North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (259 Records)
A historic maritime ruins site located on Plum Island off the tip of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula was acquired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2007. The Porte des Morts Lighthouse (47DR497) operated briefly from 1849 to 1858 until replaced by a more substantial lighthouse on nearly Pilot Island. In partnership with Hamline University, excavations took place between 2013-2015 to uncover evidence as to both the architecture of the building and domestic life on the maritime frontier. Spotty...
Pre-Columbian Burial Rites: Burial Practice Among Prehistoric Native Americans: Midwest Region, Volume III (2014)
Volume III of the PRE-COLUMBIAN BURIAL RITES series analyzes prehistoric mortuary practice in the Midwest Region of North America. The database consists of 32,998 individuals from 1,304 burial sites and covers the period from approximately 9000 B. P. until A. D. 1500. The region by now comprised of the following states: Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. The provinces are analyzed individually by prehistoric period, then the analysis is followed by...
Prehistoric Ceramic Production Variation during the Early and Middle Woodland at the Richter Site, Door County, Wisconsin (2018)
The Richter site (47DR80) located on Washington Island, Door County Wisconsin was excavated by the University of Wisconsin field school during 1968 and 1973. Large quantities of ceramic materials were recovered. This site was identified as belonging to the Middle Woodland North Bay culture as defined by Mason. Among the body sherds were those with smooth or cordmarked exterior surfaces. Smooth surfaced sherds exhibited breaks along coil lines, indicative of coil construction technique....
Preliminary Results from Newport Site (36IN188) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Newport village was founded in circa 1787 to facilitate movement of people and goods from Pennsylvania’s early road system to riverine highways. The town was largely abandoned by 1840, but contained several taverns, blacksmith shops, and infrastructure for loading boats on, and crossing over, the adjacent Conemaugh River. At its height approximately 30...
Preliminary Results from Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of Pit Features at the Morton Village Site (11F2), Central Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of paleoethnobotanical analysis of flotation samples from 38 external pit features from the Morton Village Site (11F2), located in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV). Previous research at Morton Village provides strong evidence that the village was occupied contemporaneously by both Mississippian and Oneota...
Processing Personhood: Mortuary Activity from the Middle to Late Woodland in the Lower Illinois River Valley (2018)
While archaeological engagement with the body as a locus of embodied agency has proliferated in recent years, this study is the first to rigorously apply theories of personhood to the lengthy burial rituals documented within interment facilities of Woodland burial mounds from the North American Midcontinent. This study aims to explore conceptions of the body, dividuality, embodiment, and personhood through the analysis of skeletal material from the Middle Woodland Gibson Mounds Site (n=19) and...
Puberty in Precontact Illinois: An Evaluation of Pubertal Timing in Middle and Late Woodland Native American Adolescents (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing of life-cycle stages in ancient populations has important implications for population dynamics and social identity; it may also serve as an indicator of broader health and social processes. This study of Woodland adolescents is the first assessment of pubertal development in precontact Native Americans and demonstrates that Shapland and Lewis’s...
Public Archaeology at Kathio National Historic Landmark: Structure and Archaeobotany of a Burned Earthlodge (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kathio National Historic Landmark, in east-central Minnesota, is an important place within the ancestral homeland of the Dakota Nation. Petaga Point (21ML11) is one of the contributing sites within the landmark, and excavations there in the 1960s were a primary source for the Woodland Tradition ceramic sequence of the Mille Lacs locality. Elden Johnson...
Pushing and Pulling the Mississippian Moment Into the Western Great Lakes (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. This paper provides a comparative review of the regional chronology, material culture indicators, and environmental data for three site-centered locales (Trempealeau/Fisher Mounds, Fred Edwards, and Aztalan) harboring Middle Mississippian components in southern Wisconsin and the Upper Mississippi River Valley. These data...
"Quickly, bring me some wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever." Understanding the Viticulture Industry in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The agricultural industry in America was one of the most profitable industries of our past. This paper will focus on one important aspect of that industry. The viticulture industry was firmly established in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky from as early as the 1800s. Unlike most agricultural industries, preparing, cultivating and harvesting grapes took the right...
Range and Variation of Copper Tools from Two Archaic Localities in Wisconsin (2018)
Great Lakes Archaic copper artifacts have been well documented and typed for many decades. However, there is a lingering tendency to think of copper as primarily a social signifier and to shy away from development of economically oriented copper theory. One component of the problem is rooted in copper’s innately malleable nature. Copper was made into a wide range of tools and non-utilitarian items during prehistory. While most of these types have been enumerated, there are no published...
Reconsidering the Late Woodland: A Critical Reassessment through Decolonizing Approaches (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Woodland period in eastern North America has traditionally been conceptualized as a cultural hiatus between the region’s Hopewell and Mississippian traditions. As a drastic (though not complete) reduction in the practices of monumental architecture and art produced with nonlocal materials occurred during this time, the end of the preceding Hopewell...
