North America: Midwest (Geographic Keyword)
351-363 (363 Records)
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. A long-standing point of contention has been the degree of continuity and change between the Middle Woodland (ending AD 500) and Fort Ancient periods (beginning about AD 1000). The intermediate Late Woodland period has become a placeholder but is clearly of...
When and Where Did They Go? More Fully Conceptualizing Fort Ancient’s Descendants (2018)
There were two distinct cultural systems in a key part of the Fort Ancient region – Anderson and Madisonville – with the general understanding that one changed into the other in situ ca. AD 1400 and then left the region en masse ca. AD 1650, becoming one of several contemporary Central Algonquian tribes. However, new data raise the possibility that this interpretation needs revision. First, through a biodistance analysis we learn that at least some Anderson and Madisonville groups were not...
Which Way Is Ashtabula? Recent Archaeological Investigations within Lake Erie Waters of Ashtabula County, Ohio (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2018, Coastal Environments, Inc., (CEI) conducted a targeted cultural resources survey in the Lake Erie waters of Ashtabula County, Ohio, a study area covering ca. 30 square miles of lake bottom. The project’s first phase consisted of a geophysical survey at selected locations within the study area. The second phase involved the selection of ten anomalies...
Who Was Where: Georectification and Radiometric Dating of a Mississippian Mortuary Complex (2018)
The Orendorf site is a Mississippian village and mortuary complex located in west-central Illinois. Salvage excavations between 1970 to 1990 have yielded one of the largest and best-preserved skeletal assemblages in the central Illinois River valley. The human skeletal assemblage from the Orendorf site has been ideal for a wide variety of bioarchaeological research, both invasive and non-invasive. Despite the attention given to the individuals, research focusing on the burial contexts and...
Whole Pots and Harvard Drops: Understanding the Pottery from Turpin (2024)
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. Many early professional archaeological investigations in the Ohio River Valley resulted in legacy collections lacking in a variety of ways. The Turpin site, excavated by Harvard University in the late nineteenth century, is an early Fort Ancient village...
Why Do We Farm?: Risk Assessment of the Foraging Farming Transition in North America (2018)
The evolution of the genus Homo is characterized by the emergence of numerous biological and cultural traits including bipedalism, encephalization, and language. A more recent adaptation led humans to transition from a foraging subsistence strategy to one based on farming. This is significant because foraging persisted for approximately 95% of human existence until farming emerged about 12,000 years ago. For nearly a century, anthropologists have studied the foraging-farming transition and...
The Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Efforts to trace 80 dugout canoes reported from Wisconsin resulted in the identification and documentation of more than 66 and the recognition that six had been destroyed or lost. Wisconsin dugouts range in age from 4,000 years old to the early twentieth century. Dugouts were made from a variety of types of wood and those that date to the last...
Women Bleed Red: Rendering Women’s Spaces Visible in the Archaeological Record (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As Patricia Galloway aptly observed in her 1998 paper, “Where Have all the Menstrual Huts Gone?”, menstruation is rarely discussed in archaeological literature. Recent research in the Ohio River Valley has brought renewed interest to these ‘invisible’ spaces, attempting to identify potential menstrual structures in the archaeological record. It was...
The Women of Fort St. Joseph, a French Colonial Settlement on the North American Frontier (2024)
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. Forts and fur trading posts conjure images of intrepid soldiers and jovial voyageurs engaged in masculine activities that implicated material objects like firearms, ammunition, smoking pipes, alcohol containers, and trade goods. Male colonial ambitions also structured many of the accounts that persist into the present....
Women's Portages: Colonial Encounters, Gender, and Indigenous Worldview in the Great Lakes (2024)
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. Dakota and then Anishinaabeg women were central figures in water-based travel cycles in an annual round directed by plant, animal, and river relations within the Woodland Tradition. Portages, including Women's Portages, are material records of Indigenous women's labor before, during, and after the Fur Trade in the...
Woodland and Late Precontact Interaction along the Saint Croix River Corridor in Minnesota and Wisconsin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Saint Croix River is a major tributary to the Upper Mississippi River and forms a boundary between eastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin. Flowing southward out of northwestern Wisconsin and entering the Mississippi near the Twin Cities, this 170-mile, north–south valley offered a passageway connecting communities of the...
Woodland Tradition Plant Use and Foodways in the Western Great Lakes: A View from Southeastern Wisconsin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper implements a multiproxy approach to Woodland foodways, integrating plant macrobotanical studies, faunal analyses, ceramic morphological and use-wear analyses, and absorbed residue analyses. Datasets from southeastern Wisconsin and the surrounding region highlight...
Writing on the Wall: Patterns of Discourse in Undergraduate Graffitti (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research examines 2,400 samples of desktop graffiti (pictures or words that are drawn or etched into the wood of a writing desk) collected from a liberal arts college study space in Ohio, establishing chronology when possible. Much of what is written in the graffiti approximates patterns of discourse on social media websites like Reddit and Twitter. I...