Mississippian (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Boles. William Iseminger. Lori Belknap.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Guth dugout is named for the finder Matt Guth, who found the dugout on a sandbar in a meander portion of the St. Francois River in 2008. The dugout was exposed after floodwaters receded and due to the find location, Guth was determined to be the rightful owner. The dugout was over 6 m long and in remarkable shape given its age. In 2009, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Blaber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1977 Drs. Chester DePratter and David Hurst Thomas began a complete perimeter survey of St. Catherines Island. In their initial survey they identified more than 100 new archaeological sites that were either visible on the surface or eroding out of the bank of the island. Many of these sites were not investigated again until January 2017 when archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Buchanan.

Archaeological studies of hypothesized regional abandonments often perform what Tim Ingold (2008) refers to as "a logic of inversion;" by drawing lines around sites, regions, and spaces we create boundaries in which life is lived, and by extension, create spaces where life is not lived. In examples of abandonments, the absence of evidence related to human living spaces is taken as the absence of (human) life. In other words, when we demarcate "abandoned" or "unoccupied spaces" (noted as such by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Kong Cheong. Nilesh Gaikwad.

We recently identified residues indicative of the preparation of Datura in ceramic and shell vessels dating to the Mississippian period (900-1600 CE) of the southeastern United States in the collections of the Gilcrease Museum. Datura is a genus of flowering plants whose seeds and flowers contain tropane alkaloids that produce hallucinogenic effects when consumed by people. The use of Datura for a variety of medicinal ritual practices is well established among Native Americans today and in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Baumann. Gary Crites.

Arriving after AD 1000, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) was the last domesticated plant to be adopted in the prehistoric Eastern Woodlands. Beans were combined with corn and squash to create the "three sisters" agricultural system. Recent scholarship has argued that the earliest beans entered the eastern US from the lower Plains and through the Great Lakes. When and how beans entered into the southeastern U.S. is not clearly understood because very few beans have been directly dated. New...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren. Scott Fitzpatrick. Victor Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Hope for the Future: A Message of Resiliency from Archaeological Sites in South Florida" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some scholars have argued that the adoption of agriculture is inevitable and that Holocene climate changes forced complex societies around the world to domesticate plants and animals. But the complex cultures of precolumbian south Florida provide a rare example of persistent reliance on wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georgia Zavala.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Boxed Springs (41UR30) is an Early Caddo archaeological site, known for its earthen mounds and looted cemetery. Gradiometer results from 2020 revealed multiple circular features throughout the southern area of the site, likely indicative of domestic structures. In addition to presumed structures, gradiometer results indicated several anomalies, which were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliet Morrow.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located at the eastern edge of the Ozarks, the Greenbrier site is in a unique ecotonal location in close proximity to a diversity of lithic resources in the middle White River Basin. Ceramics at Greenbrier indicate that people here were closely connected to towns on the upper and lower White River and also to occupants in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Kressly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the Boxed Springs site is primarily known for the elaborate Early Caddo ceramic assemblage from cemetery contexts, lithic material is also abundant at the site. This study describes the lithic assemblage recovered from Wichita State University’s investigations in 2021 and 2022. Given the limited time frames allotted for excavations at Boxed Springs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Cross.

Ames (40FY7) is an Early-Middle Mississippian period town with two dozen structures, four mounds, and plazas enclosed within a palisade located in Fayette County, Tennessee, which dates to A.D. 1050-1300. Very little research has been done on Early-Middle Mississippian settlements in West Tennessee; this has resulted in very little being known about the social life history of these sites. Recent research at Ames has utilized multiple lines of evidence such as magnetometry data, surface...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses results from examination of faunal remains and iconography from Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma. By combining multiple analyses, this research yielded data useful to recognizing animal use patterns at the site that may suggest how ideological structures affected food choice at the site. In particular, this paper highlights some examples that may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Purcell. Ashley Schubert.

In this paper, we present the results of archaeobotanical analysis from the Cane River Site in Yancey County, NC. Thirty-three samples were collected during the 2013-2014 field season from features associated with different spatial contexts such as household architecture and palisades. Our results show that corn, beans, and squash are ubiquitous in the assemblage, indicating that Cane River has unexpectedly high amounts of domesticates given its higher elevation and lack of lowland floodplains....

