North America: Great Plains (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal Dozier.

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The work of Alston Thoms and colleagues has highlighted the importance of earth oven cooking technologies throughout the world, and especially within North America. One advantage of earth oven (heated rock) cooking is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Ward. Macy Ricketts. Rachael Shimek. Mary Lou Larson. Marcel Kornfeld.

This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleomicrobiology is probably best known as an approach that yields anthropological findings connected to human health and disease, such as long-term records of oral microbiomes recovered from ancient dental calculus. However, the tools of microbial ecology have been tested for their potential to address other anthropological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Meltzer.

Vance T. Holliday has played a key role in developing our understanding of the late Pleistocene geological history, climate and environment of North America, especially the Great Plains, and of the context and chronology of Paleoindian sites. The localities he has worked on, and to which much is owed to his interpretation of their geoarchaeological setting and histories, include iconic localities such as the Clovis, Folsom, Midland and Plainview type sites, and especially the Lubbock Lake site,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

The environment has a strong influence on the evolutionary ecology of hunter-gatherer foraging. Studies of prehistoric hunter-gatherers have often made hypotheses regarding the effect of climate on foraging strategies, but have rarely tested those hypotheses. The absence of explicit hypothesis testing has been partly due to a dearth of operationalized paleoenvironmental variables. Although paleoenvironmental reconstructions have been abundant, particularly those based on pollen, they have mostly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Tiffany. Shirley J. Schermer.

One of Larry Zimmerman’s lasting contributions to archaeology is his research on the Central Plains tradition Glenwood culture in southwest Iowa. New site seriations, AMS radiocarbon dating, and site modeling utilizing GIS, all address fundamental assumptions derived from Zimmerman’s research in the 1970s. The current model proposes a short-term occupation consisting primarily of dispersed farmsteads and possibly two or three unfortified house clusters in the Glenwood locality. Site location is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Kruse.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Archaic sites on the Great Plains are few in number and often little studied and poorly reported, as they are almost always found in salvage or recover archaeology. Of those early Archaic sites that have been studied rarely has debitage been analysed in detail or fully evaluated for usewear. This presentation describes the lithic assemblage from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Fisher.

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historic journals and early ethnographic accounts have the potential to inform on Native American cultural norms, including interaction with commensals, such as dogs. However, these accounts are imperfect due to biases couched in ethnocentrism and personal interests. This research seeks to test historic accounts related to dog...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alix Piven. Elizabeth Lynch.

This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research at Hell Gap has incorporated a number of technological innovations since investigations began at the site in the early 1960s. Recent advances in digital techniques have spurred the rise of digital documentation and analysis in the field. Low-cost yet high-quality photogrammetric softwares such as Agisoft Photoscan have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tammy Rittenour. Heidi VanEtten. Judson Finley.

This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Witness Block (Locality I) at Hell Gap preserves a well-studied open-air stratified record of near-continuous Paleoindian occupation. Radiocarbon-based age control has been problematic due to age reversals and inconsistencies related to old and young carbon contamination and calibration uncertainties. Recent work by Pelton et al....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Spencer Pelton. Brigid Grund.

This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1960s, the Hell Gap site in eastern Wyoming produced at least eight archaeological cultural complexes that spanned almost the entire Paleoindian period, becoming the key chronological site for Plains Paleoindian archaeology and beyond. High resolution spatial and chronological data spanning this occupational sequence were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only LuAnn Wandsnider.

Solomon Butcher was a citizen photographer smitten with what he referred to as the "history project," to photodocument the citizens of Custer County, Nebraska as the frontier receded further west. From 1886-1892, he imaged perhaps one third of the occupants, staging them in front of occupied or recently abandoned sod houses and making them party to his commemoration of a constructed pioneer heritage. When severe droughts hit in the mid-1890s, did this shared pioneer "can-do" heritage sustain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, researchers have interpreted rock art based on ethno-historical accounts of ceremonies as male-created and male-oriented experiences and spaces. This has led to researchers ignoring traditional women’s roles in the creation of rock art as well as women’s interaction with rock art spaces. I examine how Lakota women...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John W. Greer. Mavis Greer.

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Keyser’s interest in horse styles in rock art of the Northwestern Plains has expanded our knowledge and ways of thinking about this image. His recent work to quantify differences in Crow and Blackfoot horses has led to identifying infusions of each group into the other’s territory. However, his identification system has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only KC (Kristen) Carlson. Douglas Bamforth.

