North America - Midwest (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (329 Records)
The very word “archaeology” conjures interest by the public generally. Finding meaningful ways to engage that interest, however, is less straight-forward for practitioners, educators, and researchers. Sitting within any given repository of archaeological materials are collections in need of additional documentation and analysis, some of which may have not been handled since the time of their initial excavation and curation. Additionally, while much can be learned through microbotanical...
Middle Grant Creek: a rare example of a single component Huber phase site on the Illinois prairie (2017)
Our understanding of the protohistoric Huber phase is limited by our small sample of sites from this complex period. We present preliminary findings from the summer 2016 excavation at the Middle Grant Creek (MGC) site at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Wilmington, IL. The site is a well-preserved single component Huber phase, warm weather camp that survived historic farmsteads and the construction and abandonment of an Army arsenal. MGC expands the sample of Huber sites and provides...
Migration and Cohabitation at Morton Village: Future Research Directions (2015)
New evidence for Oneota/Mississippian cohabitation at Morton Village leads us to develop novel questions and models for understanding the nature of social interaction at the site, while also recontextualizing previous analyses and interpretations within a revised framework of migration, cooperation, and ethnogenesis. In addition to carrying out additional excavations to further test hypotheses about the nature of co-habitation and social stress at the site by examining site structure, foodways,...
Migration and Cultural Emplacement on the Mississippian Periphery: A Fort Ancient Example (2017)
Recent excavations at the Turpin site (33HA19) in southwest Ohio, have reestablished the importance of population movement in cultural emplacement in this region. Although the predominant model for Fort Ancient evolution in the Middle Ohio Valley posits gradual village development and relatively late (post-AD 1400) Mississippian influence, work at Turpin and other sites in the lower Miami Valleys suggests that the movement of Mississippian people acted as a catalyst for change beginning around...
The Milky Way Path of Souls and Adena-Hopewell Earthworks (2016)
In this presentation I consider Adena-Hopewell earthworks from a relational perspective. For decades, archaeologists have focused on individual sites. But what if it was found that the significance of certain sites unfolded in their relationships to other earthworks as well as other dimensions? In this presentation I use LiDAR imagery, archaeoastronomic analyses, and ethnohistoric data to explore the idea the Newark Earthworks, Great Hopewell Road, Mound City, Serpent Mound, and others were part...
Mistaken identity?: A reassessment of the Angel Mounds historic cemetery site using anthroposcopic and XRF analyses (2015)
In 1940, a collection of human skeletons were excavated from a historic cemetery on Mound F at Angel Mounds State Historic Site, near Evansville, Indiana. Based on the presence of a single historic grave stone, these remains were determined to be Euroamerican. However, after further study of morphological characteristics and copper staining, we suggest that several individuals are of Native American descent. An evaluation of the elemental composition of the copper staining using a portable X-ray...
The Mitchell Site: An Upgrade (2017)
In the Spring of 2015, SCI Engineering, Inc. was contracted to conduct archaeological investigations ahead of the expansion of the Cedar Creek Lumberyard situated in the northeast portion of the Mitchell site (11MS30) in Madison County, Illinois. These investigations resulted in the delineation of multiple wall trench structures of varying size and shape. Most of what is known of this important Mississippian mound center comes from James W. Porter’s dissertation on his 1960s salvage excavations...
Mixed burials and commingled human remains recovered from the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Poor Farm Cemetery (2015)
From the mid-1800s to its abandonment in 1974, the MCIG Poor Farm Cemetery in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin served as a burial place for institutional residents, unidentified or unclaimed individuals from the Coroner's Office, and the community poor and indigent. Previous excavations at the cemetery in 1991 and 1992 recovered 1649 individuals in predominantly single interments with an occasional extraneous body part representing incidental amputation or autopsy. The 2013 excavations at the site yielded...
