cemetery in Fulton County, Illinois did suffer traumatic injuries, both fatal and...
Life in a Mississippian Warscape; Violence and Materiality at the Common Field Site (2016)
Analyses and interpretations of Mississippian Period warfare have typically been couched in evolutionary theoretical frameworks that down play, dismiss, or ignore the impacts of endemic violence on the lived experiences of past peoples. Carolyn Nordstrom (1997) advocates the telling of "a different kind of war story," one that focuses on human experiences, tragedies, and creativity during periods of political and social upheaval and violence. In this presentation, I discuss a framework for...
A Life’s Story from a Single Tooth? : a discussion of the value of destructive analyses (2017)
Countless studies have demonstrated that isotopic and ancient DNA analyses of human skeletal remains can provide a valuable added layer of information to the study of past populations and their lifeways. Although improvements in sampling methods and technological advances have greatly reduced the amount of bone or enamel required, these analyses still require the destruction of human remains. Many Native American communities are opposed and do not allow sampling of their ancestors’ remains for...
Lithic Raw Material Procurement at the Multicomponent Prehistoric Wansack Site (36ME61), Mercer County, Pennsylvania: Evidence for Mobility and Trade Patterns through XRF Data (2015)
The Wansack Site (36ME61) is a multicomponent, prehistoric site located in western Pennsylvania (Mercer County). Four seasons of excavation (1974-1977) yielded ample evidence of occupation spanning the Archaic, Woodland, and Late Prehistoric. The present study analyzes the patterns of raw material procurement, seen through the lithic artifacts collected from the site. The primary method utilized to do this is X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. Samples of chert from Flint Ridge, Upper Mercer, and...
Lithic Technological Organization on Grand Island, Michigan, During the Late Archaic Period (2015)
This paper presents the results of a study of subsistence, chipped stone and hot rock technologies, settlement variability, residential mobility, and landscape interactions of the Late Archaic (c. 5,000-2,000 BP) people on Grand Island, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Recent excavations by the Grand Island Archaeological Program (GIAP) have yielded a sizable body of evidence for Late Archaic occupations on Grand Island, which is the largest island of Lake Superior's southern shore. Direct...
Lithics as evidence of social networks and landscape knowledge among the Western Wendat, 1670-1701 (2016)
The Western Wendat were refugees that fled their homeland villages in Ontario in 1649, and resettled in the western Great Lakes. This paper examines the lithic resources from their village at the Straits of Mackinac, inhabited from 1670-1701. Lithics can be indicative of multiple aspects of the resettlement process – particularly knowledge of local resources and strength of social networks. Results show that formal tools, excluding gunflints, tend to be made from cherts from the lower peninsula...
‘Little Hope of Much Trade This Year’: Merchant Capitalism and Community-making in the Late Eighteenth-Century Western Great Lakes Fur Trade (2017)
While the North American Fur Trade has often been examined through economic lenses, scholarship from the 1980s onward has striven to demonstrate that this colonial phenomenon was more than mere trade and merchant capitalism: it also embodied a complex web of social relationships and practices that went beyond daily transactions. In this paper, I unpack the ways in which exchanges, of myriad shapes and forms, between Euro-Canadian fur traders and local Indigenous groups in the Western Great Lakes...
LONG TERM ALLUVIAL RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE: IDENTIFYING PAST LANDSCAPES AND SITE DISTRIBUTION ALONG MIDWEST WATERSHEDS (2015)
The Pleistocene-Holocene climate change had a global effect on the patterns and variations of river channels. Following the Last Glacial Maximum there was site specific variability regarding fluvial reactions, including vegetation, fluvial discharge, dominant sediment transport systems, and climate. This project will investigate and compare the various inputs and routing of sediment in two Midwest watersheds in response to the changing climate of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition and the...
Loon, Fish, and Beaver: Inland Lake subsistence and settlement from the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan (2015)
Small Late Woodland period occupation sites around Hubbard Lake, MI provide a rare opportunity to examine the empirical evidence of seasonality and subsistence from faunal assemblages in the Upper Great Lakes region in light of long-standing models. While much work has been done regarding the Inland Shore fishery of the Upper Great Lakes, there have been few opportunities to consider Inland Lake localities and their importance in Juntunen phase strategies of settlement and subsistence. SAA...
Magnetic Survey of the Mound City Group at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ross County, Ohio (2016)
Mound City Group is a Hopewell mound and enclosure site located in south-central Ohio. The site was originally mapped by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis in 1846. The prehistoric earthworks consisted of 24 mounds within a square embankment wall and surrounded by eight borrow pits above the right bank of the Scioto River. In 1917, the mound group was leveled by the U.S. Army during the construction of the World War I training camp of Camp Sherman, except for Mound 7. After Camp Sherman was razed in...
