North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Freire.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery is an umbrella term used to describe the four cemeteries that were used by Milwaukee County, WI from 1878 through 1974 for the burial of the indigent, unclaimed, institutionalized, and anatomized. The focus of this research is the twice-excavated Cemetery II, in use between 1882 and 1925. Approximately one-quarter of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only F. Scott Worman. Elizabeth Sobel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than a century, books, movies, and other media have portrayed the Ozarks region of the U.S. as historically isolated, rural, backwards, and overwhelmingly white. However, recent studies have begun to reveal a more complex and nuanced picture of life in the Ozarks during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our investigations of a company town...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Madeleine McLeester. Terrance Martin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Prehistoric Oneota subsistence in the North American Upper Mississippi River Valley has been described using many different and sometimes incompatible perspectives. For example, Oneota maize agriculture could be less intensive than Middle Mississippian agriculture, or more intensive. In a similar fashion, the use of wild resources, especially aquatic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dunham.

The practice of archaeological site reconnaissance falls within the western scientific tradition and relies on consistent methodology, precise measurement, and sampling strategies. However, there is also an experiential element to archaeological survey in which practitioners consciously and unconsciously observe patterns in the field that lead them to hunches or gut feelings that drift beyond quantifiable, empirical observation. While such hunches are occasionally crafted into hypotheses, they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Iseminger.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology as a Public Good: Why Studying Archaeology Creates Good Careers and Good Citizens" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During nearly five decades of working in public archaeology at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, I have witnessed and experienced the importance of public awareness of archaeology and American Indian cultures and found the need to overcome stereotypes the public has about both.This has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Brown.

Wilderness areas are generally managed as unpeopled landscapes, in the words of the Wilderness Act, "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." However, wilderness areas do have human histories, and these historical narratives and the archaeological record they left behind can greatly enrich the visitor experience. In the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, visitors portage canoes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kooiman.

A novel combination of analytic methods is used to address the decades-long debate about diachronic subsistence pattern change during the Woodland period (AD 1 – 1600) in the Upper Great Lakes of North America. While some have argued for dietary continuity throughout the regional Woodland, others maintain that certain specific resources—including fish, wild starchy plants, and/or maize—were more intensively exploited over time. The Cloudman site (20CH6), located on an island off Michigan’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kat Slocum.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1836, after centuries of occupation, Native Americans signed over 13 million acres of Northern Michigan land to the U.S. in an attempt to curtail complete removal from their ancestral homeland. This research project examines the transitional period of land loss in the mid-19th century to analyze to what extent Native Americans utilized the landscape before,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Foubert.

Analysis of a faunal assemblage gives us direct evidence of a subsistence base of archaeological occupation. Woodpecker Cave is a Late Woodland rockshelter site used by the University of Iowa as a field school for student education. The site was first excavated by Warren W. Caldwell after his initial surveying in 1956. In the subsequent years since the university first began excavations in 2012 with Jim Enloe as supervisor, students have expanded the excavation area horizontally leading to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hinkelman. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural groups in the Middle Ohio River Valley experienced significant changes in mobility, subsistence, and social organization from the Late Woodland (AD 700 – 1000) to the Early Fort Ancient period (AD 1000 – 1300). Technology changed as well, particularly the production and morphology of projectile points. It is possible that constraints related to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Libbon. Karen Reed. Aidan McCarty. Erica Birkner. Seth Mitchell.

Northern Ohio is the intersection of several physiographic zones and drainage sub basins. Where the eastern edge of the dissected Allegheny plateau meets the broad till and Lake Plains of western Ohio, the difference in the landscape is apparent. Between 2015 and 2017, SWCA, worked to complete a 217-mile survey across Northern Ohio for a large natural gas pipeline project. The project investigated almost 10,000 acres, and recorded close to 500 archaeological resources. The dataset generated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kooiman.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. James Skibo’s seminal works on pottery function created a valuable model for assessing the role of pottery in the lives of past peoples. While this approach has broad applicability for ceramic assemblages worldwide, its efficacy has been demonstrated through a series of studies on ancient pottery assemblages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Green. Steven De Vore. Adam Wiewel.

