North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Dempsey. Steven De Vore. Ashley Barnett. Nora Greiman. Anna Dempsey.

Over the last four years, the Midwest Archeological Center has been conducting a project designed to gather information on mound and earthwork preservation across the Midwest Region of the National Park Service. St. Croix National Scenic Riverway in eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, is one of several parks included in the study. The St. Croix and Namekagon river valleys are home to mounds and earthworks of a variety of shapes and sizes. Some have been dated to the Late Woodland period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Barzilai. Jayne-Leigh Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian peoples (circa eleventh–fourteenth centuries CE) in the midwestern and southeastern United States have long been proven to be and defined by their maize agricultural practices. Due to the nutritional deficiencies of subsisting solely on maize as a crop when unprocessed, researchers have linked all maize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Strezewski. Staffan Peterson.

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. The Mann site in southwest Indiana is one of the largest Hopewell ceremonial centers in the Midwest and also one of the least studied. The site, which was occupied between A.D. 200 and 500, consists of flat-topped, conical, and geometric earthworks, similar to those from Hopewell complexes in Ohio and elsewhere. The most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards. Robert Jeske.

Population aggregation and shifts in material culture of the Late Prehistoric Eastern Woodlands (AD900-1100) has often been linked to the increase in the importance of maize in the human diet. In the Midwest, the development of distinct contemporaneous archaeological cultures (e.g., Oneota, Langford and Middle Mississippian) has often been connected to assumed differences in maize consumption. A commonly used model is that increased complexity in social structures result from, and/or are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Styles. Mona Colburn. Sarah Neusius.

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With support from a National Science Foundation grant, the Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group (EAFWG) uploaded faunal datasets for 24 Archaic Period (10,000-3,000 BP) archaeological sites in the Interior Eastern United States into the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) to address research questions about the roles of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Schmidt. Megan Hoffman. Grace Holmes.

This is an abstract from the "The Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project: Historical, Osteological, and Material Culture Analyses of a Nineteenth-Century Indiana Cemetery" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Elizabeth Poland was a member of one of the prominent families interred at the Bethel Cemetery, located in Indianapolis, IN; she died in 1896 at the age of 76. Her skeleton indicated several pathological conditions including pedal arthritis, vertebral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Massey. Christina Friberg. Quinn Lewis. Edward Herrmann.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Angel Mounds State Historic Site, a Middle Mississippian fortified mound center along the Ohio River, is home to 11 man-made earthworks which make up the largest known archaeological site in Indiana. Angel’s occupation coincides with the regional changes in social organization that characterize Mississippian society. Many archaeologists have discussed mound...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American city of Cahokia originates in the creation of a cosmologically powerful landscape formed by the gathering of human and other-than-human participants (including earth, water, and fire) (see Pauketat 2013). At this center humans and their nonhuman partners mediated relationships between Worlds (Upper,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Brock.

In 2008, Lynne Goldstein founded the Michigan State University Campus Archaeology Program. I had the opportunity to serve as the first Campus Archaeologist, a position that I thought would give me much needed experience in conducting and leading archaeological excavations. In addition to this, I ended up learning more about becoming a complete professional and public archaeologist, the intangible skills that are so difficult to teach, but that Dr. Goldstein has bestowed upon many of her students...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pollack. A. Gwynn Henderson.

Throughout the middle Ohio Valley, archaeologists have documented ca. A.D. 1400 region-wide changes in material culture and settlement patterns that they have characterized as the Madisonville Horizon. Established ca. A.D. 1300, the three hundred year continuous occupation of Fox Farm, located in northern Kentucky, spans the Fort Ancient transformation (A.D. 1375-1425). As the site grew in size during the fourteenth century, the settlement shifted from a circular to clustered arrangement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cook. Aaron Comstock.

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. Recent research on the Fort Ancient culture of the Middle Ohio Valley has considerably improved our understanding of the motivation for and subsequent role of Mississippian migrations along a Mississippian periphery. A plethora of new radiocarbon dates on multiple media, strontium and biodistance analyses of human bone,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sissel Schroeder. A. J. White. Lora Stevens. Samuel Munoz. Varenka Lorenzi.

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. In this paper we explore sociopolitical, economic, and climatological aspects of the population history of Cahokia and compare these with the timing of the appearance of Cahokia materials at hinterland sites to better understand some of the factors that may have contributed to the migration of people out of the American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jodie OGorman.

