North America: Great Plains (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (212 Records)
This paper presents the results of an investigation conducted at the Capshaw site, a lithic scatter site, located within the Southern High Plains region in the panhandle of Texas. The Southern High Plains region is well-known for its rich archaeological record of Paleoindian peoples, however the Cody period remains relatively poorly understood. The paper will first describe the history of the site from its discovery in 2013 through archaeological surveys with explorative field school excavations...
Is Fluting Exclusive to Paleoindians? A Comparison of Paleoindian and Archaic End-Thinning Techniques (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea that fluting is a uniquely Paleoindian technological marker for projectile points in the Americas has been considered a given ever since the original Folsom discovery in 1927. While it is true that fluted lanceolate points are reliably diagnostic artifacts of the Paleoindian period, stemmed points from the Archaic period also occasionally exhibit end...
Islands on the Plains Revisited: GIS-Based Predictive Models of Playa Use on the Southern High Plains (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Landscape Archaeology is useful in providing a framework for understanding human movements across various environments. Such an approach relates landscapes as they evolved through time to settlement patterns of human groups occupying the area. Cultural behaviors can then be linked to physiographic and topographic features using such an approach. On the...
An Isolated Middle Archaic Bison Kill Site in the Northern Texas Panhandle (2018)
The discovery of a nearly complete, articulated Bison occidentalis in association with a Calf Creek projectile point in the northern Texas Panhandle in 2002 constitutes one of the few known Middle Archaic archaeological sites in the region. As the remains were found incidental to the construction of a new municipal swimming pool, documentation of the excavation and any subsequent analysis were less than ideal. A recently obtained AMS radiocarbon date of the remains at 5115 RCYBP falls within the...
A Keelboat Petroglyph in the Northern Bighorn Basin of Wyoming (2019)
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. Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin is one of the areas where Dr. Larry Loendorf has worked for years. This paper talks about a new rock art site in north-central portion of the Big Horn Basin. In 2015 two ranch women Lynette Kelley Cook and Phyllis Preator contacted the author about rock art in the northern Bighorn...
Kill, Camp, and Repeat: A Return to the Lindenmeier Folsom Site of Northern Colorado (2018)
Paleoindians of the Great Plains are often generalized as highly mobile bison hunters that moved in response to migrating bison. This view is certainly shaped by many well-known single component bison kills which form the basis for the argument. The Lindenmeier (5LR13) Folsom site of northern Colorado might be a notable exception to the high mobility model, as it contains hundreds of Folsom tools, animal bone, chipping debris, and decorated artifacts spread over 800 meters of buried deposits....
The La Prele Mammoth Site: A Clovis Mammoth Site with an Associated Campsite, Converse County, Wyoming (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the biggest sticking points in the ongoing debate about Clovis subsistence is the small sample size of human killed extinct megafauna. While just over a dozen terminal Pleistocene megafauna kill sites have been identified in North America, there are only two cases where campsites have been found in association with butchered extinct megafauna...
Lame Bull Speaks: The Lukin Ledger and Pikuni Blackfoot History (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A Pikuni Blackfoot notebook created sometime between 1904 and 1911 and linked to the descendants of Lame Bull contains a winter count, a record of two treaty conferences, and a list of the leaders of various nations comprising the Blackfoot Confederacy, recorded as pictographs. An unknown person has annotated some...
The Lasting Legacy of Larry Loendorf at Legend Rock (2019)
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. For over 30 years, Larry Loendorf has spurred rock art research throughout Wyoming and Montana. No where have his contributions been more important and deeply felt than at the Legend Rock State Petroglyphs site (48HO4) in Wyoming. Through encouraging the use of standard archaeological methodology at rock art...
Late Archaic Southern Plains Bison Kills: Accumulated Analysis Results at the Certain Site, Western Oklahoma (2018)
The Certain site is a 2000-year-old Late Archaic bison kill site consisting of multiple arroyo localities in western Oklahoma. Analysis of the site’s excavated faunal assemblage identified an MNI of several hundred bison, although an MNI around 1000 is expected for the entire site. At least nine distinct kill events are represented at Certain, including multiple seasonalities, though largely targeting calf/cow herds. We present the culmination of our analysis to date, including seasonality, herd...
Late Holocene Climate Change and the Emergence of Hunter-gatherer Territoriality in the Late Archaic Texas Coastal Plains: An Analysis using Bioavailable Strontium (2018)
The Late Holocene was a time of sea level stability, increased moisture, and abundant resources. Existing models suggest that this environment set the stage for population packing and territoriality. In this presentation, strontium isotope ratios from the Loma Sandia mortuary site (2800-2600 BP) are used to evaluate the emergence of territoriality among hunter-gatherer populations on the Texas Coastal Plain. Assessing territoriality with human strontium data is facilitated by determining the...
The Late Paleoindian Cody Complex Component at Lamb Spring, Colorado (2018)
The Late Paleoindian Cody complex component at Lamb Spring, Colorado was recently reanalyzed. While best known for its possible association with Late Pleistocene fauna, the Lamb Spring Cody component with its nearly 2,000 bison bones, seven Eden projectile points, Cody knife fragment, and two flakes has largely been overlooked and incompletely described in the literature (excepting McCartney’s study of the bison bones). To remedy the situation I: (1) use prior publications, reports and the...
