North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hayden Bassett. Christopher P. Chilton. Bruce J. Larson. E. Clay Swindell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the terminal Early to late-Middle Woodland periods (500 BC – AD 500), Native groups living in the central Saginaw Valley of Michigan dramatically shifted subsistence strategies from a reliance on medium to large game, to a focus on aquatic resources. Regional sites illustrate this shift, though from the point of deposition in central domestic spaces,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Fleming.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sheffield site is the only known Late Precontact Oneota village along the Saint Croix River of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Additionally, a small collection of Oneota ceramics from a nearby rock shelter site and isolated Oneota sherds point to a slightly more widespread presence in the valley. Still, the general geographic isolation of the Sheffield site and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Mailler. Spencer Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using Esri’s ArcGIS Pro’s georeferencing tools to rubber-sheet a historic native map to satellite imagery confirms Dr. Donald J. Blakeslee’s findings (2018) regarding a site located near the mouth of the Walnut River, in Arkansas City, Kansas. The site is likely the native town, Etzanoa, a settlement of the Ancestral Wichita and Affiliated Tribes visited by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick Harvey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists strive to improve the methods used to record and preserve the archaeological record for future research, interpretation, and outreach. The process of photogrammetry has improved their ability to curate and share archaeological evidence by using photos to create 3D images of excavation units, features, and artifacts. Using this technology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven De Vore. David Watt. 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. On August 10, 1861, Federal forces under Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon and Confederate forces under Brigadier General Ben McCulloch and Major General Sterling Price were engaged in a six-hour fight on the rolling hills surrounding Willson’s Creek in Greene and Christian Counties in southern Missouri. Following...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabella Erter. Robert Cook. Emiley Gottwald.

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. Archaeologists are often good at communicating with each other, but not usually at conveying our findings to wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the US Midwest, where visibility of the remains of ancient sites is low, in contrast to places like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pierce. Patti Wright. Rachel S. Popelka-Filcoff.

The Truman Road Site (23SC924), St. Charles County, Missouri, features a diversity of material remains and a long periods of occupation mostly occurring during the Late Archaic (3000 – 2500 BC) and Middle Woodland (100 BC – AD 500). For this region of prehistoric Missouri, ceramics and chert constitute the main evidence for understanding trade and cultural dynamics. Despite its relative ubiquity among sites, ochre has rarely been considered in such studies. Recognizing that this material is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cook. Grace Conrad. Joseph Chambers.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While archaeologists are quite good at communicating to each other through various professional outlets, we have not been particularly good at conveying our core findings and lessons for wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the Midwest United States. While there are likely many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pollack. A. Gwynn Henderson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2023 investigation of the seventeenth-century Fort Ancient village of Augusta, Kentucky, focused on a section of the community’s cemetery and ritual space. It was conducted in advance of planned improvements to the historic town of Augusta’s sewage treatment system. Although six extended adult burials were documented within an 80 m2 excavation block,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation details a zooarchaeological analysis of a horse skeleton, stored unstudied for decades previous in a university teaching collection. Originating from an archaeological site outside of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, the skeleton displays notable pathologies and other osteological changes that potentially reflect its living use and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hoag.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the last four summers the Shaker Historical Museum in Shaker Heights, OH, has been sponsoring a community-based archaeological day camp experience for school-aged children. Through excavations at two local historical sites within the city, the participants of our program have learned the importance of archaeology, history, and preservation in their own...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Skeens.

Woodpecker Cave (13JH202) provides a unique opportunity to study variation in ceramic technology and resource allocation during the ceramic production process at a Late Woodland East-Central Iowa site. Excavations by the University of Iowa field school spanning six seasons have recovered hundreds of ceramic pottery sherds from Woodpecker Cave, including a modest amount of decorated rim pieces and a large number of undecorated body sherds. Previous typological analyses of the ceramic assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Niquette.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spring Valley site (23CT389) is a stratified, multicomponent site associated with a co-alluvial fan in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, southeast Missouri. Temporally diagnostic bifaces indicate components dating from the Middle Paleoindian to the Middle Archaic periods (ca. 10,800-5,500 14C yr BP). A detailed study of site formation process at 23CT389...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Freire. Patricia Richards. Brooke Drew.