This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lynch site (25BD1) is an 80 ha thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Plains Village site on Ponca Creek in northeastern Nebraska occupied by ancestors of the modern Pawnee and Arikara nations. Radiocarbon dates on material from past and recent excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The large, heavily-fortified Huff village site in North Dakota is a quintessential Late Prehistoric plains village within the Middle Missouri region of the Northern Plains. Since the 1940s, attempts to establish Huff’s occupational history and absolute placement in time achieved only coarse-grained or inconclusive results, suggesting village occupations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Lemminger.

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. From 1954 to 1957 Dr. Frison excavated Daugherty Cave (48-WA-302). Various perishable artifacts were recovered from the site including moccasins, basketry, cordage, wood, hide and sinew. It is a Late Archaic to Late Prehistoric site on the west side of the Bighorn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Dudley.

Archaeologists working in the Rocky Mountains and throughout the world have long recognized that people invest social meanings into the landscape around them. Based on de Certeau’s (1984) "Spatial Stories," these "socialized landscapes" consist of two archaeologically identifiable components: espaces (practiced spaces) and tours (practiced paths). I operationalize these ideas by creating archaeological expectations for six socialized landscape types and ask what types of socialized landscapes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Mailler. Spencer Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This analysis presents convincing evidence that the mythic city of Etzanoa locale can be confirmed as located at the mouth of the Walnut River, in Arkansas City as proposed by Dr. Donald Blakeslee in 2018. Satellite imagery, ESRI’s GIS technologies, georeferencing, and comparative viewshed analyses conducted in geospatial environments offer new and innovative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeani Borchert.

This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I was a college student in elementary education when I was inspired by the enthusiasm of an instructor in a class I took for fun: Intro to Archaeology and Physical Anthropology. It changed the course of my life. Larry’s contributions to our field are enormous and varied as he is a man of intellectual curiosity,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lila Jones. Eileen Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Whiskey Flats is a mid-eighteenth-century probable Comanche site on the Southern High Plains in Midland County, Texas. Ongoing excavation in Mustang Draw of the now dry Mustang Pond uncovered evidence of occupation along a terrace and a bone bed within the pond basin. A modern bison periotic from the bone bed dates to the mid-1700s. Artifacts from both areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst. Laura Scheiber. Mackenzie Cory. Kirsten Hawley. Cally Steussy.

This presentation highlights several aspects of archaeological research and training undertaken by the Indiana University Bighorn Archaeology field school in its thirteenth year. Areas of study include documentation of Native residential campsites (stone circles) at the Heart Mountain Nature Conservancy; research at the Heart Mountain WWII Japanese American Confinement Site; photogrammetry of stone architecture (stone circles and cairns) and rock art around the Bighorn Basin; comparative rock...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Carlson. Michael Waters. Joshua Keene.

The Debra L. Friedkin site, located in central Texas along Buttermilk Creek, provides evidence of human occupation in Texas during the past 15 thousand years within a deposit approximately 1 meter thick. Excavation Block A consisted of 52 contiguous 1x1 m units excavated between 2006 and 2009. Excavations since the initial publication of the site include 14 units adjacent to the south end of the block and 32 units just northeast. Each 1x1 m unit was excavated in 2.5 cm levels. Currently we are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikaela Razo. Marissa Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, outreach within archaeology is changing to meet the needs of its communities, including the methods used by archaeologists to disseminate information and engage diverse age groups. “Legacy: Hands on the Past” is an archaeological outreach program based out of the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Luthman. Meghan Dudley.

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. In Oklahoma, giving K-12 students hands-on experiences with real artifacts can be challenging when collections are inaccessible in museum repositories. To make archaeology accessible to all students at the national level, Project Archaeology’s Investigating Shelter (2009) for grades 3-5 supplements social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Douglass. Simon Holdaway. Sam Lin.

The USDA Forest Service National Grassland System consists of 20 individual native and restored prairie grasslands. While the scale of these areas allows landscape survey, this ‘sea of grass’ is a challenge for artifact and feature discovery due to vegetation cover, meaning archaeologists must use surface visibility created by erosion, deflation, and other natural and anthropogenic processes. Here we report on a collaborative student-training project between the Forest Service and the University...