North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Madeleine McLeester.

Archaeologists have long explored the early interactions between Native Americans and Europeans in the Great Lakes region of Eastern North America. In particular, they have prioritized investigating these relationships at late prehistoric sites containing European trade goods. However, this narrow focus has led to neglecting late precontact sites that precede this period and which are essential for fully contextualizing these early interactions. In this presentation, we summarize the second year...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Benden. Mara Taft.

Legacy collections—those typically generated decades ago that do not meet current professional curation standards and require a substantial resource investment for long-term preservation—are housed in nearly every archaeological repository across the country. Many are the result of under-funded university field schools or public archaeology projects that didn’t account for either the initial curation preparation or the long-term costs and maintenance of collections care. The deeply stratified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarrod Burks.

Ohio is home to hundreds of Woodland period (ca. 300 BC- AD 400) earthwork sites. Most contain mounds and ditch-and-embankment enclosures in geometric shapes. Site size and complexity varies widely, from small, lone circles (often surrounding a mound) in the Early Woodland to the mega-large Middle Woodland Newark Earthworks. How and why earthwork construction moved from small to massive are enduring questions yet to be solved. Recent magnetic survey in southern Ohio at two sites of moderate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Boyer.

Over 400 pieces of bone and eggshell were collected during excavation at the Nine Gal Tavern site (11CH541) located in western Champaign County, Illinois in 1987 and 1991 by a team led by archaeologist Lenville Stelle. The majority of the remains analyzed were recovered within feature context in the immediate vicinity of the established Nine Gal Tavern structure. The purpose of this paper is to describe the identification of these faunal remains which are housed at the Anthropology Program at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only F. Scott Worman. Elizabeth Sobel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dominant historical narrative of the Ozarks characterizes the region as rural, white, and agrarian, with racial diversity and industrialization limited to modern urban contexts and nearby cities like St. Louis. Building on the work of descendant-activists and avocational historians, our research in northwest Greene County, Missouri shows that while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gretchen Zoeller.

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. When records and textual evidence from the past are subjective, piecemeal, or absent, bioarchaeological analyses can be indispensable for elucidating otherwise buried histories. The case study of Burial 505 from the Bethel Cemetery highlights an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Frederick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on storage in small-scale societies has, until recently, narrowly focused on determining the form and scale that food storage took, and its relatedness to increasing social complexity. This research, instead, looked at the purposeful decision-making behind the use of food storage as a risk management strategy in non-sedentary societies....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Torquato.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout prehistory, Indigenous peoples in the Interior Eastern Woodlands of North America relied heavily on hunted and gathered resources. They commonly gathered and consumed nuts, which resulted in many archaeological sites containing these carbonized remains. Hammerstones and nutting stones in archaeological contexts suggest that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Mauldin. J. Kevin Hanselka. Cynthia Munoz. Leonard Kemp.

Baker Cave is a dry rock shelter with exceptional organic preservation in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. The site is best known for high floral and faunal diversity in a Paleoindian-age hearth excavated in 1976, the first of three seasons (1976, 1984, 1985) the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) worked at the site. Only those 1976 excavations have been reported in any detail. This poster summarizes analyses to estimate mast resource use over time at Baker Cave based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlyn Ball.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper synthesizes the ongoing archaeological research of one of the first academic buildings on the Alma College campus, located in central Michigan. Old Main was built in 1886, and destroyed by a fire in 1969. Although the building only burned down 50 years ago, the cause of the fire and exact location of the foundation remain a mystery. Throughout this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Sinders. Alex Elvis Badillo. Stephen Aldrich. Brooke L. Drew.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2021, I started working on a privately funded preservation project doing 3D data curation for Old Union Cemetery of Marion County, Indiana in association with the Geospatial and Virtual Archaeology Labratory (GVALs) at Indiana State University. In this poster, I present our methods of processing the data that has been collected over the past 3 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Betsinger.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the Civil War, the Midwest experienced unprecedented population growth. Keeping pace with the expansion of numerous commodity frontiers driven by the building of railways, cities such as Fargo, ND, and Moorhead, MN, became seasonal locales for thousands of transient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Noldner. Jennifer Mack.