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Marquardt.

This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coastal societies of the northern Pacific and southwestern Florida were once thought anomalous because they achieved sociopolitical complexity without agriculture. The Calusa are often cited as especially unusual, or as the "pinnacle" of complexity among fisher-gatherer-hunters because they achieved a tributary, state-like political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pauketat. Carrie Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the mouth of the St. Francois River in eastern Arkansas, up along the Ohio River, and northeast to the Varney-culture inhabitants of greater Cahokia, ancestral Quapaw people defined the archaeology of both the central Mississippi River valley and David G. Anderson. Understanding a vast swath of precolonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Nelson.

Ethnographic sources indicate that fire and its alternate forms—smoke and ash—are powerfully symbolic substances for many historic period southeastern Indian groups. The remains of fire are frequently deposited in ways that amplify its power, or alternatively, attempt to neutralize it. This paper examines ash deposition at Parchman Place, a late Mississippi period (AD 1300-1541) site located in the northern Yazoo Basin. Here, and elsewhere in the Southeast, Mississippian people incorporated ash...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marvin Kay.

Sediment of varied textures and colors, ash among them, is highlighted from deliberately burnt Harlan-style charnel houses. These were erected in sub-mound pits. In one rendition that followed an earlier house burning, light gray ash alternates in the superior, or upward, position with the black charcoal layer of a collapsed burnt thatch and cane roof. The ash was levelled as a platform. This completed a mortuary cycle linked lineally to subsequent pyramidal mound construction. In other cases...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg. Elizabeth Watts Malouchos. Edward Herrmann.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Angel Mounds (12VG1) is a fortified Mississippian multi-mound center on the Ohio River in Vanderburgh County, Indiana. With 11 mounds, hundreds of residential structures, a prepared plaza, and massive daubed palisade wall, previous researchers have suggested Angel is at the top of a complex regional settlement hierarchy in the Ohio Valley. However, to-date,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Stauffer.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. First detected by Charles Bareis in 1969 in Cahokia’s Ramey Field tract, Mound 17 (the Bareis Mound) was partially exposed beneath artificially mixed plaza fills, immediately west of the palisade wall that bounds the eastern extremity of the site core. Following an analysis of Bareis’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robbyn McKellop.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the east Texas Pineywoods, Boxed Springs (41UR30) is a lesser-known Early Caddo mound center characterized by a diverse and distinctive archaeological assemblage. Recently, Wichita State University has been granted permission to access the eastern portion of the site which was previously restricted. Excavation findings during the 2021 and 2022...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Phillips.

This paper will examine one possible model for the use of pottery engraved in the Hemphill style at Moundville, the associations model. The Hemphill style is Moundville's local representational art style. The most commonly engraved themes in the style are winged serpents, crested birds, raptors, paired tails, center symbols and bands, and human trophies in the form of skulls, scalps, and the hand and eye design. It is suggested that these designs represent patron supernaturals relating to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much of the research and scholarship in Southeastern iconography focused on birds and avian or avian anthropomorphic imagery emphasizes connections to warfare, especially raptors and woodpeckers. While some research has discussed how birds relate to broader patterns in iconography, notable gaps in literature exist pertaining to how birds are integrated into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne Goldstein.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Aztalan is located between the modern cities of Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin, and is commonly identified as Mississippian, dating to about AD 1000. The site has been known since the 1800s, and many amateur and professional archaeologists have excavated there. Much of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Druggan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence and decline of Cahokia, the largest Indigenous settlement north of Mexico, have long captivated archaeologists. Population reconstructions are a major line of evidence for unraveling the story of Cahokia. Current models hinge upon reconstructions derived from architectural data which estimate population by tracking the quantity of observed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Schirmer.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Red Wing Region in the northern Mississippi valley is best known for the Silvernale phase characterized by extensive but ambiguous evidence of some kind of relationship to Middle Mississippian communities downriver. The last two decades of research here have greatly clarified the nature of Red Wing communities during this phase as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Henry. Casey Barrier. Robin Beck. Timothy Horsley.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated in present-day Collinsville, Illinois, Cahokia Mounds is considered globally as the premier example of precontact American Indian urbanism in North America. However, understandings of Cahokia’s early population density, spatial arrangement, and scale are primarily drawn from relatively small areas within...