North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Everhart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Woodland societies of the Central Scioto River Valley in Ohio, most notably the Hopewell, have garnered much archaeological distinction from two elements of their ceremonialism: the construction of large, sometimes geometric ditch and embankment enclosures and the production of ornate art, often of exotic materials, utilized in funerary practices. It has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Tankersley.

During the past decade, the University of Cincinnati has offered a summer archaeological field school, which focuses on periods of rapid and profound global climatic change. Students undertake detailed excavation profile descriptions, collect samples for AMS radiocarbon and OSL dating, botanical, faunal, soil, and geochemical analyses to develop an accurate chronology and paleoenvironmental framework of the depositional history for archaeological sites, which date to the Younger Dryas and Little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Painter. Jeffrey Painter. Jodie O'Gorman. Terrance Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violent interaction between people of the Oneota and Mississippian traditions in the Central Illinois River Valley in the North American Midcontinent ca. 1300–1400 CE at Norris Farms #36 is a clear example of intermittent, low-scale warfare. One aspect of initial interpretations of the interaction, based on evidence for raiding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bretton Giles. Brian Rowe. Ryan Parish.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores the significance of the Middle Woodland burials found on the lower floor under Mound 2 at the Hopewell Earthworks, including their grave goods, mortuary furniture, spatial patterning, and postmortem treatment. It investigates how certain aspects of these burials’ ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Silverman. William A. Parkinson. Jamie Kelly. Mitch Hendrickson. Joe Wheeler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tallgrass Prairie Archaeological Landscapes Project (TPALP) was established to identify the dynamic settlement lifeways within the current boundaries of the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Will County, Illinois. Previous CRM-based projects identified 214 sites spanning the Archaic to Historic periods across 18,094 acres (73.22 km2) of this US...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Logan Miller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation provides an overview of recent excavations at the Noble-Wieting village in McLean County, Illinois. Noble-Wieting is a nearly six-acre Langford Tradition mound and village site along the Kickapoo Creek, far from the Langford core along the upper Illinois River. The site has long been known for its unique geographic position as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hedman. Thomas Emerson. Timothy Pauketat. 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. At its peak, Greater Cahokia had a population of over 30,000 people, and engaged in social, political, and religious interactions that covered the midcontinent. The factors that influenced the rise and dissolution of Greater Cahokia between ca A.D. 1000 and 1300 remain a focus of inquiry. Archaeobotanical and isotopic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Sherman. Aaron Comstock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Turpin site (33Ha19) reflects the remains of an early Fort Ancient (ca. AD 1000-1300) village located near the confluence of the Little Miami and Ohio Rivers on the east side of modern-day Cincinnati, Ohio. Recent excavations at Turpin revealed evidence of habitation, midden, and possible special purpose contexts. One large pit (Feature 100) dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner. Robert Ahlrichs. Dan Wendt. Larry Furo.

The Old Copper Complex represents a unique temporally and geographically bounded technological phenomenon. Binford (1962) challenged the idea that copper tools were adopted by Native Americans solely because they were technologically more efficient. He argued that Archaic copper served a primarily socio-technic function based on two assumptions. One, that copper tools were more efficient in use performance than their stone and bone counterparts. And two, that the energy expenditure required for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hinkelman. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the US Midwest, most students are exposed only briefly to the precontact history in the fourth grade and then not again unless they opt for archaeology as an elective in college. The Ohio Board of Education requires teachers to merely state that American Indians lived in Ohio, participated in the War of 1812, and then died or left the area....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Jones. Shannon Freire. Jessica Skinner. B Charles.

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. Throughout her career, Patricia B. Richards has held many prominent positions within and adjacent to conventional academic anthropology, among them senior scientist, adjunct curator, principal investigator, and associate director of an archaeological research laboratory. While these positions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg.

The ‘Mississippianization’ of the Midwest unfolded during the late 11th and early 12th centuries as interactions with Cahokia influenced aspects of local community organization, ceremonialism, material culture, and access to exotic raw materials. For local peoples, these encounters and affiliations also facilitated interactions between Mississippian groups beyond Cahokia. The direct proximity of the Lower Illinois River Valley (LIRV) to the Greater Cahokia area enabled certain social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Skinner.

