North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (259 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identification and interpretation of buried cultural deposits in alluvial settings is improved by an integrated approach that considers the area at an appropriate scale in line with prehistoric land use; applies key underlying concepts; and utilizes multiple methodologies of subsurface investigation, laboratory analysis, and environmental modeling. Success at...
Hopewellian Meteoric Iron Use: An Experimental Approach for Exploring Production and Function (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hopewell artisans were innovative and highly skilled craftspeople, demonstrating proficiency with a wide variety of exotic materials, including meteoric iron. Here we explore the material properties of this unique raw material in terms of production and possible function. In this...
Hopewellian Woodhenges: Recent Research at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Monumental Surveys: New Insights from Landscape-Scale Geophysics" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monumental timber post circles or "woodhenges" are ancient and enduring elements in the ritual landscapes of Native North America. Examples are known from as much as 3500 years ago at Poverty Point; from 2400 years ago in Adena ceremonial contexts in the Ohio Valley; from 1000 years ago at Cahokia; and in contemporary use...
How Much Force Does It Take to Break a Flaked Stone Tool? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Endscrapers are a common flaked stone tool found at Late Pleistocene sites around the world. Microwear evidence has demonstrated that these implements are predominantly used for hide-scraping. However, these small, round, often bullet-like specimens are also found broken. Here, using controlled and actualistic experiments we explore the forces necessary to...
Hoxie Farm: Bioarchaeology of a Late Prehistoric Community in Northeastern Illinois (2018)
The Upper Mississippian (A.D. 1400-1500) Hoxie Farm site is one of the best documented late prehistoric sites in Cook County, Illinois. In 1953, Elaine Bluhm and David Wenner from the Field Museum of Natural History organized a volunteer crew of professional and avocational archaeologists to salvage portions of the site in advance of construction of the first interstate highway (I-80) in Illinois. In 2000-2003, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) conducted additional excavations at...
Hunter-Gatherer Fission-Fusion in Ethnographic and Archaeological Records: From the Mbuti to Paleoindians (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology views hunter-gatherers as nature’s children or launching pads to complex society. Ethnographic hunter-gatherers exhibit fission-fusion cycles that we explain variously, including modular organization of group sizes (e.g., "scalar-stress"). However well models explain ethnographic pattern, archaeological tests...
Identifying Subterranean Storage Features: A Cautionary Tale (2018)
Recent research in northern lower Michigan systematically tested the ability to identify subterranean food storage features using surface criteria. Subterranean storage features were used during the late Late Woodland period (AD 1200-1600) in parts of the Michigan Inland Waterway. Such cache features prolong the availability of food stuffs and mitigate against the risk of food shortage. This paper discusses the research methodology required for identifying such features. While many are...
The Influence of Diet on the Ancient Dog Gut Microbiome (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coprolites are recognized as an important source of archaeological data; they contain biological remains from the organism’s diet, as well as genetic material from microorganisms, dietary components, and the host. Modern studies have shown that the gut microbiome reflects dietary trends; as microbial remains are also present in coprolites, these provide...
Insights into Central Kentucky Adena Moundbuilding Drawn from Tom Dillehay’s Research on Mapuche Moundbuilders of Southern Chile (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Upon arriving as a visiting professor at the University of Kentucky in 1980, Tom Dillehay took an immediate interest in the mounds and geometric earthworks that dotted the Bluegrass landscape of central Kentucky. As he drove the country roads and walked the rolling hills around Lexington, Dillehay...
Integrating Archaeology and Environmental Education to Strengthen a Place-Based Curriculum (2018)
The practice of archaeology involves studying human adaptation to the natural world by using the environment as a vehicle for the development of knowledge. Archaeology education has strong parallels and intersections with the well-established field of Environmental Education (EE); yet, it is both widely acknowledged that cultural history is one of the weaker components of EE, and many archaeology educators are likewise unfamiliar with EE. In 2016, archaeologists from University of Iowa Office of...
Introduction to Session: Recent Research and Future Objectives (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery and development of metals as tool media is a topic of global interest. Although this phenomenon is generally associated with sedentary, agrarian-based societies, in North America there is regularly documented, albeit not widely known, use of metals by...
Investigating a Shotgun House: "Who Knew Shelter Was So Emotionally Charged?" (2018)
Investigating a Shotgun House, a Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter case study, asks students to use multiple data sources (oral history, historical documents, architecture, and archaeology) to examine a single question: what can we learn about the lives of mid-20th century urban working-class people from the study of their homes? In this case, shotgun houses. Formal field testing in elementary school classrooms, and interviews with piloting teachers and their students documented that...
Investigating the Archaeology of Shifting Community Values at Chrisholm Farmstead (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the 19th century, Amish and Mennonite settlers fleeing persecution settled in the United States. In this study, I focus on families who settled in what is now Butler County, Ohio. For these settlers, there is a robust historic record telling a story of the community shifting from conservative Amish to more liberal Mennonites. I investigate to what...
