North America: Great Plains (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonya Beach. Thomas Thompson. Thomas Gruber. R. Doyle Bowman. Janna Gruber.

This is an abstract from the ""Is There Gold in that Field?" CRM and Public Outreach on the Front Lines" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why shouldn't cultural resource management (CRM) companies be involved in public outreach and education outside of regulatory mandates? Archaeologists are ambassadors of the discipline by nature, giving responsible access to shared history with other disciplines and members of the public as well as engaging with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Hofman. Barbara Crable.

Feature 15-1 at a 9,000 year old bison kill site in Rawlins County, northwest Kansas yielded remains of black footed ferret (BFF) and numerous other species. Here we summarize cultural and taphonomic factors related to the feature’s formation and review BFF biogeography for the early Holocene period in the central Plains region. The diverse fauna from this feature and its varied modifications may reflect special cultural behavior associated with the bison kill at Burntwood Creek. Both natural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ebony Creswell.

Until recently, the development and spread of tuberculosis in humans has been associated with the advent of Old World animal domestication and agriculture. However, recent evidence for the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis raises the possibility of a Pleistocene era dispersal. Poor bone preservation and small populations make finding Pleistocene-era bioarchaeological evidence of the disease difficult. Coupled with this, epidemiological studies suggest that population numbers were too low...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Neeley. Craig Lee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Forager mobility is often linked to the organization of technology through the continuum of curated and expedient technologies. Curated technologies are expected to be associated with higher levels of mobility reflecting transport costs and longer use histories, in response to reduced access to raw materials. In contrast, expedient technologies are more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reid Farmer. Jon Kent. Allan Koch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1971, excavations were conducted by avocational archaeologists at Cherokee Mountain Rock Shelter (5DA1001) in Douglas County Colorado. A 1973 published report showed an assemblage indicating three Late Prehistoric components. The middle component contained what was interpreted as Shoshonean ceramics likely from outside of the region. The collection was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Shimek.

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. Despite ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence suggesting the Great Plains were teeming with canids during prehistory and the contact period, the archaeological record of canids (wolves, coyotes, dogs, and foxes) in Wyoming seems rather sparse. This presentation briefly describes the nature of the canid record in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James D. Keyser. David Kaiser.

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. Site 24ST560, located northwest of Billings, Montana, contains the most detailed example of a Crow war party tally known in northern Plains rock art. Known from two avocationalist publications, we analyze the site imagery using Crow ledger drawings and Crow ethnographic information, and determine that it represents the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stance Hurst. Eileen Johnson.

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. Excavated in the mid-1940s, the Plainview site on the Southern High Plains generated considerable interest and continues to do so today. After hours spent illustrating each flake scar of the Plainview (41HA1) bison kill site’s lithic assemblage, Knudson stated in her 1973 dissertation that “perhaps only one and at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leland Bement. Kristen Carlson. Dakota Larrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bison crania without mandibles form a vertical cluster in the earliest of two arroyos at the ~10,400 year old Ravenscroft bison kill site in the Oklahoma panhandle. The skulls were stacked on the arroyo floor, eventually forcing subsequent kills to relocate to an adjacent arroyo. A combined total of five winter kill events have been documented in the two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Banks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancestral Apache sites located in the eastern Central Plains of Kansas and Nebraska date to AD 1500-1800, and are frequently associated with small, circular wickiup house structures. A number of these localities have a high degree of preservation that allows for a detailed study of the architecture and construction techniques of these people. This poster will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Macy Ricketts. Naomi Ward. Todd Surovell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" 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 questions, and aid in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bamforth. Kristen Carlson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maize farmers settled the Lynch site in northeastern Nebraska from the late 1200s through the 1300s during a period of significant drought and social, demographic, and economic changes linked to Cahokia’s decline. Oneota groups expanded westward into the central Great Plains during this time as indigenous Central Plains Tradition farmers abandoned the western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Fisher. Kelsey Witt.