The analysis and disentanglement of human skeletal elements from commingled burial contexts is an essential step in creating individual identifications. This commingled analysis often includes a reliance on joint articulations to determine holistic element reassociations. Manual methods currently exist to test joint articulations for potential reassociation, but most appendicular joint articulations fall within the low reliability category for this method (Adams and Byrd 2014). Many cases of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffery Kruchten.

The Emerald Acropolis is an early Mississippian shrine complex constructed atop a high upland ridge approximately 25 kilometers east of Cahokia in southwestern Illinois. The termination and abandonment of a suite of special-use buildings located along an isolated spur at the base of the main ridge is strikingly different than the termination of similar non-domestic buildings throughout the region. These buildings, including large public structures, shrines, temples, and a sweat lodge, are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Ellens.

This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Unearthing Detroit Project is a collections-based research and public archaeology initiative focused on the historical collections housed in the Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University. Reflecting on our experiences and integrated feedback has allowed Unearthing Detroit to consider the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Nolan. Mark Seeman. Mark Hill.

Timing of Hopewellian developments plays a critical role in developing an understanding of how Hopewell came to be, and what it was. Focusing on the Scioto Hopewell sites studied by the Scale and Community in Hopewell Networks (SCHON), we present the results of 40 new radiocarbon dates obtained from 15 sites including both habitation and earthwork sites. We also undertake an evaluation of previous dates from these sites to come to a more robust understanding of the timing of key Hopewellian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Krus. Edward Herrmann. Christina Friberg. Dru McGill. Jeremy Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Angel polity, located within the northeast Mississippian (AD 1000–1500) frontier, consisted of a network of hamlets and villages along the Ohio River, encompassing ∼800 km2 in southwestern Indiana. In this paper, we present 22 new radiocarbon measurements from archaeological samples that provide dates for occupations,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kelly Brown. Alison Shepherd. Josh Wackett.

With the curation crisis growing more prominent in the realm of archaeology, research focus is slowly being shifted to previously excavated collections that are under analyzed and underreported. Many of these previously excavated collections are overlooked by potential researchers because of the perceived difficulties of re-establishing provenience and quantitative control for artifacts that have been long separated from their original archaeological context. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Nolan. Talon Silverhorn. Glenna J. Wallace. Joseph Blanchard. Garet Couch.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2020, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) started planning for the state’s 76th state park focused on the late-eighteenth-century Shawnee town of Chillicothe on the Little Miami River. ODNR was committed to working collaboratively with the three Shawnee Nations to design the park and its interpretive content. Over the last two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only 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 Mississippianization of the Midwest unfolded during the late 11th and early 12th centuries as interactions with Cahokia influenced aspects of local community organization, ceremonialism, material culture, and access to exotic raw materials. For local peoples in the northern hinterland regions, these encounters and affiliations also facilitated interactions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Surface-Evans.

Urban landscapes, those densely populated spaces in which generations of people live, play, work, and die, are complex palimpsest of memories. But not all memories are treated the same or are even chosen to be remembered. My own experiences as an archaeologist living in a modest-sized, rust-belt city for nearly two decades has exposed the never-ending rush of "progress" to erase the past. At both my research sites and my home, I see communities harmed by the trauma of forced erasure of the past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Hambacher.

Among the many changes that take place during the Late Prehistoric period in the Upper Great Lakes are greater levels of regionalization and shifts in region-wide interaction patterns. These changes are generally viewed as being reflected in varying degrees of similarity and dissimilarity in ceramic wares, decorative styles, and technology seen across the region during this period. Suites of ceramic types and decorative styles have also been used to link particular ceramic groupings with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Hawkins. Scott Willard.

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. The relationship between American Indian tribes and American archaeology—both its practice and its practitioners—has always been complicated and is still often fraught with a lack of consonance. Although the engagement of tribes as consulting parties in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Wiewel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Midwest Archeological Center (National Park Service) has long been at the forefront of geophysical surveys for archeological research and heritage management in the United States. Since the Center’s pioneering efforts to showcase the practicality of geophysical methods nearly 50 years ago, our use of ground-based surveys has become indispensable for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Brouwer Burg. Meghan Howey.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several papers in "Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology" identified space as a critical factor in structuring diversity and called for whole landscape, regional-scale analyses to improve archaeological approaches to diversity. The capabilities of today’s geospatial technologies were unimaginable at the time but now, the desire to analyze...