Mississippian (Other Keyword)
51-75 (256 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between garden hunting and food security in the Central Illinois River Valley, an area plagued by endemic warfare and drought during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Located ~100 km north of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian polity in North America, the CIRV was composed of smaller settlements that...
Determining village extent and layout utilizing geophysical survey and excavation at the Mississippian site of Cane River, North Carolina (2015)
Geophysical techniques can help to clarify the extent of a site and show spatial relationships between structures, therefore guiding research and excavation strategies. When monuments and larger structural elements are absent, feature density can be a reliable proxy for occupation areas and village boundaries. Utilizing a combination of magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar survey at the Cane River site in North Carolina, we were able to locate borrow pits, storage pits, structures, and...
Dietary and Environmental Implications of Animal Use in the Okeechobee Basin Area of Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In order to gain a better understanding of the faunal diet composition of Native Americans in south-central Florida, an examination was conducted to determine which types of animals appeared most frequently within tree island assemblages. Of the faunal remains examined from a 2016 excavation, all were identified to at least an animal’s taxonomic order,...
Discovering Buried Pasts: Illinois Transportation Archaeology and the Rediscovery of America's First Native City (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Byways to the Past: An American Highway Archaeology Symposium" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology and transportation share a 60-year partnership in Illinois during which large-scale approaches to data recovery have become standard practices. These practices were recently employed to expose 28.5 acres of a precolumbian mound complex that is an integral part of Greater Cahokia. Investigations at East St Louis...
The Disintegration of Style and Memory: Mound 3 Assemblages at Lake Jackson (2021)
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. At the 75th annual meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, Claudine Payne proposed that Lake Jackson’s Mound 3 served as a repository for ritual heirlooms that could no longer be used in the manners their creators intended. This paper revives her hypothesis to examine the role of this archaeological context at the...
Documenting the Crescent Hills Quarry Complex, Missouri (2018)
Presently, no detailed distribution map of the full scope of prehistoric procurement activities in the Crescent Hills area exists. The Crescent Hills area near St. Louis, Missouri is synonymous with high-quality Burlington chert. This paper presents data gathered from a preliminary survey of procurement activity preserved in the Tyson Research Center. The spatial data within a Geographic Information System allows researchers to study the relationship between geologic context, occurrence, and...
The Downstream Effects of Abandonment: Immigration and Transformation on the 14th Century Georgia Coast, USA (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By 1390 CE, the Mississippian chiefdoms of the Savannah River Valley (SRV) had been depopulated. Settlement and radiocarbon evidence suggest that the former residents of the SRV spread to neighboring regions. On the Georgia Coast, immigrants arrived into a rapidly changing context. Settlement expansion meant the establishment of new locales, occupied for the...
Drought, Diet, Demography, and Diaspora during the Mississippian Period: A View from the Central 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. For decades archaeologists have conjectured about the impacts of climate change on the distribution of Mississippian and related pre-Columbian populations in midcontinental North America. Until recently, climatological reconstructions were coarse grained and lacked the temporal and spatial resolution to link in any...
Early Oneota Longhouses in Southeastern Wisconsin (2018)
Since 1998, archaeologists from UW-Milwaukee have conducted long-term, systematic excavations at the 12th-15th century Crescent Bay Hunt Club site (47JE0904). The Crescent Bay Hunt Club site is unique among early Oneota sites because of the three distinct forms of structures discovered there. This paper focuses on longhouses: portions of at least three longhouses have been recovered from the site. Evidence suggests that these longhouses are at least two hundred years older than previously dated...
Elemental and Isotopic Geochemistry to Source Shell-Tempered Ceramics – Late Woodland and Mississippian Contexts in the Yazoo Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sourcing shell-tempered ceramics using compositional analyses has revealed to be challenging, if not impossible in some contexts. Recent pilot studies have shown that freshwater mussel shells from archaeological sites located in different drainages in Eastern and Southeastern United States display different elemental compositions. The present research further...
Elements of Cahokian Neighborhoods (2015)
American Indian neighborhoods were very much under construction during the late-eleventh century at Cahokia. A social order that transcends pre-Mississippian village life may now be defined based on large-scale excavations at East St. Louis and Cahokia proper. Architectural patterns and craft production debris within the greater central complex indicate possible religious if not political or ethnic divisions that did not form organically. The central problems of a Mississippian analysis,...
Elucidating Fort Walton in Florida: Chronology and Mound Construction at the Lake Jackson Site (2016)
Along the periphery of the Mississippian Art and Ceremonial Complex, the Lake Jackson site existed as a multi-mound ceremonial center whose material contents included objects bearing widespread symbols connected with complex traditions in the long-lived history of Native American iconography and ceremonialism. This paper investigates the occupation chronology of the site through an analysis of its ceramic assemblage and artifact proveniences with a particular focus on Mound 5, a...