This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition to agriculture in the Great Plains of North America is generally assumed to have occurred through processes of migration and diffusion. But understanding the nuance of this transition at local and subregional scales requires a focus on different types of social interactions and community-level decision-making. One method is to use dogs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer. Gene Munson.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lynn Fredlund was a product of the 1960s, the decade before women exploded onto the archaeological scene on the Northern Plains. She was one of the earliest archaeologists to earn her living as a contract archaeologist and one of the first in the region to earn a PhD while actively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Harman.

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. In 2014 – 16 I participated in Sacred Sites Research rock art documentation projects in Montana and Wyoming, led by Larry Lowendorf. My contribution was my expertise with the DStretch program, which I created. DStretch proved to be an important resource in aiding the documentation of sites and recognizing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ankele.

In comparison to the Late Paleoindian Period (10,000-8,000 rcybp), the Early Archaic (8,000-6,500 rcybp) in the Gunnison Basin, Colorado is a poorly understood time because of its relatively light archaeological signature. Not only is the archaeological record more ephemeral, but we also see a change in technologies, such as projectile points types, in this transitional period. Some archaeologists explain these observations as a result of changing environments and shifting settlement processes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Koerner. Eric Skov. Brett Giles.

The cultural resource program at Fort Riley manages 100k acres in the Flint Hills province of northeastern Kansas. Variations in the Flint Hills landscape influence the use of different archaeological site discovery methods. While floodplain settings with deep soil deposits necessitate regular subsurface testing, higher elevation settings with low soil accumulation require less intensive survey methods. Many prehistoric sites in higher elevation, upland landscapes are expressed largely by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Cannon.

Bringing the geologically historic record to bear on questions of ecosystem evolution is a goal emphasized in recent National Research Council reports. Within this context one species has become significant, the bison of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Recent expansion of the population, and its subsequent migration outside federal lands, has created concern among federal managers, local ranchers, and conservation groups. However, much of what is known about pre-management herds is based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

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. Hoofprint markings are a widespread macro tradition across the Plains and Great Lakes region but their relationship to elk imagery has not been fully explored. Along those lines, limited research has been done on what is known of track grooves or rock art imagery attributed to Indigenous women sharpening...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrien Hannus.

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. The Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village (39DV2), an Initial Middle Missouri site in the James River valley of southeastern South Dakota, serves as the platform for this presentation. The site boasts both a museum with a variety of exhibits relating to Plains Village cultures and a facility called the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Lynch. Mary Lou Larson. Marcel Kornfeld.

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. Ruthann Knudson's chapter, "The Early Expeditions: University of Wyoming, Harvard University, and the Peabody Museum," in *Hell Gap: A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies, pulls together a range of experiences from the earliest discovery of the site. The chapter unfolds like a road map through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassidee A. Thornhill.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The introduction of Equus caballus (modern horse) into Native American life on the Plains during European-American contact has been associated with major cultural and ecological changes to native lifeways. The horse influenced a variety of cultural practices including the distance at which resources could be exploited, the number of material goods that could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Zarzycka. Todd Surovell. Madeline Mackie. Spencer Pelton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Red ochre is a ferrous iron oxide mineral used for cultural expression and utilitarian tasks by hominins beginning 250,000 years ago. The use of ochre continued into the New World. While its use by Paleoindians has been noted, the function and significance of ochre for these groups is not well understood. To conceive the importance of ochre to Paleoindians, it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Ozbun.

Morrison Formation red orthoquartzite was procured, reduced, and exported as large percussion flake blanks from a late pre-contact quarry and workshop (LA21699) near Tucumcari, New Mexico. Experimental flintknapping replication of the orthoquartzite reduction technology represented at the aboriginal quarry/workshop site produced data on the average frequency of various technologically diagnostic flake types per reduction event. Comparing these experimental flake type frequencies with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Carlson. Haley Sherwood. Dagny Anderson. Amelia Cisar. Andrew Kracinski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lynch site occupied in the late 1200s saw substantial environmental and population shifts in the context of profound regional sociopolitical and demographic changes. Oneota groups expanded into the east-central Great Plains at the same time that indigenous Plains farmers abandoned the western parts of their ranges and moved east. Interactions between these...