Migration of human populations is an ancient and persistent part of the history of humankind. In the past, as in the present, migration continues to be a solution to human problems that carries with it some degree of increased risk and challenges for group and individual security and identity. Vulnerability resulting from migration choices, and practices to mitigate risks of that vulnerability, vary between historically situated populations and within groups by age, gender, and other elements of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Howey.

The Inland Waterway is a series of lakes, rivers, and streams that creates an inland route between Lakes Michigan and Huron. During the 1970’s, Lovis helped lead the NSF-funded Inland Waterway Project which involved survey and test excavations. The results of this research have been vital in advancing understandings of hunter-gatherer-horticulturalist social, economic, and ideological processes in the region and beyond. In a 2001 article, Lovis argued a set of clay products found at the Johnson...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Peterson.

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. Over the past 10,000 years, hunter-gathers in the Lake Superior Basin have utilized primary and secondary deposits of native (elemental) copper in a production and exchange network that spanned across and beyond the North American Midcontinent. The production system that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Faith Wilfong. Matthew E. Hill.

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dismal River Aspect sites, located within Lake Scott State Park in western Kansas, represent long-term settlement of the area during the AD 1500s-1700s by a mixture of Puebloan migrants and local Apache groups. This study uses faunal material from the protohistoric period to begin to understand the nature and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane E. Buikstra. Jason King.

Lynne Goldstein has significantly advanced knowledge of ancient peoples in many theoretical and empirical domains, including her seminal studies of ancient cemeteries, especially their spatial organization and interpretation through the judicious use of ethnographic sources, critically evaluated. The senior author has had the pleasure of collaborating with Dr. Goldstein in several of these ventures, some under challenging conditions of heat and cold, which were bearable only due to Lynne’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mackenzie Cory. Edward W. Herrmann.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we expand upon our analysis of all recorded early Paleoindian sites in Indiana by incorporating spatial data from middle and late Paleoindian sites. Our analysis of both site locations and least cost paths between tool stone resources and sites with identified raw material types indicates that temporal differences exist for where Paleoindians...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Ritchison. Matthew Davidson.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic- and lithic-based phase-level chronologies, built on assumptions of gradual change over time, have traditionally comprised the foundation of archaeological reconstructions. Recent reevaluations of long-standing regional chronologies, often based on pre-AMS radiocarbon dates and the presence or absence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayne-Leigh Thomas. Dan Knudsen. Rebecca Hawkins.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Agricultural research in archaeology has predominantly focused on the presence or absence of food refuse, dietary data from isotopic studies, or the origins of agriculture. Fewer studies exist that focus on how crops were actually grown and what yields would be needed to viably support a specific population,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Anklam. Dan Wendt.

Since 2009 the Knife Lake siltstone quarries in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota U.S. quarry district have been the focus of archaeological and geoarchaeological research. A recent survey conducted in 2014 and 2015 identified several relic beach features at varying elevations above the current water line of Knife Lake. GIS was used to model and predict these proglacial lake shoreline features to better understand the procurement patterns of Knife Lake siltstone, a prominent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Wilson. Metin Eren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the performance of three different projectile point hafting mediums in order, to determine whether thermoplastic adhesive is an applicable medium to use in archaeological experiments concerning projectile point ballistic experiments. The study examines ninety, triangular projectiles (thirty points hafted with each of the three mediums): one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Jones. Zoe Doubles. Esmeralda Ferrales. Kenzie May. Jason King.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Golden Eagle site (11C120), Calhoun County, IL, is located on the edge of the Deer Plain Terrace, 8 km upstream of the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. First documented by William McAdams in the late nineteenth century, Golden Eagle is the only Illinois River Valley mound site to include a ditch-and-embankment enclosure. The site is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Bonzani. Michael Steenken. Jon Endonino. Michael Detisch. Hugo Reyes-Centeno.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are considered natural seed dispersing agents through the social acts of seed saving and seed sowing. The intentional and unintentional results of these human-plant relationships can lead to the development of genotypic and phenotypic traits that are beneficial to both the plant and to their human influencers. Anthropogenic seed dispersal of wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Metin Eren. Grace Conrad. Stephen Lycett. Michelle Bebber.

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 Old Copper Culture in the western North American Great Lakes region is one of the few areas in the world in which people produced both copper and stone weapon tips. However, a robust quantitative comparison of these implements has, to our knowledge, never been conducted....