North America - Midwest (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (329 Records)
Excavations at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in 1991 and 1992 recovered 1649 individuals associated with Milwaukee County’s practice from the mid-1800s through 1974 of providing burial for institutional residents, unidentified or unclaimed individuals sent from the Coroner’s Office, and community poor. In 2013, Historic Resource Management Services of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee recovered an additional 632 individual coffin burials representing...
A 1000-Year Record of Cahokia Region Population Change through Fecal Stanol Biomarker Analysis (2017)
Determining the timing and magnitude of Cahokia’s demographic rise and fall is crucial to understanding the reasons for its advance and collapse. Fecal stanol biomarker analysis is an emergent geoarchaeological method that may provide a more direct record of Cahokia region population change than previous population estimates. This study analyzed sediment from Horseshoe Lake, Illinois for fecal stanol content to establish a population proxy of the Cahokia region. The stanol record indicates...
The 1912 Grave Desecration of the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Poor Farm's Cemetery (2015)
This research looks at the institutional desecration of graves at the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds as overseen by Superintendent Ferdinand Bark, the reaction of the surrounding community to that disturbance, and the ensuing investigation. The paper also explores the relationship of this historical event to the evidence from the 1990s and 2013 archaeological excavations conducted at the location of the cemetery. The event will be viewed within the historical context in which it happened...
19th Century Mining Life in Michigan's Upper Peninsula - The American West on the Wrong Side of the 100th Meridian (2015)
The western Upper Peninsula of Michigan was home to many mining boom towns, similar to those associated more commonly with the American West. Clifton, the town site of the first profitable Copper Mine in Michigan, attracted workers of diverse ethnic backgrounds: Cornish, German, Irish, Native American, and African American. Michigan Technological University has conducted five seasons of field work at Clifton and the Cliff Mine, and has uncovered material remains that aid in the remembrance of...
A 3D Method for Measuring Platform Angles on Lithic Flakes (2017)
The measurement of platform angles on lithic flakes by hand is notoriously difficult, and is plagued by intra- and inter-observer variability. The measurement method proposed in this poster uses 3D models of flakes loaded into Blender, a free open-source 3D design program. After identifying the platform, two points (a) and (b) are defined at the intersections of the left and right lateral margins and the platform. A line (a-b) is drawn between these two points, ignoring any platform roundedness...
A-Maize-ing: Phytolith evidence for an early introduction of maize in the Upper Great Lakes diet (2017)
There is no recorded maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) at Laurel or North Bay Initial/Middle Woodland sites in the northern Lake Michigan-Huron or Superior basins of the western Great Lakes, despite the presence of maize microbotanicals in Michigan, New York, and Quebec as early as 400 BC. To evaluate the potential for an early maize presence in this region, samples of carbonized food residues adhering to sixteen ceramic vessels from the Laurel/North Bay Winter site (20DE17) were processed and...
Absences and Abandonments in the Mississippian Midwest (2015)
Archaeological studies of hypothesized regional abandonments often perform what Tim Ingold (2008) refers to as "a logic of inversion;" by drawing lines around sites, regions, and spaces we create boundaries in which life is lived, and by extension, create spaces where life is not lived. In examples of abandonments, the absence of evidence related to human living spaces is taken as the absence of (human) life. In other words, when we demarcate "abandoned" or "unoccupied spaces" (noted as such by...
An Abundance of Data: The Opportunities and Constraints of Digital Media Utilization at Fort Snelling National Historic Landmark (2017)
Intensively recorded, researched, and utilized historic and archaeological sites present many unique opportunities and issues in their study and interpretation. One such site is Fort Snelling National Historic Landmark. The large amounts of historic map and archival data available throughout the history of Fort Snelling allows for both more complete, and more complex understandings of the site. The use of georeferenced archival maps can highlight and visualize a timeline for the progression of...
Acorn Oil Rendering in the Upper Great Lakes (2017)
Recent research in the Upper Great Lakes region has demonstrated the importance of acorns as a dietary staple. As a plentiful and easily storable source of carbohydrates and fats, acorns provide an excellent dietary complement. Organic residue analysis of pottery sherds and fire-cracked rock from Grand Island, Michigan yielded lipid profiles consistent with nut oil, suggesting that the vessels may have been used to process acorns through boiling or simmering. In order to make many species of...