Modeling Woodland Land Use in the Lower Little Miami River Valley, Ohio (2016)
This paper examines Woodland (ca. 1,000 BCE to 1,000 CE) land use patterns in the lower Little Miami River valley of Ohio. Theoretically, two models can be applied to the distribution of archaeological sites which date to the Woodland cultural period in this region: an ideological model based on ceremonial and mortuary behavior and a pragmatic model based on the socio-economic optimizing and risk-reducing behaviors of human evolutionary ecology. Archaeological data including artifact typology...
Molecular identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the Milwaukee county institution grounds cemetery (2015)
Whether or not the identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in skeletal remains is possible has been a debated topic for many years. In order to shed more light on the issue, a study has been carried out on the remains from the 1991 and 1992 excavations of the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Cemetery, a collection of skeletons ranging from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, of various ages and sexes. To show the utility of the previously discussed methods of osteological identification of...
Monks Mound: Retrospective Thoughts and Prospective Potentials (2017)
Monks Mound stands as the pinnacle of platform mound building at Cahokia and in North America. Built very rapidly near the end of the 11th century AD, it was the largest single public works project undertaken in North America until the 19th century. At first glance, the mound appears as an immutable fixture on the landscape yet a closer examination shows that the mound has several severe structural deficiencies that may eventually lead to collapse. Archaeologists and site managers have long...
Monumental Construction at Cahokia, a geoarchaeological perspective (2016)
Monumental Construction at Cahokia, a geoarchaeological perspective Amber Laubach and Sarah E. Baires Examining Pre-Columbian earthen mounds from both a macro and micro-scale lens can reveal geotechnical knowledge of construction as well as the cultural significance of this pervasive past practice in the Eastern Woodlands. Micromorphology soil samples provide a rich volume of data to examine fine-grained construction fill composition, pedogenic activity and the relative rate of monumental...
Mother Earth, Father Sky, Figurative Art and Reproduction at Cahokia and in the Mississippian World (2016)
In the Cahokian world the sounds and sights of night would have brought stories: the moon, morning star and evening star; human origins. Origin stories generally abound with sex, (mother earth, father sky) but our analyses are oddly devoid of sex. Yet Mississippian figurative art plays with the seen and unseen of sex as it hints at how cosmic principles, sex, and gender were entangled and tied to night and reproduction. By focusing on reproductive themes, but not sex, archaeologists have not...
Moving a Movement: Missions and Missionaries in Medieval North America (2017)
The relationship between cultural interaction and religion as a catalyst for long-term historical change is an underdeveloped line of inquiry in pre-Columbian archaeology. Particularly in North American archaeology, Mississippian cultural expansions and intrusions have been considered primarily in political or economic terms. Missionizing – defined as the intent to convert someone or something to a new idea or religion - in cultural and religious change may have facilitated the spread of a...
Multi-Element Characterization of Early Nineteenth Century Edged Pearlware from Native American and Euro-American Sites (2016)
Edged Pearlware, a type of refined earthenware imported from England, is found at many early nineteenth century Native American and Euro-American sites in North America. Due to the small size of sherds and the lack of sherds with maker’s marks, it is currently difficult to identify the date, location, and manufacturing process for Edged Pearlware. This poster compares sherds from three sites occupied during the first half of the nineteenth century: Pokagon Village, a Native American site;...
Multi-Element Characterization of Early Nineteenth Century Pottery Sherds from Native American and Euro-American Sites (2015)
Fine earthenwares imported from England are a distinctive type of artifact frequently found on early nineteenth century Native American and Euro-American sites. Relatively rapid changes in decorative motifs and technologies can easily be identified by eye and provide information about site chronology and economic status. However, visual analyses of sherds usually can usually provide only general information because of the fragmentary nature of most assemblages. For example, transfer printed...
Mutable materials and gathering worlds (2015)
Owing to a plethora of recent and ever more divergent scholarship on materiality, the lens through which we view the ontological status of things has become increasingly opaque. New thinking about the ways in which materials are always and already in flux compels us to consider how seemingly obdurate things can, paradoxically, transcend their own solidity. To this we may add a budding concern with the immaterial – regimes of light and sound, for example, and their mutability – and the extent to...
