North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa Perrone. Metin Eren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Endscrapers are a common flaked stone tool found at Late Pleistocene sites around the world. Microwear evidence has demonstrated that these implements are predominantly used for hide-scraping. However, these small, round, often bullet-like specimens are also found broken. Here, using controlled and actualistic experiments we explore the forces necessary to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eve Hargrave. Kristin M. Hedman.

The Upper Mississippian (A.D. 1400-1500) Hoxie Farm site is one of the best documented late prehistoric sites in Cook County, Illinois. In 1953, Elaine Bluhm and David Wenner from the Field Museum of Natural History organized a volunteer crew of professional and avocational archaeologists to salvage portions of the site in advance of construction of the first interstate highway (I-80) in Illinois. In 2000-2003, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) conducted additional excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Shott.

This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology views hunter-gatherers as nature’s children or launching pads to complex society. Ethnographic hunter-gatherers exhibit fission-fusion cycles that we explain variously, including modular organization of group sizes (e.g., "scalar-stress"). However well models explain ethnographic pattern, archaeological tests...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Frederick.

Recent research in northern lower Michigan systematically tested the ability to identify subterranean food storage features using surface criteria. Subterranean storage features were used during the late Late Woodland period (AD 1200-1600) in parts of the Michigan Inland Waterway. Such cache features prolong the availability of food stuffs and mitigate against the risk of food shortage. This paper discusses the research methodology required for identifying such features. While many are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Werner.

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complicating the narrative of the traditional poor farm cemetery, the work of Patricia B. Richards has led to a more humanistic approach to interpreting archaeological data. This study presents oral microbiome data from twenty-five female individuals from the Milwaukee County Poor Farm...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Buikstra.

This is an abstract from the "The Village, the Region, and Beyond: Stuart Struever (1931–2022) and the Lower Illinois River Valley Research Program" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This introductory paper for the symposium recognizing and celebrating the seminal contributions of Stuart Struever to Midcontinental archaeology begins with his earliest regional project at the Kamp Mound Group. Legend has it that Struever became lost traveling to St....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karthik Yarlagadda. Kelsey Witt. Kristin Hedman. Kelly Swanson. Ripan Malhi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coprolites are recognized as an important source of archaeological data; they contain biological remains from the organism’s diet, as well as genetic material from microorganisms, dietary components, and the host. Modern studies have shown that the gut microbiome reflects dietary trends; as microbial remains are also present in coprolites, these provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pollack. A. Gwynn Henderson.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Upon arriving as a visiting professor at the University of Kentucky in 1980, Tom Dillehay took an immediate interest in the mounds and geometric earthworks that dotted the Bluegrass landscape of central Kentucky. As he drove the country roads and walked the rolling hills around Lexington, Dillehay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Reetz.

The practice of archaeology involves studying human adaptation to the natural world by using the environment as a vehicle for the development of knowledge. Archaeology education has strong parallels and intersections with the well-established field of Environmental Education (EE); yet, it is both widely acknowledged that cultural history is one of the weaker components of EE, and many archaeology educators are likewise unfamiliar with EE. In 2016, archaeologists from University of Iowa Office of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Styles. Sarah Neusius.

This is an abstract from the "The Village, the Region, and Beyond: Stuart Struever (1931–2022) and the Lower Illinois River Valley Research Program" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Struever’s passion for multidisciplinary archaeological research in the lower Illinois River valley (LIV) attracted both authors to Northwestern University and to our specializations in zooarchaeology. Struever’s primary interest was in anthropological interpretations of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Drew. Chris Drew.

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dr. Patricia Richards had an indelible impact on these married authors’ time as UWM doctoral candidates. Her support as the former’s dissertation advisor was unfailing, and she provided a useful anthropological perspective for the latter’s English creative writing committee. In this paper, her...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edwin Hajic. Thomas Styles.

This is an abstract from the "The Village, the Region, and Beyond: Stuart Struever (1931–2022) and the Lower Illinois River Valley Research Program" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stuart Struever’s Foundation for Illinois Archeology (FIA) and subsequent Center for American Archeology (CAA) programs were incubators for interdisciplinary research including intensive geoarchaeological research. Following Struever’s vision, program geoarchaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Bebber. Christopher Wolff.

