North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Cooper.

During the 18th century, European-Americans created a myth regarding the earthen mounds found throughout the eastern United States. This myth indicated that a western people, possibly the Lost Tribe of Israel, had inhabited North America and established cities throughout this region. They then succumbed to Native American savagery and brutality and were eradicated. Over time, archaeologists disproved the myth by conducting excavations and demonstrated the cultural similarities between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarrod Burks.

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 problem with monumental earthwork sites in Ohio is that they are, well, monumental in scale! These large sites, many topping 50 ha in area, are a major challenge for geophysical surveys because they simply require too much time to completely survey. However, recent advances in instrumentation and computers is making it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Burtt. Larisa DeSantis.

This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Angel site (12VG1) is located in southern Indiana, USA, on the Ohio River, and was occupied from approximately 1100 to 1450 CE. This site is part of a larger Mississippian cultural landscape. Research presented in this paper employs two methods for investigating the dietary behavior of domestic dogs recovered from the Angel site. Both dental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Bossio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Woodland-Late Prehistoric transitional period of Northwestern Ohio (ca. AD 1250) has been the subject of much debate in past decades. Both the details and cause of Upper Mississippian influence in the Western Lake Erie region currently remain unclear. My project focuses on a 3-mile span of the First Rapids of the Maumee River floodplain, where I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Ausel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The connection between migration and violence is complex and occurs in many social spheres within a single community. Data accessible through archaeological excavations, partnered with bioarchaeological analyses, can provide insights that are otherwise invisible regarding these experiences. To this end, my research explores the patterns of interpersonal trauma...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine McLeester. Jesse Casana. Carolin Ferwerda. Alison Anastasio. Jonathan Alperstein.

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. Raised Indigenous agricultural features were once the most common earthworks in the American Midwest. Today, they are among the rarest. The Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin contains the densest concentration of ancient agricultural features in the American Midwest, providing a unique opportunity to study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurie Rush.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a twenty-one-year-old graduate student, I was present when an Indigenous ancestor, pipe in hand, was removed from the earth, placed in a box, and taken to storage. My encounter with this individual transformed and guided the course of my career in a field that has changed over the intervening decades and is working on recognition of human rights. I knew...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Burdette.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Museums as institutions have a storied history regarding the presentation of Native American cultures and histories to the public. Much has been done to address this issue, although the topic remains difficult to explain succinctly to those without prior knowledge. Often, the interpretation of artifacts is oversimplified and leads to confusion or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Madeleine McLeester.

Archaeologists have long explored the early interactions between Native Americans and Europeans in the Great Lakes region of Eastern North America. In particular, they have prioritized investigating these relationships at late prehistoric sites containing European trade goods. However, this narrow focus has led to neglecting late precontact sites that precede this period and which are essential for fully contextualizing these early interactions. In this presentation, we summarize the second year...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Benden. Mara Taft.

Legacy collections—those typically generated decades ago that do not meet current professional curation standards and require a substantial resource investment for long-term preservation—are housed in nearly every archaeological repository across the country. Many are the result of under-funded university field schools or public archaeology projects that didn’t account for either the initial curation preparation or the long-term costs and maintenance of collections care. The deeply stratified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarrod Burks.

Ohio is home to hundreds of Woodland period (ca. 300 BC- AD 400) earthwork sites. Most contain mounds and ditch-and-embankment enclosures in geometric shapes. Site size and complexity varies widely, from small, lone circles (often surrounding a mound) in the Early Woodland to the mega-large Middle Woodland Newark Earthworks. How and why earthwork construction moved from small to massive are enduring questions yet to be solved. Recent magnetic survey in southern Ohio at two sites of moderate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Boyer.

Over 400 pieces of bone and eggshell were collected during excavation at the Nine Gal Tavern site (11CH541) located in western Champaign County, Illinois in 1987 and 1991 by a team led by archaeologist Lenville Stelle. The majority of the remains analyzed were recovered within feature context in the immediate vicinity of the established Nine Gal Tavern structure. The purpose of this paper is to describe the identification of these faunal remains which are housed at the Anthropology Program at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gretchen Zoeller.

