North America: Great Plains (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (212 Records)
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. The weakest link in reconstructing patterns of organizational complexity among Late Prehistoric Blackfoot ancestors known archaeologically as the Old Women’s Phase (1000-250 BP) is the dearth of population estimates that would explain the need to adopt institutions of social control such as esoteric societies and...
Prey and Predators on the Late Pleistocene Llano Estacado (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are among the major predators on the Llano Estacado (Southern High Plains, USA) during the late Pleistocene in competition with a diverse carnivore guild that included the now-extinct giant short-faced bear, saber-tooth cat, American lion, and dire wolf. Direct evidence on bone in the form of cut marks and bone fracture patterns are used in...
Proboscideans, Drought, and Cyanobacteria: Natural Death Events both Present and Past (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lawrence Todd has made substantial contributions to the studies of taphonomy, Paleoindians, and megafauna, among other topics. His foundational research provides the basis for important questions to be asked about megafaunal extinctions. Drawing first on data on elephant deaths in northern Botswana in 2020 that...
Quantifying the Qualitative: Locating North-Central Kansas Burial Mounds (2018)
Scattered through parts of northeastern and north-central Kansas are prehistoric burial sites in the form of low rock and earthen mounds located atop bluffs overlooking stream valleys. In Kansas, the Unmarked Burial Sites Preservation Act exists to protect these sites, but this law is only effective if the location of these features is known. Most prehistoric mounds in this region are subtle in appearance, making them difficult to recognize. If sites are not recorded and protected, they may be...
The Quivira Connections (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although it was visited by three Spanish expeditions, knowledge of Quivira quickly became enshrouded in myth. Nevertheless, early documentary evidence suggests that the land of the ancestral Wichita was extensive, heavily populated, and an important source of bison products for both the Greater Southwest and the Southeast. At the western end, a...
Quivira in a New Light (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Quivira Revisited" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The identification of the "great settlement" visited by Juan de Oñate in 1601 has led to a wholesale revision of our understanding of protohistoric archaeology in Kansas. Instead of clusters of villages, the habitation sites of the Great Bend Aspect are large towns that contained thousands of residents. Sites of this scale require the use of remote sensing...
Raw Material Use though the Archaic at the Aught-Six Site: Northwestern Colorado (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here we examine the data from a cultural resource management excavation of the Aught-Six site in northwestern Colorado. We utilize an expedited version of Minimum Analytical Nodule Analysis (MANA) to address the changes in lithic raw material use and acquisition during a 2,000 year period of the Middle Archaic (6400–4450 cal B.P.). We assign individual...
Re-examining Site 48PA551 in Sunlight Basin, Northwest Wyoming: The Faunal Remains from the 2018 Field Season (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, located in the Sunlight Basin of Northwest Wyoming, is widely accepted as a winter camp dated to the Middle Archaic period. In the original excavation, researchers initially identified one consistent occupation layer, dated to ca. 3800-4400 radiocarbon years B.P and...
Recent Documentation Efforts at Greybull South, Wyoming (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Greybull South (48BH92) is a rock art site located along the east bank of the Bighorn River near Greybull, Wyoming. The site was first documented in 1951 as part of the Yellowtail Reservoir survey project, but the site gained regional notoriety in 1962 when large blocks containing petroglyphs were removed...
Recent Trends in North American Great Plains Archaeological Research (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The North American Great Plains physically encompass one third of the contemporary United States and include the international border with Canada. The region has been occupied for at least 16,000 years, with some of the oldest sites in North America. Although the Plains have often been considered peripheral to major developments in adjacent regions, we...
A Reclassification of the High Plains Upper Republican Ceramics from Buick Campsite: Buick Collared and Buick Straight (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramics from Buick Campsite (5EL1), a High Plains Upper Republican open camp in eastern Colorado, were previously classified as Frontier and Cambridge ware of the Central Plains Tradition Upper Republican Culture. However, analyses of 568 sherds from excavations and surface collections indicate that vessel morphology was significantly different than...
Redating the Jones-Miller Site: Multiple Hell Gap (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Jones-Miller Bison Kill site was excavated in the early 1970s is dated to approximately 8000 BCE. The age of the site was initially represented by only four radiocarbon dates, only one of which was from the bison bone bed while the remainder came from charcoal samples associated with...
A Reexamination of the Nature and Context of the Finley Paleoindian Bison Bonebeds in Southwest Wyoming (2018)
The Finley site is in the western Killpecker dunes in the Green River valley in southwest Wyoming, and consists of at least two Cody age bison bonebeds. For modern Paleoindian researchers, Finley still poses important questions and offers several potential avenues for research. The prior work with the Finley faunal remains, as well as our current investigations, demonstrate that the site is associated with an enormous collection of bison remains that are thought to have been killed on site or...
Reimagining Non-Representational Rock Art through Proto-Historical Indigenous Cartographic Traditions (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. When confronted with apparently non-representational forms at prehistoric rock art sites, North American researchers tend to categorize such imagery as abstract symbols, shamanic art, or entoptic phenomena. Drawing on research in the field of historical geography and utilizing a direct-historical,...