Red Lake Ojibwe Food Sovereignty: A Historical and Contemporary Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Social Justice in Native North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because American Indians suffer from diet-related diseases at higher rates than other ethnic groups, Indigenous organizers are finding ways to improve the health of their communities. One way they are accomplishing this goal is through the promotion of traditional foods their people consumed prior to European colonization, known as...
Redrawing the Arrows of Mississippianization to and from the Central Illinois River Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rise of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian Native American city north of Mexico, and the rapid spread of Mississippian culture across the midcontinental and southeastern United States after 1000 CE have long been a focus of archaeological inquiry. From early theories of cultural...
Repatriating Cahokia: Pursuing Tribal Priorities in and around NAGPRA (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The NAGPRA Office at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is in the process of coordinating a multi-tribe, multi-institution project with the goal of repatriating Ancestors and cultural items from the Cahokia site, near present-day East St. Louis. This presentation summarizes the development and current status of the project, as well as its future...
Resource Dependency Theory: A New Approach for Examining Trade Relationships (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Trade and Exchange" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eighteenth-century trade and exchange in the Midwest has been characterized by give and take relationships (such as Richard White’s middle ground) between Native American groups and Euro-American traders. Looking for new ways to think about the nature of these relationships, and borrowing from business and organizational studies, resource dependency...
Resting in Meaning: Symbolism from St. Henry’s Cemetery (11S1742), East St. Louis, IL, 1866–1908 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. St. Henry’s Catholic Cemetery (11S1742), located in East St. Louis, IL, was in use between 1866 and 1908 and mainly served the surrounding German and Irish communities. Despite repeated claims of full relocation since its closure, the presence of burials on site has been debated. However, recent excavations reveal a likely large number of burials were...
Rethinking Ceramic Attribute Technology during the Late Woodland Period in Southwest Ohio (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The focus of this research is the variability of ceramics from Late Woodland (A.D. 400-1000) sites in the Little Miami River Valley in Hamilton County, Ohio. Few Late Woodland features have been recovered and little is known about the ceramic technology in southwest Ohio, but these artifacts still play a major role in understanding prehistoric societies. The...
Revealing Ritual Landscapes at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (2018)
Hopewell Culture National Historical Park preserves six monumental mound and earthwork complexes in south-central Ohio. Archaeological attention in the 19th and 20th centuries remained narrowly focused on mounds and mortuary contexts, ignoring the vast spaces between the monuments. At the same time, agricultural plowing steadily eroded the above-grade features. Recently, the National Park Service forged an international partnership to conduct high-resolution, landscape-scale geomagnetic surveys...
The Risks and Benefits of Working with Private Collections: Lessons from the COADS Project (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Privately held collections are an endangered part of the archaeological record that the SAA’s "Principles of Archaeological Ethics" directs us preserve. The Central Ohio Archaeological Digitization Survey (COADS) is undertaking the documentation of dozens of private collections in central Ohio. By September 2018 it recorded over 15,000 artifacts and added over...
Ritual Traces and the Challenges of Detecting Late Precontact Rituals at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, IL (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic accounts of indigenous communities throughout the United States illustrate the many ways that ritual activities were deeply embedded into everyday life. However, moving to the American Midwestern archaeological record, treatments of ritual are typically limited to large, ceremonial sites and these everyday rituals...
Riverine Resource Subsistence in Early to Middle Woodland Saginaw Valley, Michigan: An Investigation of Site 20SA1427 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the terminal Early to late-Middle Woodland periods (500 BC – AD 500), Native groups living in the central Saginaw Valley of Michigan dramatically shifted subsistence strategies from a reliance on medium to large game, to a focus on aquatic resources. Regional sites illustrate this shift, though from the point of deposition in central domestic spaces,...
Saint Croix Oneota and 14th Century Migration into the Saint Croix Valley of Minnesota and Wisconsin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sheffield site is the only known Late Precontact Oneota village along the Saint Croix River of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Additionally, a small collection of Oneota ceramics from a nearby rock shelter site and isolated Oneota sherds point to a slightly more widespread presence in the valley. Still, the general geographic isolation of the Sheffield site and...
Satellite Imagery and Esri’s ArcGIS Pro’s Georeferencing Tools Confirm Arkansas City, Kansas Is the Locale of Etzanoa, a Historic Site Visited by Spanish Explorer, Juan Oñate, in 1601 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using Esri’s ArcGIS Pro’s georeferencing tools to rubber-sheet a historic native map to satellite imagery confirms Dr. Donald J. Blakeslee’s findings (2018) regarding a site located near the mouth of the Walnut River, in Arkansas City, Kansas. The site is likely the native town, Etzanoa, a settlement of the Ancestral Wichita and Affiliated Tribes visited by...
Seeing Red: An Analysis of Archaeological Ochre in East Central Missouri (2018)
The Truman Road Site (23SC924), St. Charles County, Missouri, features a diversity of material remains and a long periods of occupation mostly occurring during the Late Archaic (3000 – 2500 BC) and Middle Woodland (100 BC – AD 500). For this region of prehistoric Missouri, ceramics and chert constitute the main evidence for understanding trade and cultural dynamics. Despite its relative ubiquity among sites, ochre has rarely been considered in such studies. Recognizing that this material is a...