Addressing Anthropogenic Safety Concerns in the Archeological Workplace: A Case Study (2015)
The changing nature of contract and academic archaeology has led to new safety challenges that cannot be addressed simply through adherence to OSHA regulations. In this paper we move beyond the still-relevant environmental safety challenges that were the focus of earlier work on archaeology and workplace safety, and examine anthropogenic safety issues that can commonly arise during fieldwork. We address issues such as potential theft, assault, harassment, uncontrolled animals, as well as the...
Age-at-Death Estimations from Helton Mound 20 (2017)
The original age at death estimations of the adult individuals excavated from Helton Mound 20 (Middle to Late Woodland) in the Lower Illinois Valley were re-evaluated using Transition Analysis. In addition, a taphonomic evaluation of each individual was undertaken to determine the ways in which the bones would have been modified during their interment. The goal is to understand how the current recognition of taphonomic processes differs from the original estimations from the 1970s and how that...
Analysis of a late Archaic hearth feature at the Debra L. Friedkin Site in central Texas (2017)
The Debra L. Friedkin Site (41BL1239) near Salado, Texas, is the oldest known, continually occupied site in North America. While the previous focus of excavations and analyses at the Friedkin Site has been on Paleoindian strata, this site also has extensive early and late Archaic components, and recent excavations in 2015 and 2016 uncovered a 3 m x 5 m series of five overlapping hearth features in the late Archaic strata (14C 4,000-1,250 B.P.). Projectile points, tools and organic materials...
Analysis of Ceramic Sherds from Woodpecker Cave (2016)
Four field seasons of excavations by the University of Iowa field school have recovered hundreds of ceramic pottery sherds from the Woodpecker Cave site. Previous typological analyses of the ceramic assemblage have supported the hypothesis that the site was host to long-term seasonal occupations spanning hundreds of years. Woodpecker Cave provides a unique opportunity to study variation in technologies used during ceramic production in eastern Iowa, spanning the Middle Woodland and Late Woodland...
Annually-Resolved Environmental proxies in the Great Lakes Region, 14 ka to 10 ka BP: A Time of Paleo-Indian Hunters and Megafauna Extinction (2016)
The last deglaciation was characterized by numerous abrupt climate shifts including the extended Bølling and Allerød warm periods and the Preboreal, Younger Dryas, Older Dryas and Intra-Allerød cold periods, which caused loss of stability across the periglacial landscapes of the Great Lakes region. To date, assessing the possible impact of abrupt late glacial environmental change in this area has been limited by paucity of high-resolution environmental proxies that can be compared to the...
The application of strontium isotope analysis to historic cemetery contexts: a case study for the creation of robust individual identifications (2015)
Following the 1991-1992 excavation of the Milwaukee County Institutional Grounds Cemetery (1878-1925), up to 190 individuals were preliminarily identified using historical documentation, material culture, and geospatial analysis. Subsequent bioarchaeological analyses have provided an additional line of evidence for the identification of these individuals. The cemetery population of Western European immigrants and local/nonlocal native born Americans is composed of paupers, the institutionalized,...
Archaeological Investigations of Deeply Stratified Deposits at Crumps Sink, South-Central Kentucky, USA (2016)
In the holokarstic Sinkhole Plain, sinkholes provided access to cave entrances for shelter, water, chert outcrops, and contain distinct microenvironments. As closed basins, sinkholes accumulate sediment from the surrounding catchment, burying archaeological deposits, sometimes rapidly. Therefore, these sites can provide critical information concerning paleoenvironmental change and human use of the surrounding landscape. Excavations were undertaken at Crumps Sink in the summer of 2015 to assess...
Archaeological Signatures for Mechanized Threshing Operations in the Midwest and the Plains (2016)
Nineteenth and twentieth century grain threshing operations left imprints on the rural landscape and social fabric of midcontinental North America. Traces of threshing activity are seldom recognized archaeologically, despite the importance of this activity to the history of agricultural development and rural lifeways in the Midwest and Plains regions. Changes in threshing technology followed a chronological sequence with inter-regional variability. Different stages of the technology can be...
