North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Logan Miller.

Prepared core and blade industries emerge in various times and places throughout the prehistory of North America. One of these is in association with the Hopewell phenomenon of the Eastern Woodlands. As such, they are often recognized as a Middle Woodland "index fossil" and a key materialized indication of Hopewell ceremonialism. However, few formal tests of their occurrence across space and time exist. Drawing on published reports, as well as an extensive review of the unpublished gray...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Reynolds. Thomas Palazzolo. Ashley Lemke. John O'Shea. Sarah Saad.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Submerged Prehistoric Archaeology is a subdiscipline of archaeology that deals with the discovery of ancient submerged landscapes. In Europe alone over 3,000 submerged ancient sites are recorded. While there is an increased number of submerged sites in North America, the emphasis has on the study of shipwrecks and historical questions related to nautical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Noe. Amber VanDerwarker. Greg Wilson. Douglas Kennett. Richard George.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between garden hunting and food security in the Central Illinois River Valley, an area plagued by endemic warfare and drought during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Located ~100 km north of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian polity in North America, the CIRV was composed of smaller settlements that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Schaefer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar’s utility in detecting anthropogenic topographic features, especially those occurring in forested environments, is well established within the archaeological literature. Here, lidar data produced and made publicly available by the state is utilized in the detection of earthworks within the North River Valley, a relatively small tributary of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey White.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community engagement in anthropology and archaeology is extremely important in this day and age, just as it has been in the past; through community engagement, we have the ability to pass along the importance of conserving and preserving our shared (?) archaeological heritage as well as pointing out the importance of every human being's ethnicity,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alleen Betzenhauser. Thomas E. Emerson. Brad H. Koldehoff. Tamira K. Brennan.

This is an abstract from the "Byways to the Past: An American Highway Archaeology Symposium" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology and transportation share a 60-year partnership in Illinois during which large-scale approaches to data recovery have become standard practices. These practices were recently employed to expose 28.5 acres of a precolumbian mound complex that is an integral part of Greater Cahokia. Investigations at East St Louis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Williams.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric domesticate C. berlandieri var. jonesianum is well documented in the archaeobotanical record of eastern North America from ca. 3,800 BP to European contact when it fell out of use. The seed morphology of the domesticate resembles other new world Chenopodium domesticates (C. quinoa and C. berlandieri subsp. nuttalliae) and is distinct from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Meindl. Michelle Bebber.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Old Copper Culture (OCC) (4000-1000 B.C.) of the Lake Superior Region of North America features a wide variety of utilitarian tools manufactured from native copper. Here, we assess the technological diversity of copper projectile points found in the region spanning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota U.S.A., as well as artifacts found...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Parish. Brad Koldehoff.

Presently, no detailed distribution map of the full scope of prehistoric procurement activities in the Crescent Hills area exists. The Crescent Hills area near St. Louis, Missouri is synonymous with high-quality Burlington chert. This paper presents data gathered from a preliminary survey of procurement activity preserved in the Tyson Research Center. The spatial data within a Geographic Information System allows researchers to study the relationship between geologic context, occurrence, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Wilson. Amber VanDerwarker. Duane Esarey. Broxton Bird.

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. For decades archaeologists have conjectured about the impacts of climate change on the distribution of Mississippian and related pre-Columbian populations in midcontinental North America. Until recently, climatological reconstructions were coarse grained and lacked the temporal and spatial resolution to link in any...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Jeske. Katherine Sterner.

Since 1998, archaeologists from UW-Milwaukee have conducted long-term, systematic excavations at the 12th-15th century Crescent Bay Hunt Club site (47JE0904). The Crescent Bay Hunt Club site is unique among early Oneota sites because of the three distinct forms of structures discovered there. This paper focuses on longhouses: portions of at least three longhouses have been recovered from the site. Evidence suggests that these longhouses are at least two hundred years older than previously dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Torquato.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The evolution of the Homo lineage is characterized by the emergence of numerous biological and cultural traits. One behavioral trait is the transition from foraging to farming. Some scholars suggest that climate change contributed to the emergence of agriculture while others hypothesize that continually increasing foraging risk...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Torquato. Erik Otárola-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a century, scholars studying prehistoric subsistence have questioned why humans began farming. A common hypothesis is that climate change contributed to the emergence of agriculture. One area where climate change may have influenced early agriculture is the Interior Eastern Woodlands of North America, where the independent domestication of native plants...