Investigations at the Sugar Potato Workshop Site: Repeated and Long-Term Exploitation of Burlington Chert from the Pinnacles Quarry in Central Missouri (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sugar Potato site is located on an alluvial fan at the base of the Pinnacles, an eroded upland area that borders the Missouri River floodplain in central Missouri. The lower slopes of the ridges in this area contain residual deposits of high-quality Burlington chert, which were quarried for more than 2,000 years. Test excavations at the Sugar Potato site...
Isotopic Evidence for Protohistoric Field Locations in Northeastern Illinois (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the western Great Lakes region of the USA, late prehistoric and early historic Indigenous fields are often difficult to investigate because their archaeological signatures are faint and easily destroyed. They have been identified largely via rare remnants of ridged fields and historical records. With the...
Janet D. Spector (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Janet D. Spector is best known for her groundbreaking work in Feminist Archaeology and collaborative research but she also made significant contributions beyond archaeology. Spector helped form the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Minnesota in 1973, the first in the...
Kindling "New Fires" in Ohio Hopewell Ceremonial Regimes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our paper investigates the relationship between Ohio Hopewell ceremonial hearths and the caches interred within/adjacent to them in submound buildings at Hopewell and Mound City. While large Ohio Hopewell mega-caches have captured the attention of archaeologists, discussions of the ceremonial hearths associated with them have typically focused on their use....
Landscape Marking, the Creation of Meaning, and the Construction of Sacred and Secular Spaces: Rethinking The Birney "Mound" in the City of Bay City (2018)
The so-called "Birney Mound" on the Saginaw River in lower Michigan is revisited from the vantage point of long term landscape perception, marking, naming, and memory. The natural raised postglacial beach feature, a deposit of light sand, is the major landscape prominence on the Saginaw River drainage. At times during high water stands in the basin the location was the entrepot to the system from Lake Huron, and during later recessional episodes became the first highly visible landform...
Late Precolumbian Subsistence Change, Socio-political Transformation, and Ethnogenesis in the Upper Illinois River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Post-AD 1000 was a time of tremendous change in the Upper Illinois River valley. The Terminal Late Woodland groups in the region were bordered on the south by emergent Mississippian petty chiefdoms of the Central Illinois River valley, on the north by Oneota and Mississippian societies, and on the east by Fort Ancient...
Late Woodland Cultural Adaptations in the Lower Missouri River Valley: Archery, Warfare, and the Rise of Complexity (2018)
The introduction of the bow and arrow into prehistoric Missouri during the Late Woodland Period possibly changed the Middle Woodland social dynamic and settlement pattern arrangement such that there was a major increase in social cooperation between settlements tied closely to defensive settlement strategies. Small villages faced the possibility of effective, long-range attacks that could potentially lead to the quick application of overwhelming force on unprepared villages. To address this...
Law and Ethics: The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery Excavations in the Context of the Wisconsin Burial Site Preservation Statute (2018)
The 1987 Wisconsin Burial Site Preservation Statute (WisStats 157.70) serves as the basis for the protection of all burial sites in the State of Wisconsin and assures that all human burial sites be accorded equal treatment under the law regardless of age or affiliation. A burial site, under the law, refers to any place where human remains are buried and includes marked and unmarked cemeteries, Native American mounds, small family cemeteries, and other less obvious locations that are reported to...
Learning to Squeeze the Data: Fifteen Years of Archaeological Research within the Grand Island National Recreation Area (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2001 until 2015, the Hiawatha National Forest partnered with Illinois State University (ISU) to host a public archaeology program named the Grand Island Archaeological Project. The project involved an archaeological field school operated through ISU, a Youth Archaeology Workshop, and public interpretation...
Life and Adaptation during the Little Ice Age in Midwestern Agricultural Villages: Evidence through Stable Isotopes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Grant Creek archaeological site, located in northeastern Illinois, was a prehistoric village occupied in the early seventeenth century, during one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age. Despite this, the site was home to up to 200 inhabitants for around a decade and showed signs of impressive maize cultivation and storage to feed the...
Local Legacy, Local Legend: John White, Youngstown State University, and Fifty Years of Public Archaeology (2018)
Dr. John White served as a member of the faculty at Youngstown State University from 1971 to 2005. Part of his legacy is nearly four decades of local, regional, and public archaeology. He shared his passion for the discipline with thousands of students and engaged hundreds of students and volunteers in fieldwork, both regionally and internationally. Upon John’s retirement in 2005 I was hired to take his position. In this paper, I summarize my own work and collaborations with colleagues as we...
Locating Wisconsin's Past Indigenous Agricultural Landscapes Using Historical Aerial Photography (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wisconsin has the largest number of recorded precolumbian and early historic Indigenous ridged and hilled garden beds in the American Midwest, with over 450 known examples. But, twentieth-century land-use practices have destroyed or obscured more than 90% of these sites. Leveraging a comprehensive database of...