North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacey Camp. Ben Akey. Levi Webb. Duane Quates.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In May 2023, Michigan State University (MSU) construction workers installing hammock poles hit what they believed was a foundation or rock. They immediately contacted MSU's Campus Archaeology Program (CAP), directed by Dr. Stacey Camp. Ben Akey, the Campus Archaeologist at the time, examined historic maps and aerials, which revealed that the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Rybka.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological studies have shown how the methods and sensibilities of the discipline can be usefully drawn on to explore the history and relations of the Anthropocene—our current epoch of cultural and environmental instability. However, certain massively spatio-temporally distributed objects that define this era, what Timothy Morton calls...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Doershuk.

As an established scholar, Larry Zimmerman spent several years around the turn of the millennium at the University of Iowa where he served as a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the American Indian and Native Studies Program. With the encouragement and support of then State Archaeologist of Iowa William Green, Larry and I initiated a program of study in 1999 emphasizing the teaching of high quality archaeological field techniques coupled with active exploration of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Richards. Sissel Schroeder. Jarrod Burks.

Lynne Goldstein’s compilation of a GIS-based map of the Aztalan site, portraying all investigations through 1996, visually integrated almost two centuries of archaeological work at the site in southern Wisconsin. Lynne’s map made two things startlingly clear. First, decades of excavations were not all referenced to a common datum and few had left visible surface indications, making it difficult to relocate earlier excavations and avoid re-excavating disturbed contexts. Second, just 10% of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Butler.

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. The eastern Great Plains of North Dakota and west-central Minnesota are home to the remnants of one of the world’s largest ancient glacial lakes, Lake Agassiz, as well as the United States’ longest river, the Missouri. These two powerful water entities shaped and disrupted the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alleen Betzenhauser. Madeleine Evans.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People who rely on corn for significant portions of their diets must process it to improve its nutritional quality, or risk severe malnutrition. A common method historically employed throughout Mesoamerica and North America consisted of soaking corn kernels in an alkaline solution created from wood ash or burned limestone, a technique referred to as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Simmons.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Clay smoking pipes fragments proliferate archaeological sites in colonial North America. Clay pipes were in regular use, did not last for very long, and were often replaced. Pipe bowls and stems found at sites across New France not only provide evidence of daily life on the frontier, they also introduce and strengthen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates community organization as an approach to understanding the shift from typologically complex to a simpler lithic technology after circa A.D. 500 in the Prairie Peninsula. I compare the lithic practice of Upper Mississippian groups settled in western Wisconsin (A.D. 1400-1700) at the La Crosse locality to that of groups in eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Komulainen-Dillenburg.

This is an abstract from the "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: A National Perspective on CRM, Research, and Consultation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. St. Paul District Regulatory (Corps) implemented measures to build upon and improve relationships with our Tribal Nations and ensure open and transparent communication. A multi-year effort occurred in stages to assess tribal concerns and needs, and develop and share tools and materials to address...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fossil shark teeth recovered from Ohio Hopewell sites represent a quintessential example of an exotic good representative of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. As with most artifacts, the primary questions asked of fossil shark teeth in archaeological contexts are (1) what were they used for and (2) where did they come from? Answers to date are that these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Johnston. Jennifer Jordan Hall. Kevin Schwarz. Andrea Crider. Taylor Bryan.

This is an abstract from the "Canine Resources for the Archaeologist" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote sensing techniques, including magnetic survey and ground penetrating radar, are commonly used in archaeology as part of cultural resource management projects. In this presentation, we share our experience using a complimentary and nascent remote sensing technique to locate human remains on archaeological sites, human remains detection (HRD)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy McCoy.

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. Iron meteorites are among the most exotic raw materials used for Hopewell ceremonial objects. The sourcing of these meteorites via chemical comparison to known meteorites has implications for acquisition and exchange. Some large meteorites (e.g., Brenham, KS; 4 tons in hundreds...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Rankin. Erin Benson. Michael Kolb.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mitchell site is a major Mississippian (1050–1400 CE) mound center located roughly 10 km north of Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, the largest mound center in North America. At a minimum, Mitchell consisted of 11 earthen mounds; however, only one mound is visible today. In 1960, salvage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Doershuk. John Cordell. Teresa Rucker. Stephen Lensink.