Gast Farm (13LA12), situated on a Mississippi River valley alluvial fan, has been a focus of interdisciplinary study since 1990. Surface collections and excavations documented two Woodland communities and one mound. The Weaver community (Late Woodland, ca. A.D. 400) was determined to have been a circular village with a central plaza, but details of the Havana community (Middle Woodland, ca. A.D. 100) and mound structure were not clear. Aerial imagery seemed to indicate the presence of geometric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Schirmer. Andy Brown.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A multiyear collaborative process led to the Prairie Island Indian Community acquiring 120 contiguous acres containing two major villages and more than 90 known associated burial mounds on the north side of the Cannon River, near Red Wing, Minnesota. Archeologists have known about the site complex for more than 140 years, but other than partial mound...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Wilson. Grace Bocko. Olivia Messenger.

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. Building on our prior paleodemographic research as part of the Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project, this study examines the patterns of dental disease and rates of decayed, missing, and filled teeth (DMFT) across the three periods of interment and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Vander Heiden.

Patent medicine bottles offer a window into the popular culture of 19th Century America and highlight the ways in which otherwise isolated populations were connected into broader social and economic networks. Settlers on the Wisconsin frontier in the mid-to-late 19th century had limited access to formal health care. Physicians who did provide services to remote populations were often poorly trained and had a limited understanding of the causes of many diseases. Thus, self-medication and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessi Spencer. Kaleigh Best. Mark Wagner.

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) in East St. Louis, IL, was interring largely German and Irish individuals from 1866 to 1908. As part of growing urbanization and societal sanitation concerns, the cemetery was closed and buried individuals were supposedly relocated by 1926. By 1951, the Illinois National Guard Armory was constructed on the site and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Richards.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pots with rims formed into distinct collars appear in the western Great Lakes during the early eleventh century A.D. and appear to have been produced well into the fourteenth century A.D. Such "collared ware" has a wide, though uneven distribution in the region and includes at least three types of true collared...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sigrid Arnott. Janis Fairbanks. David Maki. Marcus Ammesmaki.

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Grand Portage of the St. Louis River is both a historic route and a series of historic sites originally documented as a fur trade connection between Lake Superior and the Mississippi River Basin. Although often considered a “contact period” site, the trail has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Truhan.

A powerful function of GIS is to look at spatial distributions of different components of settlement systems. During the Woodland Period, there appears to have been fundamental changes in economic and social organization, during the transition from hunting and gathering to substantial dependence on maize agriculture. Increasing dependence on maize agriculture appears to be correlated with increases in population and number of sites in the Late Woodland. What is less clear is the relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Howey.

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. The Midewiwin is a ceremonial complex whose importance among the Algonquin-speaking peoples of the Great Lakes Region was noted frequently throughout the historical era. Various scholars have interpreted this ceremonial complex as an exclusively post-contact phenomenon, as a medicine society that evolved in relation to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne Goldstein. John Kelly.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Harriet Smith worked at the Field Museum in Chicago for much of her long career. She was in the Education Department and focused primarily on teaching high school students about archaeology and other disciplines. However, this simple statement does not do justice to Harriet’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Livingood. Christina Friberg.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mill Creek hoe industry was integral to the political consolidation of Greater Cahokia. Manufactured at the chert quarries in southern Illinois and distributed throughout the Mississippi valley, previous research examined the relationship between Mill Creek hoe abundance and straight-line distance between source and site to produce characteristic fall-off...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Comstock. Robert Cook.

Shell tempered pottery with smoothed surfaces, widely referred to as Mississippi Plain Pottery, is a ubiquitous but understudied element of Mississippian assemblages throughout the Midwest and Southeast. Along the northeastern Mississippian periphery, shell tempered plain pots and body sherds are present but have not been formally considered. Through analysis and direct dating of early Fort Ancient (c. AD 1000-1300) ceramic assemblages, we suggest that Mississippi Plain pottery appears early at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwendolyn Martin-Apostolatos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The gravestones of Missouri’s historic Columbia Cemetery demonstrate the evolving social identity of the population of Columbia, MO. These stone artifacts display information that reflects the mortuary values of the residents of this city, spanning more than a century. This study resulted in a database of local historic mortuary monuments documenting their...