Mississippian (Other Keyword)
26-50 (256 Records)
This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia may not be the first place to come to mind when thinking about urbanism, but given new thinking and discoveries from a series of major excavations at and around this novel kind of city, views about the causes and consequences of American Indian urbanism are substantially changing. In part this is because...
Cahokia's Mound 34 and the Moorehead Moment (2017)
Cahokia’s Mound 34 was an essential component of the dramatic reorganization of the eastern portion of Cahokia’s site core at the turn of the 13th century. Since the 1990s the Mound 34 Project has included examination of a copper workshop, the exploration of a complex mound construction history, and extended study of Mound 34’s special role in the production and exchange of Southeastern Ceremonial Complex art. The construction of this mound and a series of other low platforms adjacent to the...
Cahokia’s Wandering Supernaturals: What Does It Mean When the Earth Mother Leaves Town (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. A Cahokia female figurine recovered from Ohio in 1935 was recently brought to light. Although this example is made from limestone, it is identical in all other respects to the Cahokian flint clay suite. Additionally, the limestone was sourced to the St. Louis formation, leaving little doubt as to its...
Care Provision for Victims of Violence in Late Prehistoric Tennessee (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Systems of Care in Times of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses care provision for victims of violent trauma during the Mississippian period in the Middle Cumberland Region of Tennessee. Previous research in the region has identified several cases of individuals surviving incidents of intentional violence. However, there has been little attention given to whether healthcare provisioning would...
Center Posts, Thunder Symbolism, and Community Organization at Cahokia Mounds, Illinois (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. North American and Mesoamerican material cultures exhibit similarities that were mistakenly seen by early diffusionists as evidence for northward migrations that catalyzed social complexity among Mississippian period (AD 1050–1500) cultures. Iconographically, assemblages from both geographic areas highlight...
Changes in Resource Use during the Mississippian Period on St. Catherines Island, Georgia (2018)
After more than forty years of zooarchaeological research on prehispanic collections from coastal Georgia, it is clear that people exploited the same suite of estuarine resources from the Late Archaic through the Mississippian periods, despite changing socio-political conditions. However, changes in resource use over time are evident when fine-grained recovery and multiple analytical techniques are applied to vertebrate and invertebrate collections from the Mississippian period on St. Catherines...
Chronology of a Fortified Mississippian Village in the Central Illinois River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geophysical survey and excavations from 2010–2016 at Lawrenz Gun Club (11CS4), a late pre-Columbian village located in the central Illinois River valley in Illinois, identified 10 mounds, a central plaza, and dozens of structures enclosed within a stout 10 hectare bastioned palisade. Nineteen radiocarbon measurements were taken from single entities of wood...
Climate Change, Population Migration, and Ritual Continuity in the Lower Mississippi 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. Tree-ring reconstructions of cool- and warm-season moisture reveal several multi-decadal droughts that impacted the northern Lower Mississippi Valley between AD 1250 and 1450. These chronic droughts contributed to the regional abandonments and population migrations southward out of the Cairo Lowland and adjacent areas...
Climate Change, Subsistence and Warfare during the Late Pre-Columbian Period in the Lower Midwest (2016)
Archaeologists are increasingly turning to climate change as part of their explanatory models of regional and interregional population movement, socio-cultural transformation, and the dissolution of societies in North America. In the lower Midwest, both megadroughts and megafloods have been invoked to explain declining agricultural returns, rises in conflict, and abandonment of major river valleys during the latter half of the Mississippian Period. However, the data sources and indices recording...
Coastal Land Loss and the Future of Louisiana's Archaeological Record (2018)
This presentation examines the effects of land loss to the coastal archaeological record. Impacts observable at different scales (coast-wide, regional, and the individual archaeological site) demonstrate that our ability to understand Louisiana's past may be permanently altered. New directions for future research and community engagement are proposed.
Coastal Louisiana’s Vanishing Archaeological Record: The Last Investigations at the Adams Bay Mounds Site (16PL8) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sea level rise coupled with coastal erosion and subsidence has created an unprecedented land loss crisis for coastal Louisiana. This presentation provides an overview of the effects of land loss to coastal Louisiana’s archaeological record observed at different scales (coast-wide, regional, and the individual archaeological site) and highlights the 2018 summer...
Collective Action, Transport Costs, Watercraft Technologies, and the Engineered Ancestral Landscapes of Southern Florida (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Watercraft technologies have a long history in southern Florida. Archaeologists have recovered large vessels but historic documents also describe the Calusa utilizing complex ships able to transport large numbers of people. In addition to the sizable amount of labor that the people of...
A Combined Bayesian and Zooarchaeological Approach to Understanding Local Histories of Socio-Ecological Adaptation in Southwestern Florida, USA (2019)
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. We present current research at the Pineland Site Complex (8LL33, etc.), a large shell midden-mound site in southwestern Florida occupied by the Calusa from around AD 50 up to historic contact. This well-preserved and well-studied archaeological site provides new insights into the relationship between subsistence practices of...
Combining Geophysics, Photogrammetry, and Archaeological Testing at the Mississippian Pile Mound Site, Upper Cumberland Plateau, Tennessee (2015)
The Pile Mound survey includes magnetometry paired with targeted ground-penetrating radar (GPR), electromagnetic induction (EMI), low-altitude aerial photogrammetry and test excavations over the ca. 6.5 ha site. The EMI survey focused on the mound proper and several distinct magnetometry anomalies to the south and east. The aerial imagery was used to create a photomosaic and digital elevation model (DEM) of the mound and immediate surroundings, and to topographically correct the GPR data. From...