Mystery and Ideology in the Rock Art of Missouri (2015)
Working hypotheses link selected rock art sites in Missouri with the religious and political ideologies of the Mississippian tradition. For example, petroglyph sites such as the Bushnell Ceremonial Cave (23SG89), Washington State Park (23WA01), Madden Creek (23WA26), and the Commerce Site (23ST255) have been linked with the Mississippian tradition. Likewise, a cluster of three pictograph sites preserve Mississippian iconography: Rattlesnake Bluff (23FR95), Willenberg Shelter (23FR96), and the...
Native Science: How a Native American Understanding of Ritual as a Science can help Archaeological Analysis. (2017)
In the last couple of decades, Native peoples across the world have become more vocal that indigenous rituals are not the result of religious superstition or mechanisms of social control, but the formulae of indigenous sciences. Ceremonies and many myths, they argue, have been mistakenly categorized as religious by anthropologists due to their baroque appearance and our modern separation between nature from culture. Gregory Cajete and Leroy Little Bear have led the movement to re-categorize...
Negotiating Identity through Food Choice in the Pre-Columbian Mid-Continent (2015)
Recent research has deepened our understanding of intergroup interactions in the Mid-continent of North America during the late prehistoric period, and archaeological investigations have revealed evidence not only for conflict, but also for cohabitation and cooperation between the migrant Oneota people and local, maize-reliant Middle Mississippian groups. This poster utilizes the broadly defined framework of foodways and explores dietary changes in this interaction through time along with...
Negotiating Migration and Violence in the Pre-Columbian Mid-Continent: A View from the Village (2015)
Multiple lines of evidence from Morton Village presented in the poster symposium are brought together to consider the social context of marked violence evidenced at Norris Farms 36 cemetery. This current work sheds light on the complexity and context of social interactions whereby migrant and resident populations negotiated a level of cooperation and support by creating new mechanisms for social integration in the village. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...
Negotiating Practices at the Emerald Site (11S1): A Case Study of Two Burned Structures (2015)
Located near the Silver Creek in the Illinois uplands of the midcontinent of the United States, the Emerald Site (11S1) in Lebanon, IL is a constructed Mississippian mound center where everyday practices were entangled with the performance of Mississippian religion. Recent excavations at the Emerald Site by Indiana University and the University of Illinois have unearthed high densities of non-domestic structures dating to the Terminal Late Woodland (TLW) Edelhardt (AD 950-1000) and Early...
Neonatal line assessment among Milwaukee County Institution Grounds (MCIG) perinates to determine viability (2015)
A sample of perinatal individuals recovered from MCIG Cemetery (ca. 1890-1920) included broken teeth. We evaluate these teeth for the presence of the neonatal line to differentiate stillborn individuals from those that died as postnatal individuals. Our research is nondestructive. We compare the results of the dental analysis to the distribution of stillborns and live births documented in the MCIG burial record and City of Milwaukee vital records. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR...
New Evidence for Human Butchery of an American Mastodon from Central Ohio, USA (2016)
A growing body of archaeological data now points to the likely exploitation of American Mastodon (Mammut americanum) by late Pleistocene hunters in North America. The recent discovery of a partial mastodon skeleton at the Cedar Fork site in Morrow County, Ohio provides additional evidence in the form of at least one possibly cut marked bone. The skeletal remains are those of a large male and were disturbed post-mortem by animal scavenging and more recent geological processes including debris...
New Views of Cahokia's Urban Landscape: Multi-Instrument Geophysical Survey at the Ramey Field (2017)
In this paper we report on new collaborative research that seeks to investigate the history of pre-Columbian urbanism and Mississippian culture in the greater American Bottom region of eastern North America. Our research is being designed to take advantage of a wide range of archaeological methods, technologies, and analyses to produce information for Cahokia and other sites in the region. Here, we present initial results from our first season of work at Cahokia. In July 2016, project members...