Reinvestigating the Chronostratigraphy of the Early Paleoindian Components of Hell Gap, Locality 1 (2018)
Hell Gap in eastern Wyoming contains the most complete Paleoindian cultural sequence in North America, providing insight into long-term landscape use and available resources exploited by early Americans. A well-developed chronology allows for clearer and more accurate comparisons of both cultural information and geologic data. Although Hell Gap is well studied and has provided archaeologists a wealth of information regarding the Paleoindian period, questions remain regarding the timing of events...
Remembering ichaskhah (Camp Creek): Low-Impact Methodologies for Documenting an Early Twentieth-Century Wichita Camp and Dance Ground in Oklahoma (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes have a long history of occupation in Oklahoma. This includes evidence of both pre- and postcontact habitations along major and minor waterways near Anadarko, Oklahoma. Here Wichita peoples camped, built grass houses and arbors, and held social...
Remote Sensing Investigations of the Arzberger Site (39HU6) (2018)
Arzberger is a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century fortified Plains Village site located near present-day Pierre, South Dakota. Although it is an important example of an Initial Coalescent settlement in the Middle Missouri subarea of the Plains, its most intensive study occurred in 1939 when the village was accurately mapped and test excavations were made of four lodges and the fortification. This early work identified a surprisingly low number of houses for such a large settlement. In recent...
Revisiting Julie K. Stein’s "Archaeological Sediments in Cultural Environments": The Nexus Between Lithostratigraphy and Geoarchaeological Research in the Great Plains and Central Lowlands, USA (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In her seminal 2001 book chapter, Archaeological Sediments in Cultural Contexts, Julie Stein emphasized that identifying and characterizing sedimentary deposits at archaeological sites is crucial to understanding the geologic context of the cultural deposits as well as site formation processes. Archaeologists have taken heed of...
The Role of Geomorphology and GIS in the Identification of Paleoindian Archaeological Sites at Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming, U.S.A. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We discuss the role of geomorphology in identifying early Paleoindian archaeological sites at North America’s highest-elevation natural lake, Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming. Prior research proposed geomorphological models for the ages of Yellowstone Lake paleoshorelines that mark former lake levels after Late Pleistocene glacial retreat. Based on results of 10...
The Role of Geophysical Remote Sensing in the Management of Archaeological Resources within the US Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District’s Missouri River Main Stem Dam System (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Crucial Issues in United States Department of Defense Cultural Resources Management " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The United States Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District (USACE) has approximately 850,000 acres of land within its jurisdiction. Much of this land is rich in both historic and prehistoric archaeological resources and located on reservoir shoreline that is subject to erosion. Erosion is exacerbated by...
Ruthann, the Leader-Hearted Woman - inawa’sioskitsipaki (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. The Blackfoot, in whose territories Ruthann Knudson worked, recognize some women as inawa’sioskitsipaki, a “leader-hearted woman.” Such a woman is strong, intelligent, highly moral, outstandingly capable in the tasks she carries out, kind, and generous. She is deeply respected and listened to. Oscar Lewis, in a...
Sacred Stone, Sacred Land: A Traditional Native American Quarry Cultural Landscape (2018)
The Pipestone National Monument, created August 25, 1937, attracts people to mine its catlinite rock containing traces of iron-rich hematite giving it a red hue. The living cultural landscape preserved as a National Monument in southwestern Minnesota is 301 acres, but its modern constituency extends far beyond these borders. In ancient times, raw material from the Sioux Quartzite Formation traveled long distances as well. Archaeological research in combination with ethnography and descendent...
Sand, Rivers, Glacial Lakes and the Prairie-Forest Border: A Doc Holliday Student Heads North (2018)
In this paper I link ongoing research along the eastern shore of Glacial Lake Agassiz (GLA) to Doc Holliday, the person who made it possible. Doc instilled in his students an interdisciplinary mind-set, and taught them to emphasize archaeological questions first and to consider past human groups as active agents of paleoenvironmental change as well as sophisticated responders to it. My research up North began where the ancestral Sheyenne River entered GLA from the west. After patient mentoring...
Scaling Analysis of Prehistoric Wyoming Camp Sites—Implications for Hunter-Gatherer Social Dynamics (2018)
Recent studies suggest many properties of human settlements vary in predictable ways with population size. These studies have shown, for example, that more populous settlements are systematically denser on average than less populous settlements in a wide range of societies. In this presentation we examine this densification effect in mobile hunting and gathering societies by analyzing a database of information for prehistoric stone circle (tipi ring) sites in the plains and intermontane basins...
The Science in Small Business: A Small Business's Process and Problems with Archeological Science Techniques (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science Outside the Ivory Tower: Perspectives from CRM" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quality Services, Inc. is a small business in Rapid City, SD. Since 2013, we have added GPR, terrestrial LiDAR, 3D scanning and drone photography to our services, but have not had success in using them on a consistent basis. Three obstacles are present: skilled employee retention, convincing clients of the benefits...