Past populations that are associated with the Oneota archaeological tradition appear to have practiced a variety of burial practices. This paper serves as a presentation of another case study that contributes to our knowledge base of Oneota burial practices. Contexts for human skeletal remains recovered from Oneota sites range from scattered isolated elements to primary burials (both extended and flexed) oriented in various directions, both within constructed mounds and other non-mound features....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food is a persistent symbol of identity, signaling both membership and distinction within communities at multiple scales. A combination of macrobotanical, zooarchaeological, isotopic, and ceramic data are used to make inferences about Oneota culinary practices. This paper examines the way that cuisines connected and divided members of Late Precontact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amethyst Owen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late pre-contact Oneota populations of Southwestern Wisconsin practiced a mixed economy of wild resources, in addition to a full suite of domesticated corn, beans, and squash. Analysis of floral remains from the sites prior to European contact, as well as those at the time of contact will examine the impact of external stressor on the use of wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Stroh Messerole. Mark Anderson.

Data recovery excavations were conducted during 2016-2017 at the Dixon site (13WD8) a large Oneota village located along the Little Sioux River in northwest Iowa. The University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist contracted Megan Stroh, archaeologist at the Sanford Museum and Planetarium, to conduct geophysical surveys before initiation of Phase III excavations. A Geoscan Research FM256 fluxgate gradiometer was employed at three different mitigation locations under both pre- and post-top...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason King. Jane Buikstra. Robert Pickering.

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we explore the implications of time travel (Holtorf) and ontology (Viveiros de Castro, Latour, Pedersen) for bioarchaeological perspectives of Middle Woodland (Hopewellian) peoples of the lower Illinois River valley (LIV), who occupied this region two millennia ago. Following...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Drew.

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. During the 2018 Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project, 26 concrete or metallic burial vaults were recovered. Established field protocol dictated that these were to remain unopened and were to be reinterred at the new cemetery location without further...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tania Milosavljevic.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last 40 years have seen increasing methodological sophistication providing for a relatively nuanced understanding of food technology and resource use. Paleoethnobotany is one way to observe the diversity of plant use among Langford site occupants. Using standard paleoethnobotanical practices, plant macroremains from the Robinson Reserve Site (11CK2)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Walder. Daniel Contreras. Walker Good. Alexander Woods.

In summer of 2017, CEMML archaeologists at Fort McCoy, in Tomah, Wisconsin conducted Phase III investigations of three NRHP-eligible sites 47MO054, 47MO360, and 47MO660 near a tank trail crossing Stillwell Creek. This location was continually re-occupied for the last 3,000 years, by Late Archaic to historic-era Native American (probably Ho-Chunk) communities. Bioturbation, military activities, and other cultural and natural processes easily disturb the sandy soils at Stillwell Crossing,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cook. Rebecca Hawkins. Aaron Comstock. Grace Conrad.

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. As with many archaeological sites, the Turpin site has factored into various social, historical, and archaeological narratives ranging from the good to the bad and ugly. Here we begin by situating Harvard’s archaeology project at Turpin within the social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Rybka.

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Enbridge’s crude oil Line 3 Replacement Pipeline cuts through 337 miles of Ojibwe Treaty lands in Northern Minnesota and has been in operation since October 2021. It is the most recent instalment of a historic petroleum infrastructure tradition in the state of Minnesota that extends back over seventy years. Oil pipelines do not only enter...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the surface, French Post Park, a small, wooded picnic area and campground located on the south bank of the Wabash River in Carroll County, Indiana, may seem unremarkable. Covering about 5.4 acres, the park’s amenities consist of a small shelter, a few fire rings, a boat ramp, and a swing set. But, to the people of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaelyn Stebbins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recognized archaeologically by their distinct material culture, Oneota sites exist in many ecological zones across the Upper Midwest. Consequently, the sites are hardly homogenous. Across localities, Oneota groups are recognized as late Precontact food producers who grew Zea mays (maize), Cucurbita pepo (squash), and later Phaseolus vulgaris (bean). The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bailey Raab. Dana Bardolph.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoethnobotanical analyses over the past several decades have shed light on the subsistence practices, agricultural strategies, and environmental interactions of members of the Fort Ancient culture, an Indigenous society that thrived in the Ohio Valley from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. Largely absent from these conversations,...