North America: Great Plains (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph McConnell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Folsom projectile points are housed and displayed by museums around the country, but many are donated by collectors without the accompaniment of information documenting their original archaeological context. As a result, questions surrounding their authenticity hamper their ability to contribute to collections-based archaeological research of the Folsom time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Breslawski.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists frequently face the problem of explaining uneven skeletal element representation, with explanations involving either non-human taphonomic agents or differential carcass transport decisions made by humans. Existing statistical methods for evaluating these explanations are generally applicable at the...

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

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies of microbial communities in terrestrial environments have shown that an input of environmental "triggers" within soil substrate can activate dormant soil microorganisms. Additionally, deep within marine coal deposits, it has been discovered that forest soil microbes thrive, despite their oceanic surroundings. However, terrestrial microbial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Behling. L. Adrien Hannus.

Over the years of excavation at the Prehistoric Indian Village at Mitchell, several similar shell artifacts were discovered. Excavators came to the hypothesis that the shell items had been fishing lures, and set out to test it. The shell artifacts were replicated and used as lures on several fishing expeditions. These shell items functioned as lures, and we are led to believe that the artifacts found at Mitchell could indeed have been fishing lures.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Sando.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Infrastructure decisions influence human settlement and can leave archaeologic and geographic evidence for us to discover and decipher. Discovery in that much of this evidence has faded away into the environmental background of current human occupation and can be rediscovered by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacy Hollenback. Christopher Roos. Whitney Goodwin. Francesco Berna.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Firing is an important step in the life history of ceramic objects, or what some would refer to as a châine opératoire. The firing environment of ceramics can yield insights into changes in fuel choice and abundance, labor estimates, degree of craft specialization, and perhaps even ritual and belief. In contrast with formal firing structures, such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Soza. Evelyn Pickering. François Lanoë. María Nieves Zedeño.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Four Horns Lake, located on the southern end of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, was surveyed in July 2018 as part of the expansion and rehabilitation project for the Four Horns Dam. Built in the early 1900s, current focus on this dam has induced action to record resources that may be impacted by development. The sacredness of Four Horns Lake to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Vehik.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1978 excavations in the first of four houses at the Uncas site (34KA172) produced several pieces of a burned clay panel carrying multiple fingertip impressions. Uncas is a late fourteenth-century site north of Ponca City, Oklahoma and south of Arkansas City, Kansas overlooking the Arkansas River. Several pieces of this panel were reassembled at that time,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Crisp.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in Eastern Oklahoma, Fort Gibson acted as the starting gate for America’s military expansion into the West. Founded in 1824, Fort Gibson played a role in mediating encounters between the Osage and Cherokee until 1857. The Fort reopened at the start of the American Civil War and operated until 1890. Fort Gibson serves as an excellent archaeological...

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 Leila Joyce Seals. Rolfe Mandel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Central Plains of North America have yielded fewer stratified Paleoindian archaeological sites than other regions of the Great Plains. The dearth of recorded early sites is due to geologic filtering of the archaeological record; processes of erosion and deposition have removed or deeply buried early sites, respectively. At the Coffey site in the Big...

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 Brandi Bethke. Sarah Trabert. Richard Drass.

This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In North America, the southern Plains exchange system after 1600 CE was a complicated and fiercely competitive network of fluid alliances, rival interests, and conflict in the middle of overlapping Southeastern and Southwestern cultural, economic, and physical power...

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...