Mississippian (Other Keyword)
101-125 (256 Records)
The Upper Mississippian (A.D. 1400-1500) Hoxie Farm site is one of the best documented late prehistoric sites in Cook County, Illinois. In 1953, Elaine Bluhm and David Wenner from the Field Museum of Natural History organized a volunteer crew of professional and avocational archaeologists to salvage portions of the site in advance of construction of the first interstate highway (I-80) in Illinois. In 2000-2003, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) conducted additional excavations at...
Identifying Potting Traditions from the Nashville Basin through Ceramic Petrography (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to investigate ceramic manufacturing in the Nashville Basin of Tennessee during the Mississippian period (AD 1000–1500) at the macroscopic and microscopic levels. Our vessel lot and petrographic studies analyze 73 shell-tempered pottery sherds from seven Middle Cumberland archaeological sites. We...
Immigration and Transformation: Local Community Response to the Abandonment of a Neighboring Region (2018)
Following the abandonment of the Middle Savannah River Valley at the end of the 14th century, communities on the neighboring Georgia Coast adopted a new settlement system. At the scale of the region, this appears as a dispersal of settlement and an increase in size of the largest population centers that had previously existed. This paper presents the results of the first systematic intra-community survey of a large site on the Georgia Coast. Results show how residents of the site spatially...
In the Morning House: The Redhorn Cycle Depicted in Rock Art from Kentucky (2018)
This presentation reports on a new rock art site from Kentucky, brought to the authors' attention by local citizens. Inside a large sandstone rockshelter, more than a dozen black pictographs show several anthropomorphic characters. These images bear distinctive features and regalia associated with the "Redhorn Cycle" hero narrative reported by Paul Radin in 1948 from his ethnographic work among the Ho-Chunk. The rock art from this "Morning House" strongly resembles well-known Mississippian...
Information Exchange in the Postclassic Oikoumene:a view from midcontinental North America. (2017)
Several years ago Steve Lekson and I proposed a Postclassic Oikoumene stretching from Mesoamerica through the Southwest and into midcontinental North America. A frequent question has been how such a "known world" could have been created in the absence of long-distance trade and transportation systems. In this paper I explore how information was exchanged among the peoples of midcontinental North America in the late prehistoric and early historic periods. I examine how hunters and gatherers serve...
The Inglehame Farm Site (40WM342): A Preliminary Assessment of Mississippian Settlement in the Little Harpeth River Watershed, Tennessee (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initial grading activity in 2003 for a proposed cul-de-sac within the Inglehame Farm subdivision in northern Williamson County uncovered several Mississippian period stone-box graves. Subsequent archaeological investigations in 2004 recorded structures, refuse-filled pits, and additional stone-box graves associated with an intact Mississippian period village. ...
Introduction to the DMM-MSU Morton Village Project (2015)
Morton Village and Norris Farms #36 cemetery, located in the central Illinois River valley in Fulton County, Illinois, offer a rare opportunity to investigate migration and conflict with multiple data sets. The cemetery was excavated in the 1980s for highway improvements. Archaeologists from the Dickson Mounds Museum branch of the Illinois State Museum recovered 264 apparent Oneota burials dating to ca. A.D. 1300, and the cemetery is well known for the high level of violence evidenced. The...
Investigating Mississippian Site Layout and Architecture in Northeast Arkansas (2016)
In June 2015, the Arkansas Archeological Society Training Program was held at the Richards Bridge site. This Parkin phase village lies along the Tyronza River and was contemporaneous with the Parkin site, located about 16 km away. Geophysical studies revealed well-preserved structure floors at Richards Bridge and four of these were chosen for excavation to see if their construction was identical to those at other Parkin phase sites. A search for fortifications revealed a wooden palisade, but no...
Investigation of biological relationships at the Late Woodland/ Mississippian transition in the northern Mississippian hinterlands (2015)
The Mississippian period is exceptional for the fast and wide ranging influence it had on the mid-continent. Processes behind the Mississippianization of the Midwest are often derived from explanations of trade or religion as inferred from the presence of material culture and site organization. It is unknown to what level direct contact occurred. Biological distance investigation using odontometrics and dental discrete trait analysis was conducted on individuals from Late Woodland and...
An Isotopic Assessment of Late Prehistoric Interregional Warfare in the Southcentral US (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a great need to develop better methods to identify and quantify warfare when it occurs without accompanying written documentation, and to consider alternative explanations of data. This study tests if late-prehistoric Caddo communities in southwest Arkansas were committing large-scale acts of violence against neighboring regions. Concurrent...
Just a Grog Sherd Livin’ in a Shell World: Mississippian Microhistories of Practice in Ceramic Production (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carbonized shell temper has traditionally been seen as one of the defining hallmarks of Mississippian Period societies in the Midwestern and Southeastern US. The Lower Mississippi River Alluvial Survey (Phillips, Ford, and Griffin 1951) solidified the importance of shell temper in distinguishing Mississippian Period sites and occupation levels from earlier...
Landscapes of Mississippian Rock Art in the Southeast (2016)
Prehistoric rock art has been relatively unknown in the American Southeast until the past few decades. In the 1970's Wellman's catalog of North American rock art contained a handful of sites east of the Mississippi River; today there are hundreds of sites recorded for Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and areas east of the Appalachian Mountains. The great majority of these sites probably date to the Late Prehistoric period, and there are clear regional variations in how rock art was...
Late Holocene Human Population Dynamics in Eastern North America: Lessons from Site and Artifact Records in DINAA and Beyond (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Population trends in Eastern North America are explored using the incidence and distribution of diagnostic artifacts and components, using continental scale datasets like DINAA and PIDBA, and as developed by researchers at the locality, state, or regional level. Such research has a long history in the...