Environment, Climate, and Mississippian Origins in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Mississippi River Delta (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. The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) and Mississippi River Delta (MRD) are dramatically impacted by long-term and seasonal fluctuations in water levels, storm cycles, and flooding. In both regions, unpredictable storm events, upstream changes in water flow, and increased water salinity (as well as a host of other factors)...
Establishing Mississippian Potting Communities at the Wickliffe Mounds Site, Kentucky (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pottery vessels at the Wickliffe Mounds site, a Mississippian village located in Ballard County, Kentucky, can be used as a representative sample to examine the ceramic production techniques and choices used within the Ohio-Mississippi River confluence region. This paper uses both visual and quantitative...
Establishing Provenance and Population Movements of the Vacant Quarter Phenomenon through Ceramic Traditions (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Vacant Quarter is a phenomenon that involved the movement of hundreds, possibly thousands, of sedentary communities in mid-continental North America during the Mississippian period (~AD 1450–1550). Many of the details surrounding this phenomenon are still debated. This study narrows in on two subregions of the...
The Everyday of the Hominy Foodway: Changing Lifeways During Early Moundville (2016)
Between A.D. 1120-1260 in the Black Warrior River valley of west-central Alabama, a Mississippian identity first began to take shape that ultimately led to the materialization of the civic-ceremonial center of Moundville. While traditional models hold that feasting played an important role in this process, in this presentation, I propose that the adoption of an ancestral hominy foodway during this formative period restructured everyday household activities, seasonal procurement strategies, and...
Evidence for Ridge and Furrow Agriculture at Angel Mounds in Southern Indiana (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. Evidence of agriculture during the Mississippian period in the Midwest derives largely from the identification and analysis of cultivar macrobotanicals from refuse contexts. However, research that investigates how and where crops were grown on Midwestern sites is scant. As a result, few sites have been identified that...
Evidence of Heirlooming at Moundville (2016)
This paper examines evidence of heirlooming at Moundville, a major Mississippian center located in west central Alabama. This evidence was discovered while analyzing pottery engraved in Moundville's Hemphill style. The Hemphill Style (ca. AD 1325-1450) is Moundville's local representational art style including such motifs as winged serpents, raptors, crested birds, paired tails, hand and eye designs, scalps, skulls, and forearm bones.
Excavation of a Burned Middle Mississippian House at the Cummings Site, Bartow County, Georgia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations by Kennesaw State University Field Schools completely excavated a 13th century residential structure at the Cummings site, a small community two kilometers downriver from the Etowah site. Dating to the Early Wilbanks phase (AD 1250-1325), that newly established community was part of the return of people to Etowah and the site’s ascent...
Experimental Use of 3-D Data to Predict the Risk of Slumping at Monks Mound, Cahokia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monks Mound is the largest prehistoric mound north of Mexico, and is arguably the Cahokia World Heritage Site’s most dramatic monument. Major slumps that occurred in 2007 did significant damage to the mound. Repair of the slumped area revealed a complex stratigraphy, multiple features, and evidence for previous prehistoric and historic slumps. Mounds, like...
Exploring Community Creation at the Mississippian site of Etowah (9Br1) (2015)
Etowah was the locus of a prehistoric community for 550 years. After it’s founding the site was abandoned and re-occupied twice, meaning Etowah’s communities were created three separate times. Periods of abandonment create points in the life of a community where it is possible to question and modify local tradition. Re-establishment after abandonment can lead to novel ways of casting identity, social relations, and history. Data collected at Etowah and the wider region reveal this process and...
Exploring Kinship Ties through Mortuary Practice at Cahokia’s Ridge-top Mounds (2019)
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. Kinship, roughly defined, is a web of social relationships forming a central part of human lives. Kinship contextualizes patterns of behavior, familial ties, socialization, parenting, and relationships that extend beyond biological affinity. In this paper I explore how kinship ties (fictive or...
Exploring Perforated Earspools of the Arkansas 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. Earspools dating from the Mississippi Period are found throughout the Southeast region of North America. Some of these artifacts were recovered from sites in the Arkansas and Red River Valley regions, and share similarities with those from other Mississippian sites in form, material type, size, and decorative motifs. The variability suggests that not all...
Farming, Warfare, Drought, and Soil Fertility in the Mississippian Central Illinois River Valley: Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes on Maize Kernels from Five Sites Spanning Two Centuries (2018)
We report on carbon and nitrogen isotope results from a total of 60 maize kernels from five sequentially-occupied sites in the Central Illinois River Valley that span the Mississippian period (AD 1100-1300). The sites span: (1) the onset of and intensification of warfare in the region; and (2) a long period of drought that eventually gave way to wetter conditions during the last 50 years of the sequence. C13 and N15 isotope values from these maize kernels provide independent support for the...
Feasting and Social Integration: Connecting Faunal Use and Consumption from the Nuclear Core of a Mississippian Site (Singer-Moye 9SW2) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food is not only a means of nutrition and nourishment but also a way to bring people together, share experiences, and create memories. Some of the ways food is most noted is through special events or circumstances when large meals or atypical foods are used to bring groups of people together. Feasts, however, can serve many purposes. It is not...