Mississippian (Other Keyword)
201-225 (318 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Museums as institutions have a storied history regarding the presentation of Native American cultures and histories to the public. Much has been done to address this issue, although the topic remains difficult to explain succinctly to those without prior knowledge. Often, the interpretation of artifacts is oversimplified and leads to confusion or...
Native Prairie: The Kankakee Protohistory Project and Ongoing Excavations at the Terminal Prehistoric Middle Grant Creek Site in Northern Illinois (2018)
Archaeologists have long explored the early interactions between Native Americans and Europeans in the Great Lakes region of Eastern North America. In particular, they have prioritized investigating these relationships at late prehistoric sites containing European trade goods. However, this narrow focus has led to neglecting late precontact sites that precede this period and which are essential for fully contextualizing these early interactions. In this presentation, we summarize the second year...
Negotiating Practices at the Emerald Site (11S1): A Case Study of Two Burned Structures (2015)
Located near the Silver Creek in the Illinois uplands of the midcontinent of the United States, the Emerald Site (11S1) in Lebanon, IL is a constructed Mississippian mound center where everyday practices were entangled with the performance of Mississippian religion. Recent excavations at the Emerald Site by Indiana University and the University of Illinois have unearthed high densities of non-domestic structures dating to the Terminal Late Woodland (TLW) Edelhardt (AD 950-1000) and Early...
A Network Approach to Zooarchaeological Datasets (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological datasets are often large, complex, and difficult to visualize and communicate. Many visual aids and summaries often limit the patterns that can be identified and our interpretations of relationships between contexts, species, and environmental information. The most commonly used of these often include bar charts, pie charts,...
Oneota Cuisine: Tradition, Identity, and Community (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food is a persistent symbol of identity, signaling both membership and distinction within communities at multiple scales. A combination of macrobotanical, zooarchaeological, isotopic, and ceramic data are used to make inferences about Oneota culinary practices. This paper examines the way that cuisines connected and divided members of Late Precontact...
Oneota Expansion and Ethnogenesis on the Eastern Great Plains (2018)
The late 1200s and 1300s saw substantial population shifts in the eastern Plains and Midwest. These occurred in the context of profound sociopolitical and demographic changes, particularly the political decline and depopulation of Cahokia, and regional climatic variation, including significant changes in northern hemisphere temperatures and severe regional droughts. Oneota groups expanded into the east-central Great Plains during this time, at the same time that indigenous Plains farmers...
Only Soil Deep: Geophysical Contributions to an Excavation at an Oneota Village in Northwest Iowa (2018)
Data recovery excavations were conducted during 2016-2017 at the Dixon site (13WD8) a large Oneota village located along the Little Sioux River in northwest Iowa. The University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist contracted Megan Stroh, archaeologist at the Sanford Museum and Planetarium, to conduct geophysical surveys before initiation of Phase III excavations. A Geoscan Research FM256 fluxgate gradiometer was employed at three different mitigation locations under both pre- and post-top...
The Organizational Implications of Architecture at Moundville and Cahokia (2017)
What practices generated the largest and most complex Mississippian centers? We examine this issue through an analysis of Mississippian public and ritual architecture from Moundville in west-central Alabama and Cahokia in southwestern Illinois. Politico-religious buildings and associated practices or powers constituted the historical development of both places. Cahokians created a wider variety and more complicated distribution of such buildings than did Moundvillians. We argue that the Cahokian...
Ozark Imagery: Documenting Rock Art in the Arkansas Highlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first published account of Arkansas rock art appeared in the late nineteenth century when public museums and other institutions relied on private citizens as well as professional scholars to report all manner of scientific facts and discoveries. The Arkansas state site files include reports of rock art...
A Paleoethnobotanical Comparison of Mortuary and Village Langford Tradition Sites in Northern Illinois (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last 40 years have seen increasing methodological sophistication providing for a relatively nuanced understanding of food technology and resource use. Paleoethnobotany is one way to observe the diversity of plant use among Langford site occupants. Using standard paleoethnobotanical practices, plant macroremains from the Robinson Reserve Site (11CK2)...
Paleoseismology at Old Town Ridge (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 fall of 2018 personnel from the Arkansas Archeological Survey, University of Memphis, and the Natural and Cultural Resources Services conducted investigations at Old Town Ridge (3CG41) to determine if Mississippian period Native Americans abandoned the site circa A.D.1400 because of earthquake activity. Excavation of Trench A exposed four sediment...
PHASE I ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF APPROXIMATELY 161 ACRES AT THE SAGE MILL INDUSTRIAL PARK AIKEN COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA (2012)
"S&ME, Inc. (S&ME), on behalf of the Economic Development Partnership, has completed a Phase I archaeological survey of approximately 161 acres at the Sage Mill Industrial Park in Aiken County, South Carolina (Figures 1 and 2). Fieldwork for the project was conducted intermittently from May 21 through June 14, 2012. This work was done in anticipation of compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, and was conducted in general accordance with S&ME...
