North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cook. Grace Conrad. Joseph Chambers.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While archaeologists are quite good at communicating to each other through various professional outlets, we have not been particularly good at conveying our core findings and lessons for wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the Midwest United States. While there are likely many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hoag.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the last four summers the Shaker Historical Museum in Shaker Heights, OH, has been sponsoring a community-based archaeological day camp experience for school-aged children. Through excavations at two local historical sites within the city, the participants of our program have learned the importance of archaeology, history, and preservation in their own...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Skeens.

Woodpecker Cave (13JH202) provides a unique opportunity to study variation in ceramic technology and resource allocation during the ceramic production process at a Late Woodland East-Central Iowa site. Excavations by the University of Iowa field school spanning six seasons have recovered hundreds of ceramic pottery sherds from Woodpecker Cave, including a modest amount of decorated rim pieces and a large number of undecorated body sherds. Previous typological analyses of the ceramic assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Niquette.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spring Valley site (23CT389) is a stratified, multicomponent site associated with a co-alluvial fan in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, southeast Missouri. Temporally diagnostic bifaces indicate components dating from the Middle Paleoindian to the Middle Archaic periods (ca. 10,800-5,500 14C yr BP). A detailed study of site formation process at 23CT389...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Freire. Patricia Richards. Brooke Drew.

From 1878 through 1974 Milwaukee County utilized four locations on the Milwaukee County Grounds for burial of more than 7,000 individuals, primarily paupers, the institutionalized, and the unidentified. Two archaeological excavations in 1991 and 1992 and again in 2013 resulted in the recovery of over 2,400 individuals from one of those cemetery locations. A comprehensive understanding of the spatial organization and use life of this site has been complicated by the cemetery’s history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards. Robert Jeske.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Mississippianization” has been used by archaeologists to explain the appearance of shell-temper and certain decorative ceramic motifs found in the northern Prairie Peninsula during and after the eleventh century. These ceramic attributes are supposed symbols of an expanding Cahokian worldview, sent north by a diffusionist wave of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kelly.

Lynne Goldstein’s contribution to our understanding of Mississippian societies in the Midwest is still an ongoing endeavor. Her research with its roots in the greater Cahokia area and within a few years at Aztalan has an important impact on my own efforts. Her dissertation research into the Mississippian cemeteries, Schild and Moss, was methodologically rigorous and provided insights into the manner in which non-elite cemeteries some 100 km north of Cahokia were spatially and socially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Polk. Jeremy Wilson. Broxton Bird.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. High-resolution paleoclimatic data have been increasingly utilized in archaeological research to investigate regional settlement patterns, periods of growth, stasis, and decline, and episodes social stress and resilience, among other subjects. Until recently, few databases have existed for the Eastern Woodlands of North America that enable researchers to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Enloe.

Spatial analysis has the potential to yield substantial evidence about the organization of economic and social interactions of prehistoric archaeological sites. There is a growing body of ethnoarchaeological research that allows robust interpretations of spatial patterning in the open-air campsites of mobile peoples. The very fact that such sites may represent short-term, low density occupations means that the configuration of labor and activities may actually be clearer than in longer-term...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Roache-Fedchenko.

The location of blacksmith workshops is often noted on historic maps, yet the archaeological attributes of the workshops are often not well understood within the context of the 18th century. Most knowledge of blacksmithing derives from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The various tools and techniques used to produce and repair metal objects are well documented from these later time periods, as is the spatial layout of the blacksmith shops. These depictions of blacksmiths and blacksmithing are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elspeth Geiger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the Great Lakes and the Northeastern United States, microfossil research has primarily focused on maize (Zea mays). Further, direct evidence of starch beyond maize is equally limited. The importance of wild rice (Manoomin) as a food source, an aspect of spirituality, and other-than-human being is well known to the archaeologists of the region....

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Flood. Jeremy Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late pre-Columbian period in the central Illinois River valley (CIRV) is demarcated by the development of large, oftentimes fortified Mississippian towns, farming hamlets, extensive trade networks, and shifting political alliances between AD 1050 and 1400. The fission and fusion of local polities ceased with abrupt abandonment of the CIRV by AD 1450 as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Feltz.