The Late Pleistocene (Rancholabrean) Vertebrate Local Fauna from Zone 3 of Kincaid Rockshelter (41UV2), Uvalde County, Texas (2018)
Kincaid Rockshelter (41UV2) is a stratified, multi-component archaeological site spanning the late Pleistocene-Holocene in Uvalde County along the Sabinal River in south-central Texas. Texas Memorial Museum investigations in 1948 produced a small but relatively diverse sample of late Pleistocene (Rancholabrean) vertebrates from the lacustrine Zone 3 depositional unit. Zone 3 material was examined as part of a review of American lion (Panthera leo atrox) remains from Texas. New qualitative and...
Legend Rock Remembered (2019)
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. Legend Rock is a world-renowned petroglyph site located north of Thermopolis, WY. Considered a sacred site by the Shoshone Indian Nation it features impressive and significant petroglyphs within the Dinwoody tradition. This presentation focuses on the management plan created between Wyoming State Parks and...
Legends of the Dinsmore Hilton (2018)
Learning to be an archaeologist is a craft that comes in many forms from formal academic training, field and lab work, to informal unstructured experiences. These become known through academic degrees, peer reviewed publications, project reports, conference presentations and interactions with peers, colleagues, the public and even the media. Formal training is listed in detail in personal vitae and may be measured and judged by the outputs but how we do archaeology as individuals is also the...
“Like Mushrooms after Rain”: Learning the Land on the Late Nineteenth-Century Central Great Plains (USA) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the Civil War, settlers moved into a Great Plains landscape from which Native Americans had been extirpated; i.e., a foreign land with few local experts. In the case of late nineteenth-century Custer County, Nebraska, settler towns sprang up and disappeared “like mushrooms after rain.” Settlers initially sought out...
Lithic Technology of Manufacturing Stone Tools at Gravel Quarry Source Locations using Heat-Treatment (2018)
Prehistoric flintknappers world-wide typically used heat-treatment to improve the flakeability of lithic materials after initial reduction into smaller-sized packages. In contrast, along the eastern escarpment of the Southern High Plains of Northwest Texas, Late Archaic-age (4,500-2,000 rcyBP) flintknappers used heat-treatment to improve large quartzarenite clasts prior to initial clast reduction. Heat-treatment in this case was used as part of procurement at quarry gravel source locations....
Long-Term Dietary Change among Hunters of the North American Great Plains (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 13,000-year-long record of hunting by North American Great Plains populations is often portrayed as an almost exclusive reliance on large-bodied prey, such as bison. This simplified perspective ignores temporal and regional variability in environmental conditions and changes in human-prey dynamics, making exclusive reliance on a single taxon unlikely. The...
A Look at the Impact of Natural Grassland Fires on the Archaeological Record along the Eastern Escarpment of the Southern High Plains of Texas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fires are an essential aspect of the grassland ecosystem across the Great Plains. Natural fires often can transform surrounding rocks to look like hearths or individual hearthstones used by prehistoric people. Several experiments, however, have demonstrated that grassland fires may not fully discolor the rocks on all sides...
Managing the Effects of Climate Change and Foraging Risk through Dietary Portfolio Diversity, an Example from 13,000 years of Human-Environment Interactions on the Great Plains of North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food security and risk management are prominent contemporary global challenges, with ~795 million people undernourished worldwide. Climate change is projected to affect the availability, accessibility and stability of food sources, further exacerbating global malnutrition, but this is not a novel human challenge. Food security risk...
Many Pathways to Stewardship of Oklahoma's Past and Present (2018)
True to the title of the 2017 Oklahoma Archaeology Month poster, its creation involved an extensive collaborative effort. The theme celebrates both the long-standing education and outreach efforts of the Oklahoma Archeological Survey and the founding of the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (OKPAN). OKPAN sponsored the competitive recruitment for an artist to conceive the poster, which generated multiple submissions and spawned other creative partnerships. The poster displays an original,...
Mapping Lithic Surface Scatters with Drones (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Quivira Revisited" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Combining traditional archaeological methods such as pedestrian survey with unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) mapping creates an opportunity for efficient data capture and analysis of the scale and spatial arrangement of archaeological sites. This poster presents a cost-effective approach to surveying and mapping surface scatters and illustrates how the application of...
The McKean Complex Occupation in the Sunlight Basin, Northwest Wyoming: An Updated Assessment of Cultural and Geological Stratigraphy at Site 48PA551 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Multidisciplinary Research at 48PA551: A Middle Archaic (McKean Complex) Site in Northwest Wyoming" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site 48PA551 is a widely recognized winter camp originally dated to Middle Archaic (McKean Complex) period. Original investigators described the McKean occupation as a singular unit within a 30-90 cm thick sedimentary stratum beginning at the ground surface. Original radiocarbon dating...
Microfauna Analysis at the La Prele Mammoth Site (48CO1401): Implications for Clovis Diet and Paleoenvironments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most of the research focusing on Late Pleistocene hunting has been tailored to examining megafauna, with microfauna receiving little attention in the Clovis archaeological record. This project examines the microfauna remains recovered from the La Prele Mammoth Site (48CO1401). La Prele is an open-air Clovis mammoth camp and kill site located in Converse...
Miniature Folsom Points from the Lindenmeier Site, Colorado (2018)
Among the Folsom artifacts excavated by Frank Roberts at the Lindenmeier site in Colorado are several unusually small projectile points, both fluted and unfluted. This paper explores the hypothesis that these miniature points are toys. To do so, we review the ethnographic literature on miniature weapons and contextualize the production and use of such objects. Second, we compare the small Folsom artifacts to full-size points from a typological and technological point of view. Finally, we discuss...