Making Mounds, Making Communities in the Mississippian Period Midwest (2016)
Community is an expandable concept, at once representing social groups from scales as small as the household to those as broad as pathways of communication. This paper highlights the importance of examining archaeological data at these multiple spatial scales, but also at various scales of time, in order to more fully explore the social and historical processes that directed community development along their varied courses. Examples from several Mississippian period mound centers in the American...
Manufacturing the Gap: Discrete Data, Archaeological Sites, and Cultural Resource Management (2015)
Archaeology in cultural resource management uses methods designed to cover large areas of land, however the results are rarely interpreted as part of a landscape. Instead, the focus is usually on the densest areas of artifacts, without consideration for the types of data that might lie within the less-dense areas. This is primarily a problem of interpretation, although it is exasperated through the use of discontiguous sampling units and through the continued requirements of out-dated methods...
Mapping Residential and Public Space in Cahokia’s Merrell Tract: Results of Recent Magnetic Surveys (2017)
The Merrell Tract is located west of Monk’s Mound and just outside downtown Cahokia. It is well known for excavations of the famous Woodhenge at its west end and a large residential district at the east end. However, very little is known about what lies between. In 2012 and 2013, with logistical funding from the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society and the Illinois Association for Advancement of Archaeology, a large-area magnetic survey was undertaken to determine the density and extent of the area’s...
Marking and Maintaining Empty Spaces: A View from the Golden Eagle Site (2017)
The Golden Eagle (11C120) site enjoys unique status among prehistoric sites of the Lower Illinois River Valley due to its large earthen enclosure. This elliptical ditch and embankment circumscribes a number of mounds assumed to be of Middle Woodland origin (ca. 50 cal BC – cal AD 400), however, other diagnostic Middle Woodland attributes are absent. Magnetic survey and three seasons of excavations with field crews from the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, IL have thus far revealed...
Marking Time and Place - Eclipse Representations in the Late Prehistoric Rock Art of the Central Mississippi River Valley (2016)
Total solar eclipses are perhaps the most dramatic of celestial events. During a total eclipse, for a few moments, while the moon passes unseen between the earth and the sun, viewers positioned directly in line with the sun and moon experience totality. The sun goes black. Day turns suddenly to dusk, winds stir and animals assume their night time behaviors. It is then and only then that the sun’s luminous and variable corona becomes visible. Solar eclipse representations have been widely...
Materializing the Momentary: Community Engagement Through Ethnographic Practice (2015)
Community engagement is a growing aspect of archaeological practice; not only are archaeologists realizing that these kinds of projects are increasingly important to the movement of decolonization in regards to the histories of under-represented communities, but also that these relationships produce valuable knowledge about sites and their life histories. This paper specifically examines the unique ethnographic moment that arises when descendants and archaeologists come together in the practice...
MCIG according to MCIG: historic document research (2015)
The Milwaukee County Institutional Grounds Cemetery in Wauwatosa, WI, operated under the administration of the Milwaukee County Institutions, which prepared official reports for submission to the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors. These primary documents survive in varying degrees of completeness at repositories across Milwaukee and include evidence of the mortuary activities of County institutions that may have buried individuals under institutional care at the MCIG cemetery. Submitted...
Measures of Inequality in the Mississippian Heartland (2016)
Cahokia, the earliest and largest Mississippian (A.D. 1050–1400) mound complex, is situated in the American Bottom of Illinois. It is widely considered to be the center of a regionally integrated polity complete with subsidiary centers, specialized settlements, and rural farmsteads. Investigations at Cahokia proper and in the surrounding countryside over the past 50 years have provided a wealth of data concerning settlement layout, structure size and shape, and the differential distribution of...
Media Portrayals of Viking Rune Stones in North America (2015)
In North America, rune stones of purported Viking origin have been the subjects of excitement, scrutiny, and dispute. The stones have been called hoaxes, and archaeologists and other workers remain unconvinced about the stones’ Viking origin and validity; nevertheless, claims have appeared over time that rune stones, which have turned up in such diverse locations as underwater and on hillsides, contain the inscriptions of Scandinavian explorers in North America, including inland areas, long...
Micro-Regional Approaches to Underwater Landscapes and Submerged Archaeological Sites (2015)
Some of the most pivotal questions in human prehistory hinge on archaeological sites that are now under water. While the discovery of such sites presents technological challenges, they offer unique potentials for investigating time periods, cultures, and adaptations that are only poorly known on land. Unfortunately, underwater research rarely produces the systematic coverage of space and material culture that is needed to conduct anthropologically relevant research. The investigation of...