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. When records and textual evidence from the past are subjective, piecemeal, or absent, bioarchaeological analyses can be indispensable for elucidating otherwise buried histories. The case study of Burial 505 from the Bethel Cemetery highlights an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Frederick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on storage in small-scale societies has, until recently, narrowly focused on determining the form and scale that food storage took, and its relatedness to increasing social complexity. This research, instead, looked at the purposeful decision-making behind the use of food storage as a risk management strategy in non-sedentary societies....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Torquato.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout prehistory, Indigenous peoples in the Interior Eastern Woodlands of North America relied heavily on hunted and gathered resources. They commonly gathered and consumed nuts, which resulted in many archaeological sites containing these carbonized remains. Hammerstones and nutting stones in archaeological contexts suggest that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Mauldin. J. Kevin Hanselka. Cynthia Munoz. Leonard Kemp.

Baker Cave is a dry rock shelter with exceptional organic preservation in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. The site is best known for high floral and faunal diversity in a Paleoindian-age hearth excavated in 1976, the first of three seasons (1976, 1984, 1985) the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) worked at the site. Only those 1976 excavations have been reported in any detail. This poster summarizes analyses to estimate mast resource use over time at Baker Cave based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlyn Ball.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper synthesizes the ongoing archaeological research of one of the first academic buildings on the Alma College campus, located in central Michigan. Old Main was built in 1886, and destroyed by a fire in 1969. Although the building only burned down 50 years ago, the cause of the fire and exact location of the foundation remain a mystery. Throughout this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Betsinger.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the Civil War, the Midwest experienced unprecedented population growth. Keeping pace with the expansion of numerous commodity frontiers driven by the building of railways, cities such as Fargo, ND, and Moorhead, MN, became seasonal locales for thousands of transient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Noldner. Jennifer Mack.

Past populations that are associated with the Oneota archaeological tradition appear to have practiced a variety of burial practices. This paper serves as a presentation of another case study that contributes to our knowledge base of Oneota burial practices. Contexts for human skeletal remains recovered from Oneota sites range from scattered isolated elements to primary burials (both extended and flexed) oriented in various directions, both within constructed mounds and other non-mound features....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food is a persistent symbol of identity, signaling both membership and distinction within communities at multiple scales. A combination of macrobotanical, zooarchaeological, isotopic, and ceramic data are used to make inferences about Oneota culinary practices. This paper examines the way that cuisines connected and divided members of Late Precontact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amethyst Owen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late pre-contact Oneota populations of Southwestern Wisconsin practiced a mixed economy of wild resources, in addition to a full suite of domesticated corn, beans, and squash. Analysis of floral remains from the sites prior to European contact, as well as those at the time of contact will examine the impact of external stressor on the use of wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Stroh Messerole. Mark Anderson.

Data recovery excavations were conducted during 2016-2017 at the Dixon site (13WD8) a large Oneota village located along the Little Sioux River in northwest Iowa. The University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist contracted Megan Stroh, archaeologist at the Sanford Museum and Planetarium, to conduct geophysical surveys before initiation of Phase III excavations. A Geoscan Research FM256 fluxgate gradiometer was employed at three different mitigation locations under both pre- and post-top...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason King. Jane Buikstra. Robert Pickering.

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we explore the implications of time travel (Holtorf) and ontology (Viveiros de Castro, Latour, Pedersen) for bioarchaeological perspectives of Middle Woodland (Hopewellian) peoples of the lower Illinois River valley (LIV), who occupied this region two millennia ago. Following...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Drew.

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. During the 2018 Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project, 26 concrete or metallic burial vaults were recovered. Established field protocol dictated that these were to remain unopened and were to be reinterred at the new cemetery location without further...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Walder. Daniel Contreras. Walker Good. Alexander Woods.

In summer of 2017, CEMML archaeologists at Fort McCoy, in Tomah, Wisconsin conducted Phase III investigations of three NRHP-eligible sites 47MO054, 47MO360, and 47MO660 near a tank trail crossing Stillwell Creek. This location was continually re-occupied for the last 3,000 years, by Late Archaic to historic-era Native American (probably Ho-Chunk) communities. Bioturbation, military activities, and other cultural and natural processes easily disturb the sandy soils at Stillwell Crossing,...