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. Kevin Pape.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dayton Power and Light Company (DP&L) has invested in a long-term commitment to cultural heritage stewardship, through their role as applicant under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, at their JM Stuart Generating Station, in Adams County, Ohio. For almost 25 years, DP&L has worked closely with state and federal permitting agencies to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Spencer-Wood.

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A form of activist archaeology is undertaken by conducting research with a critical Black feminist intersectionality theoretical perspective to promote social justice in representations of America’s heritage on historical markers in Detroit and surrounding Wayne County, Michigan, USA. Contrary to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Black feminist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Thompson. Nancy Knapke. Brice Obermeyer. Diane Hunter. Nekole Alligood.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initiation of community engaged scholarship is not an event. It is often a long-term developmental process, requires recursive planning and assessment, and often engages multiple communities. We present a case study of a research project that grew into a community and collaborative archaeological endeavor that balances engagement between two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Wold.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Woodpecker Cave is a Late Woodland rock shelter site in Johnson County, Iowa, and was the location of a field school operated by the University of Iowa from 2012-2018. During seven field seasons, over 25 kilograms of mussel shell were recovered; many of these were small, unidentifiable pieces found in screens. Shell hinge morphology is the key to identifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kooiman. Aaron Comstock.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous culinary and pottery traditions were in flux during the Woodland and Late Precontact periods (200 BC–AD 1600) of the Northern Great Lakes. Shifting social relationships are indicated by changing pottery distributions and the increasing stylistic influence and presence of nonlocal wares, particularly Iroquoian styles from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Briggs. Xinyuan Zheng. John Berini.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous perspectives of cultural affiliation center on shared relationships with the land (Bruchac 2005); thus, establishing cultural affiliation under NAGPRA is more meaningful if it can reassociate an ancestor based on their region of origin. Biological relatedness has been used to establish cultural affiliation, but this approach prioritizes a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine McLeester.

Wild plant collection is often a key component of food production. Yet, despite its dietary import, collection practices remain under-researched and "wild" plants are typically relegated to the margins of our archaeological analyses. Drawing on historical medicinal records, I discuss the practices surrounding the collection of medicinal plants and these plants’ intricate entanglements in food production systems. In this presentation, I use the early 20th century ethnobotanical works of Huron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Shaeffer. Charlotte Gintert. Maeve Marino.

This is an abstract from the "Public Lands, Public Sites: Research, Engagement, and Collaboration" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on an Indigenous site that is on the NRHP and is located within Summit Metro Parks (SMP), a county-level park system in Ohio. Work on this site exemplifies many of the issues facing cultural resource / heritage management in a small public park system. The site spans both SMP and adjacent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Herrmann. Rebecca Hawkins. Christina Friberg. 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. Evidence of agriculture during the Mississippian period in the Midwest derives largely from the identification and analysis of cultivar macrobotanicals from refuse contexts. However, research that investigates how and where crops were grown on Midwestern sites is scant. As a result, few sites have been identified that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Redmond.

Much past research on the development of Archaic ideological complexity in eastern North America has focused primarily on ritualism and ceremony related to mortuary behaviors. Less attention has been given to ritualism within what is commonly thought of as domestic contexts and without overt mortuary ceremonialism or monumental architecture. The recent discovery of puddled clay architecture (floors) and associated features at the Burrell Orchard site (33LN15) in northeast Ohio provides new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Hargrave. Carey Baxter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monks Mound is the largest prehistoric mound north of Mexico, and is arguably the Cahokia World Heritage Site’s most dramatic monument. Major slumps that occurred in 2007 did significant damage to the mound. Repair of the slumped area revealed a complex stratigraphy, multiple features, and evidence for previous prehistoric and historic slumps. Mounds, like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Baires.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kinship, roughly defined, is a web of social relationships forming a central part of human lives. Kinship contextualizes patterns of behavior, familial ties, socialization, parenting, and relationships that extend beyond biological affinity. In this paper I explore how kinship ties (fictive or...