From 1878 through 1974 Milwaukee County utilized four locations on the Milwaukee County Grounds for burial of more than 7,000 individuals, primarily paupers, the institutionalized, and the unidentified. Two archaeological excavations in 1991 and 1992 and again in 2013 resulted in the recovery of over 2,400 individuals from one of those cemetery locations. A comprehensive understanding of the spatial organization and use life of this site has been complicated by the cemetery’s history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards. Robert Jeske.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Mississippianization” has been used by archaeologists to explain the appearance of shell-temper and certain decorative ceramic motifs found in the northern Prairie Peninsula during and after the eleventh century. These ceramic attributes are supposed symbols of an expanding Cahokian worldview, sent north by a diffusionist wave of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kelly.

Lynne Goldstein’s contribution to our understanding of Mississippian societies in the Midwest is still an ongoing endeavor. Her research with its roots in the greater Cahokia area and within a few years at Aztalan has an important impact on my own efforts. Her dissertation research into the Mississippian cemeteries, Schild and Moss, was methodologically rigorous and provided insights into the manner in which non-elite cemeteries some 100 km north of Cahokia were spatially and socially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Polk. Jeremy Wilson. Broxton Bird.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. High-resolution paleoclimatic data have been increasingly utilized in archaeological research to investigate regional settlement patterns, periods of growth, stasis, and decline, and episodes social stress and resilience, among other subjects. Until recently, few databases have existed for the Eastern Woodlands of North America that enable researchers to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Enloe.

Spatial analysis has the potential to yield substantial evidence about the organization of economic and social interactions of prehistoric archaeological sites. There is a growing body of ethnoarchaeological research that allows robust interpretations of spatial patterning in the open-air campsites of mobile peoples. The very fact that such sites may represent short-term, low density occupations means that the configuration of labor and activities may actually be clearer than in longer-term...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Walraven.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alcohol was traded and consumed by both Europeans and their Native American neighbors. While historic documents relay the cultural and trade uses of alcohol, archaeological investigations have begun to compare the amount of glass found with the historical reports. The amount of olive green and dark blue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Roache-Fedchenko.

The location of blacksmith workshops is often noted on historic maps, yet the archaeological attributes of the workshops are often not well understood within the context of the 18th century. Most knowledge of blacksmithing derives from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The various tools and techniques used to produce and repair metal objects are well documented from these later time periods, as is the spatial layout of the blacksmith shops. These depictions of blacksmiths and blacksmithing are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elspeth Geiger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the Great Lakes and the Northeastern United States, microfossil research has primarily focused on maize (Zea mays). Further, direct evidence of starch beyond maize is equally limited. The importance of wild rice (Manoomin) as a food source, an aspect of spirituality, and other-than-human being is well known to the archaeologists of the region....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Burant.

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. I am immensely grateful to have had Dr. Patricia B. Richards as a professor, supervisor, and mentor throughout my academic pursuits. Her long and distinguished career has been exemplified by a fierce and unwavering focus to provide her students with the tools needed to successfully apply...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Flood. Jeremy Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late pre-Columbian period in the central Illinois River valley (CIRV) is demarcated by the development of large, oftentimes fortified Mississippian towns, farming hamlets, extensive trade networks, and shifting political alliances between AD 1050 and 1400. The fission and fusion of local polities ceased with abrupt abandonment of the CIRV by AD 1450 as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Crider. Kevin Schwarz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation provides an overview of recent discoveries and excavations at the State Line site on the Ohio-Indiana border near Cincinnati, Ohio. The State Line Site is primarily a Middle Fort Ancient Anderson Phase village (ca. AD 1050-AD 1275), with earlier components. ASC Group, Inc. has led ongoing investigations at this site as part of a Section...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Feltz.

3D photogrammetry is the process of creating a manipulable 3D model using only photos from a high-resolution camera that are then processed through computer software to extract 3D data and create a wireframe and mesh. This process can be accurate enough to measure a hairline fracture along the surface of prehistoric pottery with .1mm accuracy. Analyze the benefits of such methods, a study was conducted using Oneota ceramic artifacts of the La Crosse, Wisconsin locality that have been curated at...