North America: Great Plains (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Clark.

The Missouri River Valley is a unique landscape for horticulturist settlements. The semi-arid Great Plains have wildly fluctuating weather patterns and resulted in a difficult growing environment with frequent changes in productivity. The terraces of the river valley offered relatively flat areas for village planning, the terrace-forming flood waters refreshed the flood plains with nutrient rich sediment for village gardens, and the terrace breaks provided protection from both wind and invaders....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bamforth.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous Plains warfare is one of the anthropological archetypes of tribal war, often seen as just as much of a status-related game as real violence directed toward larger social and political ends. This view misrepresents colonial-era warfare by focusing on only one aspect social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Faith Flores. Brian M. Kemp. Marc Levine.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) were domesticated by Basketmaker peoples in the American Southwest and independently by prehispanic Mesoamerican groups, yet relatively little is known about the nature and origin of ancient Oklahoma turkeys. In this project, we analyze...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Zedeno.

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painting and writing from Fort Union Trading Post, North Dakota in the 1830s, George Catlin greatly admired Plains Indian coifs, body paint, and insignia, painstakingly describing each individual’s appearance. Contemporary descendants of Blackfoot warriors whom Catlin painted, joyfully display their portraits as evidence of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Blakeslee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The bison jumps and bison pounds of the Northern Plains are prominent features of the landscape, but conditions are different on the Central and Southern Plains. Early historic documents tell of large long-distance communal hunts conducted from horticultural villages. Thousands of hunters used surrounds to take the animals, but no kill sites of that kind...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Otárola-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bayesian inference and its underlying philosophy offer an alternative to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), the conventional statistical framework in archaeology. Due to new technological advances, Bayesian inference has become an essential component of broader scientific efforts and progressively prevalent in archaeological research. Here, without using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Dudley.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For several decades, stewardship programs have proven to be a successful way to engage citizen scientists in the preservation of the archaeological record. From California to Florida, archaeologists have trained members of the public who are passionate about preserving the past to monitor sites, document private collections, and assist at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ray McAllister. Sharon McAllister.

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. Avocationalists are a valuable asset for museum curators and collection analysts. Budget-strapped institutions can benefit from a structured program of volunteers trained to clean, sort, analyze, and catalog artifacts for inclusion into museum collections. From an existing strained relationship, archaeology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Nieves Zedeño. Francois Lanoe.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We combine archaeology, oral history, and ethnography to argue for the epistemological power of visions and their complementary role—along with ontology and ordering schemes—in the fabric of Native American philosophies and practices. Waking visions and dreams are central to the long-term cultural history of Plains people. Among the Blackfoot, for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Arksey. Paddington Hodza. Greg Pierce.

The University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository (UWAR) is the largest archaeological collection and the only federally-regulated repository in Wyoming, providing an unprecedented centralized location for researchers and the public to discover and engage with the 16,000 years of human occupation in this part of North America. However, the current collections management system at UWAR does not facilitate public dissemination of this data, nor does it enable curatorial staff the ability to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandi Bethke.

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of the faunal assemblage recovered from excavations at the Cut Bank Creek Boarding School Site (24GL0302), located on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Glacier County, MT. Excavations at the site took place following the inadvertent discovery of a large bone bed initially unearth...