North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

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 Aaron Comstock. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the span of a few winter months in the mid-1880s, Harvard University conducted excavations on the property of Philip Turpin in Hamilton County, Ohio. Under the direction of Charles Metz, a local physician, a small team excavated areas throughout the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Orr. Peregrine Gerard-Little. Konnie Wescott.

This is an abstract from the "MARS General Military CRM Poster Session" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated on 7,484 ha (18,494 acres) at the foothills of the Rampart Range in Colorado, the main campus of the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) has experienced human activity across the precolonial, historic, and military eras, as well as natural disturbance from water courses and soil slumping along steep slopes. Both natural and cultural...

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 Jacob Moody. Adam Wiewel.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Geophysical and Geospatial Research in the National Parks" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Midwest Archeological Center carried out multi-instrument geophysical surveys at four properties managed by Ste. Geneviève National Historical Park in 2022 to better understand archeological resources within them. Ste. Geneviève is a French colonial town in southeast Missouri with vernacular architecture...

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 David Watt. Adam Wiewel. Steven De Vore. Jon Garcia.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Geophysical and Geospatial Research in the National Parks" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists with the Midwest Archeological Center (MWAC), local volunteers, and Wilson's Creek National Battlefield (WICR) staff conducted a systematic metal detector and magnetometry survey of the proposed location of the Guinn Farmstead. The site of an ambush during the Union Army's retreat in the August...

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 Dan Trepal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hamtramck Historic Spatial Archaeology Project, launched in 2021, is an active digital, web-based public collaborative deep mapping project for the city of Hamtramck, an industrialized city completely surrounded by Detroit. The primary focus of the project is to create and launch a digital, web-based, publicly accessible deep map linking information...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edwin Hajic. Andrew Martin. Paul Bundy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identification and interpretation of buried cultural deposits in alluvial settings is improved by an integrated approach that considers the area at an appropriate scale in line with prehistoric land use; applies key underlying concepts; and utilizes multiple methodologies of subsurface investigation, laboratory analysis, and environmental modeling. Success at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah LavenderNees. Michelle Bebber.

This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hopewell artisans were innovative and highly skilled craftspeople, demonstrating proficiency with a wide variety of exotic materials, including meteoric iron. Here we explore the material properties of this unique raw material in terms of production and possible function. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bret Ruby. Friedrich Lueth. Rainer Komp. Jarrod Burks. Timothy Darvill.

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. Monumental timber post circles or "woodhenges" are ancient and enduring elements in the ritual landscapes of Native North America. Examples are known from as much as 3500 years ago at Poverty Point; from 2400 years ago in Adena ceremonial contexts in the Ohio Valley; from 1000 years ago at Cahokia; and in contemporary use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Peterson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North America’s Native Copper Industry is one of the oldest metalworking traditions in the world, with metal use in this region dating to over 9,500 years ago. While several studies have focused on copper mining and use, few have focused on copper production. As a result, little attention has been given to the waste materials generated during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Structures, especially houses, are focal locations, acting as a venue for a myriad of social actions. Analyzing the size, shape, orientation, and context of houses individually and as a group allows for multiscale interpretations of past communities. This paper explores variation and organization of structures at a series of Late Precontact (ca. AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Burkett.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropology and archaeology strive not only to reconstruct the physical characteristics of the past world but to understand how past people thought about the world around them. The way people think gets encoded in magical frameworks in both physical objects like monuments and dwellings, as well as in less permanent expressions, like music,...