Archaeology Field School at A Community College: An Outreach Opportunity (2015)
In the summer of 2014 St. Charles Community College (SCC) in Cottleville, MO offered, for the second year in a row, an archaeology field school. This project was an opportunity for people outside of a traditional 4-year college or university setting to engage first-hand in archaeological field work. By offering the field school through a community college, students who might not otherwise be able to afford a regular field term got valuable hands-on experience—many St. Charles students (and...
Archaeology of the Port des Morts Lighthouse Ruins (47DR497) – A Mid-19th Century Lighthouse Site (2017)
The Port des Morts ruins (47DR497) are from a Great Lakes lighthouse in operation for a brief nine years from 1849 to 1858. Located on Plum Island off the tip of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, this hastily constructed and poorly positioned lighthouse was home to William Riggins his wife Phebe and their growing family for all but the lighthouse’s final year. Historic documents suggest they lived a difficult frontier existence, but otherwise little is known about their time on the island. Now part of...
Assessing the Strength of Prehistoric Glues (2017)
Glues and adhesives have been used since ~200,000 years ago. A significant question about glues and adhesives in prehistoric contexts is exactly what level of holding strength do various blends have. A widely used glue in prehistory is pine pitch; whose ingredients are pine sap, ash, and a binder, such as dried grass. An experiment is presented here to determine how strong variations in concentrations of these ingredients affect holding strength. Six different variations of the glue were used,...
Assessment of lateral edge grinding on hafting performance using experimental Clovis points (2017)
In the 1930s, F. H. H. Roberts proposed that lateral basal grinding was executed on Paleoindian projectile points to limit damage to the lashings that attached them to their shafts. This assumption is logical and widely accepted, but remains empirically untested. Here, we present an experiment that examines the role of lateral basal grinding in replica Clovis projectile points made of Texas chert. We compare via controlled ballistics experiments large samples of points with lateral edge grinding...
Attimoni (ah-jee-MOOUHN) – The Stories We Have to Tell: relationships among the Meskwaki Nation, tribes with historic ties to Iowa, and the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (2016)
A long-standing relationship has existed between the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) and tribal entities including the Meskwaki Nation. The precedent-setting burial law established in Iowa in 1976, 14 years prior to the passage of NAGPRA, has long required equal treatment and reburial of Native American remains. The law gave the OSA statutory authority for upholding the law and established the OSA Indian Advisory Council (IAC). Maria Pearson (Yankton Sioux) and Donald...
A Battlefield with a View: Visibility and Weighted Cost Path Modeling of the Battle of the Wabash (2016)
The Applied Anthropology Laboratories has conducted five years of research at the site of two of the most significant battles in the Northwest Territory: Battle of the Wabash (1791) and the Battle of Fort Recovery (1794). A recent survey and GIS analysis has shed new light on the Battle of the Wabash and particularly the Native American Confederacy’s (NAC) strategy and actions. Using visibility weighted cost paths we were able to predict the locations of survey finds. The survey results were...
Bayesian chronological models for Mississippian fortifications with bastions (2016)
Bayesian chronological modeling is used to investigate the origins and causes of warfare during the Mississippian Period (AD 1000-1500) in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States. Radiocarbon results from seven Mississippian centers are presented within an interpretative Bayesian statistical framework. The results indicate that bastioned palisades were built and maintained primarily in AD 1200-1400. While there are a number of reasons for the origins of widespread intensified...
Beach Party: A Review of Previous Relict Shoreline Surveys, and Excavations in the 2016 Field Season at McCargoe Cove, Isle Royale National Park (2017)
The Relict Shoreline Survey is the longest running intensive study of ancient shorelines and beaches ever done at Isle Royale National Park. Within the five years it has been implemented, the number of known Archaic sites on the island has more than doubled. Government agencies, universities, private museums, and volunteers have all played vital roles in the success of this study. This presentation will briefly review past Relict Shoreline Surveys and elaborate on the most recent findings of the...