Phased Out: The Distinctive Identities of Late Mississippian Communities in Eastern Tennessee (2015)
An often-made presumption is that an archaeological phase (defined mainly by pottery or projectile point types) represents a social group with shared identity. This perspective can conceal other types of cultural variation and practices that may be more significant for presenting and representing group identity. The broadly–defined Dallas Phase in the Upper Tennessee Valley provides a late Mississippian-period example of this type of presumption. While there are broad similarities in pottery...
Pilgrimage Centers, Infrastructure, and Cahokian Politics (2015)
Archaeological and historical evidence suggests that pilgrimage centers were vital to the infrastructure, politics, and religions of cities and civilizations throughout the ancient world. The pre-Columbian city of Cahokia was no different. In this paper, I argue that the Emerald site, a major pilgrimage center east of Cahokia, was integral to the formation of a new political-religious order circa A.D. 1050. Ceramic, architectural, and botanical data show that large groups periodically gathered...
Pipe Assemblages of St. Catherines Island, GA (2018)
Excavations over the last four decades on St. Catherines Island, GA have recovered over 200 pipe fragments and a dozen nearly complete pipes. These pipes are both historic and native made which cover a wide range of sites through occupational periods on the island. In this paper, I will present the results of recent and previous analyses and consolidate this information to explore the island-wide distribution and temporal trends of pipes on St. Catherines Island. In addition I will examine...
Pisgah Archaeology in the Upper Reaches of the Tennessee Valley (2017)
Pisgah in upper East Tennessee appears to represent fluid, adaptable communities of practice in the upper reaches of the Tennessee Valley. It reflects various but limited elements of Mississippianization. Pisgah also appears to have crosscut ethnic boundaries. On the Holston, it was associated with the Dallas archaeological culture, while on the Nolichucky and Watauga, it was associated with Qualla (Cherokee) and also perhaps proto-Catawban wares. Pisgah in the region does not appear to have...
Plants Are Friends and Food: Reinterpreting Fort Ancient Plant Use through Indigenous Ontologies and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoethnobotanical analyses over the past several decades have shed light on the subsistence practices, agricultural strategies, and environmental interactions of members of the Fort Ancient culture, an Indigenous society that thrived in the Ohio Valley from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. Largely absent from these conversations,...
Preliminary Data for Developing a Fine-Scale Model of Socioecological Change on Ossabaw Island, Georgia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research project examines the history of human-environment interaction on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Archaeological collections for Woodland (ca. 1000 BC–AD 1000) and Mississippian period (ca. AD 1000–1700) occupations of the island are combined with environmental data synthesized from the analysis of sediment cores taken from five freshwater ponds on...
Preliminary Results from Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of Pit Features at the Morton Village Site (11F2), Central Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of paleoethnobotanical analysis of flotation samples from 38 external pit features from the Morton Village Site (11F2), located in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV). Previous research at Morton Village provides strong evidence that the village was occupied contemporaneously by both Mississippian and Oneota...
Preliminary Results of 2022 Excavations at Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will provide an overview of the 2022 excavations at Spiro by the University of Oklahoma field school, which involved work at two areas of the site. The poster will discuss the geophysics results that lead to excavating these areas, the preliminary results from the 2022 excavations, our preliminary interpretations that the two areas represent...
Prelude to the Protohistoric: Late Mississippian Settlement Dynamics in the Central and Upper Tombigbee River Drainage (2018)
This paper examines settlement patterns of the late pre-Contact era (1300-1500 C.E.) in the central and upper Tombigbee River, with a focus on the Blackland Prairie portion. Mississippian and Protohistoric settlement strategies and chronologies are overviewed with an eye toward understanding the coalescence of Contact-era polities and the abandonment of the Tombigbee floodplain. Climatological, sociopolitical, and demographic factors are evaluated. Decentralization as a bottom-up response to...
Principles of Open Government Archaeology: Lessons from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (2018)
American archaeology is conducted under cultural resources protection laws, but how does archaeology meet the challenge of openness? The past decade saw development of the "open government" digital information paradigm for public availability of information that underpins the functions of governance. Open government data provide a base for the interested public to offer expertise in aspects of necessary analyses, and to derive further public value from reuse of government data in novel ways. The...
Production Matters: Organic Residue and Iconographic Evidence for Late Precolumbian Datura Making in the Central Arkansas River Valley (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. Recent absorbed residue studies have confirmed that ceramic and shell containers were used for consuming Datura in precolumbian times. Until now, no one has identified what tools precolumbian people used to produce a concentrated hallucinogenic concoction. In this study, we used mass spectrometry to...
A Provenance and Stylistic Study of Formative Caddo Vessels: Evidence for Specialized Ritual Craft Production and Long-Distance Exchange (2018)
Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis is used to determine whether Formative Caddo finewares (A.D. 850 -1150) were made locally in the Arkansas River Basin or produced by their Gulf Coastal Plain neighbors to the south. The preliminary INAA results, in concert with a stylistic study that indicates very few potters had the knowledge and skill to produce them, show that Formative Caddo finewares were made in the southern Caddo region and exported north to Arkansas River Basin mound centers for...
Purification Ritual and the Creation of Place in the Mississippian Southeast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the indigenous societies of the Eastern Woodlands shared ways of life, they also differed in many important ways so that we cannot view them as a single culture. Even where material cultures and iconography appear to have been shared across great distances and over significant periods of time, the meanings and practices...