Commensal Politics and Changing Neighborhoods: Preliminary Pottery Analyses of Cahokia’s Spring Lake Tract (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Cahokian sphere, building termination was embedded within broader relational practices tied to politico-religious space and neighborhood dynamics. Drawing from our preliminary analyses of three buildings in the Spring Lake Tract of ‘Downtown’ Cahokia, we argue for an intentional closing down of these buildings using fire and earth. Focusing here on...
Comparative Compositional Analysis of Parkin Phase Red-slipped Pottery and Red Ochre Deposits Using PXRF and Petrography (2017)
Portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) was used in conjunction with petrographic analysis of ceramic thin sections to characterize a sample of red-slipped potsherds from selected late Mississippian sites in northeast Arkansas. Data from this analysis is compared to a similar characterization of two separate hematite rich deposits from the same region. Results are used to evaluate the potential of this type of analysis to distinguish ochre sources from one another and to identify deposits that were...
A Comparison of Late Mississippian Complicated Stamped Designs from the Georgia Coast (2018)
Complicated stamped pottery dominates Late Mississippian (AD 1300-1580) ceramic assemblages on the Georgia coast. The most prolific design is the filfot cross, which is symmetrical and comprised of four basic elements. Although the overall filfot design does not change, the basic elements can differ to create unique combinations that can be used to track filfot variation and paddles. In this poster, I present the methods and results of a complicated- stamped pottery study, which tracked filfot...
Composing the Late Cahokian Countryside: A View from the Rhea Site, St. Clair County, Illinois (2018)
The transition between early (AD 1050-1200) and late Mississippian (AD 1200-1350) in the American Bottom is recognized as a significant moment of socio-political and religious change in the historical trajectory of Cahokia. During this time, relationships between persons, places, and things transformed, resulting in different ways of engaging with both Cahokia and the non-human powers that underwrote it and the broader Mississippian world. With a goal of investigating a Moorehead phase...
A Concealed Landscape: Historic Processes of Landscape Change at Cahokia Mounds, IL (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing geoarchaeological research studying the relationship between urbanism and environmental change at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cahokia Mounds has begun to unravel a pre-contact landscape concealed by historic land-use practices. Archaeological excavations and sediment coring conducted to understand the environmental conditions during the construction and...
Conflict, Migration, and the Transformation of Network Interrelationships in Mississippian West-Central Illinois: A Multilayer Social Network Analysis (2018)
Prior scholarship on intercultural contacts emphasizes interaction spheres, hybridization, technological transfer, or models of exchange as measures for constructing borders and defining societal membership. This presentation assesses how network relationships among complex and smaller-scale societies structured, and were restructured by, migration. Network models of social interaction and social identification are examined both prior to and following a migration process in a uniquely bellicose...
Contextualing Cahokia's Collapse (2016)
The wide scale abandonment of Mississippian towns in the lower Midwest by the beginning of the fifteenth century has been the focus of interest for the last four decades beginning with the work of Stephen Williams. The largest urban center, Cahokia, is one of the earliest to be abandoned before the end of the fourteenth century. Recent evidence has been presented on a massive flood in the twelfth century as perhaps an important factor in this process, that occurs over a century later. This...
Continuity and Change in the Pisgah Built Environment (2016)
Previous studies of Mississippian towns and villages have extensively detailed the various elements of community organization and built environment that reflect the incorporation of widely shared Mississippian ideas and beliefs. How these towns were built and rebuilt over time demonstrates how regional processes of expansion and integration played out at the presumed edge of the Mississippian world. This paper examines the evolving built environment during the Pisgah period in western North...
Cooperation and Coercion: Geography, Ecology, Climate, and Surplus Production in the Rise of the Calusa Kingdom (2018)
The Calusa of southwest Florida were the most complex and powerful society in Florida during the sixteenth century AD. They relied for protein not on agriculture, but on aquatic resources harvested from shallow-water estuaries. Our interdisciplinary team is exploring the evidence for surplus production and intensification against a background of environmental challenges and opportunities. We focus on Mound Key and Pineland, the two largest Calusa towns. We think that cooperative heterarchical...
Creating a Cahokian Community: Rethinking Mississippian Storage Practices (2016)
The procurement, processing, preparation and most importantly here, the storage of food, are inextricably tied to the everyday lived experiences of peoples of the past and cannot be disentangled from larger social, economic, and political processes. Storage pits and structures feature prominently in prior studies of Mississippian households but they are mostly regarded as utilitarian and economic spaces rather than integral to communities. Similarly, previous interpretations of Mississippian...
Creating Community at Singer-Move: Feasting and Craft Production in a Residential Precinct (2018)
During its estimated 400-year history of occupation, Singer-Moye was a focal point of prehistoric settlement and socio-political development in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley of southwestern Georgia (USA). Between A.D. 1300 and 1400, the site was a focus of regional settlement aggregation that included the expansion of the site’s monumental core and the deposition of a dense occupational midden surrounding that core. In 2016 and 2017, excavations at Singer-Moye were focused on...