Mississippian (Other Keyword)

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 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 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 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 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 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 Anthony Krus. Edmond Boudreaux III. Charles Cobb. Brad Lieb.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decade, the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) has expanded to include entries on over 100,000 radiocarbon dates from the lower 48 states, serving as a freely accessible database that can help reassess big picture questions involving archaeological chronology. In this paper, we use data from CARD to contextualize the timing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Whyte.

Animal remains from three late prehistoric Pisgah phase sites in mountainous western North Carolina are described and compared. The sites include a mound (Garden Creek Mound No.1) and adjacent village, and a village with no mound (the Cane River Middle School site). Deer, black bear, turkey, and box turtle remains dominate all three assemblages. Three large bones from the mound, previously reported as bones of Bison, are definitively Elk. Whole large mammal bones, recovered almost exclusively...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Wayne D. Roberts.

"The South Carolina Department of Highways and Public Transportation has proposed to replace the bridge on a downstream location of Shaws Creek on South Carolina Route 302/4 (Figure 1). The roadway on the eastern side of the creek will be relocated approximately 100 feet to the south to improve the curve on the existing highway. The roadway on the western side of the creek will be relocated approximately 50 feet to the south."

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brown.

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Focused stylistic analysis over the past 60 years has made clear that graphic depiction of the creative forces became a vehicle of artistic expression for southeastern societies. Between the 1100s and 1400 such expression was nearly ubiquitous by including, without being confined to, pottery surfaces, marine shell, sheet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus. Sarah Baires.

Human engagement with the world includes forging and maintaining relationships with social agents, both visible and invisible. Among Native North Americans, these relationships are simultaneously religious, social, and political. We explore these relationships using data from our 2016 excavations at Cahokia’s CABB (Courtyard Area Between Borrows) Tract, located southeast of Woodhenge and west of the Grand Plaza. The CABB Tract is situated north of two known borrow pits (Fowler’s 5-5 and 5-6) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Schulenburg.

The Fort Ancient Period (AD 1000-1700) saw the introduction of formal villages to the peoples of the Middle Ohio Valley. To help understand the transition to full time sedentary villages, this paper explores how these new villages operated as communities. This allows for an examination of the relationship between communities and villages as concepts and as organizational units. This paper uses the Guard Village site (12D29), an Early Fort Ancient village, as a case study to examine this new form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Nelson. Tamira K. Brennan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With their consistent themes of mantle construction, summit use, burning, and burial, earthen monuments of the Mississippi period conveyed shared meanings between people across wide geographical areas. Exceptions to these broader patterns, however, convey meanings that are steeped in local histories and the communities that create those histories. Drawing on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pauketat.

Even a cursory outline of the pan-continental history of non-domestic circular architecture impels us to relate similar buildings, some of which are water shrines, in the greater Cahokia region to Mesoamerica and the Southwest. In the central Mississippi valley, standardized steam baths, rotundas, and circular platforms make a dramatic appearance in the late eleventh century CE. Explaining the big-historical patterns, of which this appearance is a part, entails theorizing the bundled transfer of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Alveshere.

The Orendorf site (11F107), located on a bluff overlooking the central Illinois River valley, comprises a mound group and a series of Late Woodland and Mississippian habitations. The occupation of the site is characterized by a gradual migration of the community to the west through successive abandonment and rebuilding. Burned structures have been found in all Orendorf settlements, and at least two of the abandonments followed complete burning of all structures. Intensive salvage excavations of...