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. The discovery and development of metals as tool media is a topic of global interest. Although this phenomenon is generally associated with sedentary, agrarian-based societies, in North America there is regularly documented, albeit not widely known, use of metals by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Bossio.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are well poised to investigate the past, discover what cannot be seen today, and bring that knowledge to the present in meaningful and effective ways. One important field of archaeological study is that of human relationships with wetlands; many wetlands have already been destroyed worldwide, yet these ecosystems are both culturally and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Gwynn Henderson. Linda S. Levstik. M. Jay Stottman. Janie-Rice Brother.

Investigating a Shotgun House, a Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter case study, asks students to use multiple data sources (oral history, historical documents, architecture, and archaeology) to examine a single question: what can we learn about the lives of mid-20th century urban working-class people from the study of their homes? In this case, shotgun houses. Formal field testing in elementary school classrooms, and interviews with piloting teachers and their students documented that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Fish.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the 19th century, Amish and Mennonite settlers fleeing persecution settled in the United States. In this study, I focus on families who settled in what is now Butler County, Ohio. For these settlers, there is a robust historic record telling a story of the community shifting from conservative Amish to more liberal Mennonites. I investigate to what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adyn Hallahan. Michelle Hrivnyak.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates preservation and molecular integrity of bone through an experimental study focused on variation in mortuary practices. The objective of this study examines how different mortuary rituals affect bone preservation, particularly in an area with a freeze/thaw effect, and how simulated mortuary contexts will impact the stable isotope...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Ray. Neal Lopinot.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sugar Potato site is located on an alluvial fan at the base of the Pinnacles, an eroded upland area that borders the Missouri River floodplain in central Missouri. The lower slopes of the ridges in this area contain residual deposits of high-quality Burlington chert, which were quarried for more than 2,000 years. Test excavations at the Sugar Potato site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Bonzani. Bruce Manzano. Matthew Davidson. Robert Tykot.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our study aims to investigate the movement and territorial behaviors of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmermann) and dogs (Canis familiaris Linneaus) over time, utilizing carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotope values derived from archaeological remains. An analysis of these isotope values extracted from tooth collagen and enamel was conducted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Madeleine McLeester.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the western Great Lakes region of the USA, late prehistoric and early historic Indigenous fields are often difficult to investigate because their archaeological signatures are faint and easily destroyed. They have been identified largely via rare remnants of ridged fields and historical records. With the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Hoffman.

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. Janet D. Spector is best known for her groundbreaking work in Feminist Archaeology and collaborative research but she also made significant contributions beyond archaeology. Spector helped form the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Minnesota in 1973, the first in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bretton Giles. Ryan Parish. Marta Alfonso Durruty. Bretton Giles.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our paper investigates the relationship between Ohio Hopewell ceremonial hearths and the caches interred within/adjacent to them in submound buildings at Hopewell and Mound City. While large Ohio Hopewell mega-caches have captured the attention of archaeologists, discussions of the ceremonial hearths associated with them have typically focused on their use....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Cowan. Ryan Peterson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the end of the last major glaciation over 10,000 years ago, lake levels in the Lake Superior Basin have varied considerably. This variation caused the formation of relict shorelines that were left behind as water levels dropped. At around 6,600 years ago, the lake level began to rise in an event that took place over the next 700 years. This event...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Lovis.

The so-called "Birney Mound" on the Saginaw River in lower Michigan is revisited from the vantage point of long term landscape perception, marking, naming, and memory. The natural raised postglacial beach feature, a deposit of light sand, is the major landscape prominence on the Saginaw River drainage. At times during high water stands in the basin the location was the entrepot to the system from Lake Huron, and during later recessional episodes became the first highly visible landform...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Emerson. Kristin Hedman. 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. Post-AD 1000 was a time of tremendous change in the Upper Illinois River valley. The Terminal Late Woodland groups in the region were bordered on the south by emergent Mississippian petty chiefdoms of the Central Illinois River valley, on the north by Oneota and Mississippian societies, and on the east by Fort Ancient...