3D photogrammetry is the process of creating a manipulable 3D model using only photos from a high-resolution camera that are then processed through computer software to extract 3D data and create a wireframe and mesh. This process can be accurate enough to measure a hairline fracture along the surface of prehistoric pottery with .1mm accuracy. Analyze the benefits of such methods, a study was conducted using Oneota ceramic artifacts of the La Crosse, Wisconsin locality that have been curated at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Everhart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Woodland societies of the Central Scioto River Valley in Ohio, most notably the Hopewell, have garnered much archaeological distinction from two elements of their ceremonialism: the construction of large, sometimes geometric ditch and embankment enclosures and the production of ornate art, often of exotic materials, utilized in funerary practices. It has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Tankersley.

During the past decade, the University of Cincinnati has offered a summer archaeological field school, which focuses on periods of rapid and profound global climatic change. Students undertake detailed excavation profile descriptions, collect samples for AMS radiocarbon and OSL dating, botanical, faunal, soil, and geochemical analyses to develop an accurate chronology and paleoenvironmental framework of the depositional history for archaeological sites, which date to the Younger Dryas and Little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Painter. Jeffrey Painter. Jodie O'Gorman. Terrance Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violent interaction between people of the Oneota and Mississippian traditions in the Central Illinois River Valley in the North American Midcontinent ca. 1300–1400 CE at Norris Farms #36 is a clear example of intermittent, low-scale warfare. One aspect of initial interpretations of the interaction, based on evidence for raiding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bretton Giles. Brian Rowe. Ryan Parish.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores the significance of the Middle Woodland burials found on the lower floor under Mound 2 at the Hopewell Earthworks, including their grave goods, mortuary furniture, spatial patterning, and postmortem treatment. It investigates how certain aspects of these burials’ ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Logan Miller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation provides an overview of recent excavations at the Noble-Wieting village in McLean County, Illinois. Noble-Wieting is a nearly six-acre Langford Tradition mound and village site along the Kickapoo Creek, far from the Langford core along the upper Illinois River. The site has long been known for its unique geographic position as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hedman. Thomas Emerson. Timothy Pauketat. Matthew Fort.

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. At its peak, Greater Cahokia had a population of over 30,000 people, and engaged in social, political, and religious interactions that covered the midcontinent. The factors that influenced the rise and dissolution of Greater Cahokia between ca A.D. 1000 and 1300 remain a focus of inquiry. Archaeobotanical and isotopic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner. Robert Ahlrichs. Dan Wendt. Larry Furo.

The Old Copper Complex represents a unique temporally and geographically bounded technological phenomenon. Binford (1962) challenged the idea that copper tools were adopted by Native Americans solely because they were technologically more efficient. He argued that Archaic copper served a primarily socio-technic function based on two assumptions. One, that copper tools were more efficient in use performance than their stone and bone counterparts. And two, that the energy expenditure required for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hinkelman. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the US Midwest, most students are exposed only briefly to the precontact history in the fourth grade and then not again unless they opt for archaeology as an elective in college. The Ohio Board of Education requires teachers to merely state that American Indians lived in Ohio, participated in the War of 1812, and then died or left the area....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg.

The ‘Mississippianization’ of the Midwest unfolded during the late 11th and early 12th centuries as interactions with Cahokia influenced aspects of local community organization, ceremonialism, material culture, and access to exotic raw materials. For local peoples, these encounters and affiliations also facilitated interactions between Mississippian groups beyond Cahokia. The direct proximity of the Lower Illinois River Valley (LIRV) to the Greater Cahokia area enabled certain social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Skinner.

The analysis and disentanglement of human skeletal elements from commingled burial contexts is an essential step in creating individual identifications. This commingled analysis often includes a reliance on joint articulations to determine holistic element reassociations. Manual methods currently exist to test joint articulations for potential reassociation, but most appendicular joint articulations fall within the low reliability category for this method (Adams and Byrd 2014). Many cases of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffery Kruchten.

The Emerald Acropolis is an early Mississippian shrine complex constructed atop a high upland ridge approximately 25 kilometers east of Cahokia in southwestern Illinois. The termination and abandonment of a suite of special-use buildings located along an isolated spur at the base of the main ridge is strikingly different than the termination of similar non-domestic buildings throughout the region. These buildings, including large public structures, shrines, temples, and a sweat lodge, are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Ellens.

This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Unearthing Detroit Project is a collections-based research and public archaeology initiative focused on the historical collections housed in the Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University. Reflecting on our experiences and integrated feedback has allowed Unearthing Detroit to consider the...