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The University of Iowa (UI) Office of the State Archaeologist has maintained the State Archaeological Repository of Iowa since 1959. During its 60-year history, the repository’s curation strategy has modernized from strictly housing UI-generated collections to meeting the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nichelle Lyle. Kenneth Tankersley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines vertebrate species from Fort Ancient archaeological sites in the Ohio River Valley, which date to the Little Ice Age. They are compared to vertebrate species from archaeological sites, which predate the Little Ice Age and from modern contexts. The results of this comparison suggest that vertebrate species exhibited individual responses to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rob Mann. Charles Peliska. Jacob Dupre.

In August 1862 long-simmering tensions between the Dakota and Euro-American traders, settlers, soldiers, and government officials boiled over into open warfare. For nearly two months militant Dakota warriors, ostensibly under the leadership of renowned chief Little Crow, attacked Euro-American settlements and military installations. In response, settlers across southwest and central Minnesota either fled the region or attempted to fortify their settlements. These so-called "settlers’ forts" of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Katie Leslie. Melissa Frederick.

The Saint Louis laboratory of the Veterans Curation Program processes several archival investigations throughout each five month term, but few have been to the scale of the Harry S. Truman Reservoir Project. This project produced 23 boxes worth of documentation spanning over 268 linear inches. The Harry S. Truman Reservoir is the largest man-made lake in Missouri and covers over 100,000 acres of government owned and flood easement lands. To prepare for the construction of the dam, a number of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Barzilai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In several Mississippian sites circa 1050 CE, shrine houses and some other features were lined with a special bright yellow clay or clay mixture. This study looks at the variability and composition of these clay linings to determine what is the key vibrant ingredient in these ceremonially active clay linings. In this study methods of texture analysis, X-Ray...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan M. Alt.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia has long been subjected to terminological contention, failing to fit categorical configurations such as state or chiefdom but has now become commonly referred to as an urbanism — effectively dodging the chiefdom/state terminological quandary. What if much of the categorical problem lies in looking...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Warren.

This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Soon after the De Soto Expedition (1539-1542), Fort Ancient peoples from the Middle Ohio Valley abandoned their summer villages. For twenty generations, village life in this region had been both egalitarian and stable. Through a close reading of archaeological sources, including laser ablation testing of late Fort...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Painter. Jeffrey Painter.

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. During this paper, we will reflect on the impacts that Dr. James Skibo has had on our lives and careers. From childhood to graduate school, Dr. Skibo has been a major influence on how we think about and approach archaeological research. Thanks to his Yooper wisdom, he has also taught us many life lessons, such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine McLeester. Jesse Casana. David Overstreet. David Grignon.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, the dense forests of the northern Great Lakes seem an unlikely place for expansive ancestral Native American agricultural fields, especially ones dedicated to sun-loving crops, like maize. The short growing season in these northern climes, dense forest, alternative staples like wild rice, and past settlement history all would suggest a limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alecia Schrenk.

This is an abstract from the "Systems of Care in Times of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A different model of care is required for trauma resulting from non-lethal violence. In the prehistoric Midwest, raiding and warfare were endemic, making trauma from non-lethal violence a part of everyday life. As such, the peoples living in this region would have needed a model of care specifically designed to treat individuals suffering from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Collins. Mary De la Garza.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations on two small pre-contact archaeological sites in southeast Iowa provided an opportunity to conduct drone-mounted low-altitude aerial lidar in addition to the standard total station methodology to develop ground surface elevations and contours. The drone used for the projects was the industrial grade mapping inspection drone, DJI Matrice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Gwynn Henderson. David Pollack. Benjamin Barnes.

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. A hallmark of Tom Dillehay’s career is his engagement with local and descendant communities. This is exemplified by his tireless work for the Mapuche, the establishment of anthropology departments throughout South America, and the instrumental role he played in creating the Kentucky Archaeological Survey....