Late Pre-Columbian Craft and Community at the Weeden Island Site (8Pi1) (2018)
In the past, as in the present, political-economic relationships occur at multiple social scales: for instance, we recognize regional relationships of dominance or tribute, degrees of dependence or rivalry between trading partner communities, and patterns of collaboration or competition between neighboring households. Enduring inequalities may become established at any of these levels at different times. This paper will discuss the local organization of residential communities in the context of...
Late Precolumbian Subsistence Change, Socio-political Transformation, and Ethnogenesis in the Upper Illinois River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Migration and Climate Change: The Spread of Mississippian Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Post-AD 1000 was a time of tremendous change in the Upper Illinois River valley. The Terminal Late Woodland groups in the region were bordered on the south by emergent Mississippian petty chiefdoms of the Central Illinois River valley, on the north by Oneota and Mississippian societies, and on the east by Fort Ancient...
Lawrenz Rising: Preliminary Assessment of a Site Development Chronology for a Mississippian Village in West-Central Illinois (2016)
Recent investigations at Lawrenz Gun Club (11Cs4), a palisaded Mississippian village and earthwork complex in the central Illinois River valley, highlight the importance of integrating landscape-scaled geophysical survey with site formation processes to develop chronologies derived from diverse archaeological and geoarchaeological investigations. A comprehensive geophysical survey of the fortified village complex and surrounding landscape revealed extensive habitation beyond the site palisade....
Let Them Eat Corn: Using Stable Isotopes to Explore Turkey Management in the Mississippian Period Southeast (2018)
The eastern wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo sylvestris) is a well documented resource for Native Americans in the Southeastern United States. Recent research suggests that turkeys may have been managed by Mississippian period people in Middle Tennessee as opposed to being hunted solely in the wild. These conclusions are based on a combination of ethnographic sources, osteometric data, and other non-osseous evidence. As a part of my thesis, I extracted collagen from 12 prehistoric turkey...
Life and Adaptation during the Little Ice Age in Midwestern Agricultural Villages: Evidence through Stable Isotopes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Grant Creek archaeological site, located in northeastern Illinois, was a prehistoric village occupied in the early seventeenth century, during one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age. Despite this, the site was home to up to 200 inhabitants for around a decade and showed signs of impressive maize cultivation and storage to feed the...
Life During Wartime: Children, Violence, and Security at Morton Village (2017)
Children are not immune to the violence of war. They can be incidental victims, prime targets, active participants, beneficiaries of fierce protection, or the recipients of warfare-related symbolic action. Though not subject to the same high rates of violent trauma as their adult counterparts, the available osteological data show that a small number of children interred in the late prehistoric Norris Farms #36 cemetery in Fulton County, Illinois did suffer traumatic injuries, both fatal and...
Life in a Mississippian Warscape; Violence and Materiality at the Common Field Site (2016)
Analyses and interpretations of Mississippian Period warfare have typically been couched in evolutionary theoretical frameworks that down play, dismiss, or ignore the impacts of endemic violence on the lived experiences of past peoples. Carolyn Nordstrom (1997) advocates the telling of "a different kind of war story," one that focuses on human experiences, tragedies, and creativity during periods of political and social upheaval and violence. In this presentation, I discuss a framework for...
Life on the Margins: Eastern Oklahoma’s Arkansas Drainage between 1300 and 1500 CE (2018)
Beginning around 1100 CE, residents of the eastern Oklahoma Arkansas River drainage built mounds, shared elaborate mortuary rituals, and on some level participated in a maize-based agricultural system. These aspects of the broader Mississippian pattern were centered at Spiro Mounds. Beginning in 1300 CE, people began abandoning the mound sites on the margins of the Southern Plains. As climate conditions worsened in the fifteenth century, the residents of the Arkansas drainage adopted Plains...
Litter Burials from Spiro’s Great Mortuary Reconsidered (2016)
Artifact color has both chronological and symbolic significance at Spiroan burial sites in the Arkansas River drainage of eastern Oklahoma. In this paper, we examine litter burials from the Great Mortuary and the Brown mound at Spiro. Ethnohistoric descriptions are used to suggest color symbolism in Spiroan ritual displays. These data are compared with color usage in earlier burials at Spiro and mounds elsewhere in the drainage. We wish to determine whether the Great Mortuary was the culmination...
Living Symbols from a Mythic Landscape: An Exegesis of the Apalachee Ballgame Story and Placemaking in Northwest Florida (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dr. Kent F. Reilly and many of the scholars associated with the Mississippian Iconography Workshop have used ethnography and folklore to support interpretations about ritual and cosmology. This talk discusses how ancient landscapes can, in turn, inform folklore, ritual communication, and iconography....
The Location of the Historic Natchez Villages, Revisited (2018)
In the 1720s the Natchez nation, as described in contemporary French accounts, consisted of at least six towns: Grand, Farine, Pomme, Tioux, Grigra, and Jenzenaque. Building on the work of Andrew Albrecht, Ian Brown, and James Barnett, and taking into account eighteenth-century manuscript maps that have recently come to light, I re-examine the evidence for the nature of these towns and where they were located on the modern landscape. Apparent inconsistencies between narrative accounts and maps...
Looking for Evidence of Corn Processing (Nixtamalization) at Angel Mounds (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian peoples (circa eleventh–fourteenth centuries CE) in the midwestern and southeastern United States have long been proven to be and defined by their maize agricultural practices. Due to the nutritional deficiencies of subsisting solely on maize as a crop when unprocessed, researchers have linked all maize...