Mississippian (Other Keyword)
251-275 (318 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While archaeologists are quite good at communicating to each other through various professional outlets, we have not been particularly good at conveying our core findings and lessons for wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the Midwest United States. While there are likely many...
Shark Teeth Research Opportunities Broadened by Innovations in Materials Science (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of sharks in the archaeological record provides plentiful research opportunities within the lenses of social zooarchaeology and materials science. The convergence of these two themes when analyzing artifact shark teeth presents unique advantages and challenges to understanding how past people perceived sharks and made use of their physical...
Shell Bead Production at a Southern Appalachian Mississippian Frontier (2017)
Frontier areas differ from non-frontier areas in multiple ways; one is by a more intense degree of interaction with other cultures. To successfully settle a frontier area, frontier groups must not just interact but also socially integrate with other groups. Craft production is one way social integration occurs. At the Middle Mississippian-period Carter Robinson site, there is evidence for the production of shell beads. This paper presents this evidence, which includes all stages of shell bead...
Shellfishery Management and the Socioecology of Community-Based Sustainability (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do human settlements grow sustainably? What is the capacity of both our institutions and our local ecologies to mediate the pressures of demographic growth? Nowhere are these questions and challenges more critical today than in coastal zones, where populations grow exponentially. For millennia, Indigenous populations across the globe have...
Shells, Drills, and Lithic Tools: Indirect Evidence of Textile Production at a Mississippian Frontier (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textiles served as symbols of status and ideological belief systems in Southeastern Mississippian chiefdoms. They also were markers of identity. Remains of fabric are not often found in the Southeast, due to poor preservation in the region. Those that have been analyzed reveal that a range of colors...
A Social Network Exploration of Models of Social Space and Community Organization at Moundville (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Moundville is one of the largest Mississippian sites in North America consisting of at least 29 earthen mounds positioned around an open plaza. Numerous researchers have remarked on the regularized spatial layout of the site, arguing that the formal arrangement of the mounds and plaza reflect social...
Social Relationships and Connections from the Mississippi Valley to the Great Lakes during the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Mississippianization” has been used by archaeologists to explain the appearance of shell-temper and certain decorative ceramic motifs found in the northern Prairie Peninsula during and after the eleventh century. These ceramic attributes are supposed symbols of an expanding Cahokian worldview, sent north by a diffusionist wave of...
Sociopolitical Networks and the Transformation of Southern Appalachian Societies, A.D. 700-1400 (2017)
This paper investigates how processes of societal transformation, including the emergence of sociopolitical hierarchies and socioeconomic inequalities, are shaped by the scale and structure of social networks. Across Southern Appalachia, during more than seven centuries of population growth and sociopolitical change, two distinct regional political traditions emerged in what are today northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee. Employing data on social signaling practices as materialized in ceramic...
Sourcing Pensacola Communities of Practice: NAA of Mississippian Pottery on the Northern Gulf of Mexico Coast (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pensacola variant of the northern Gulf of Mexico Coast was well connected to interior Mississippian groups, yet Pensacola lifeways do not fit broader patterns of subsistence, settlement, and political organization commonly thought of as hallmarks of Mississippian societies. Throughout the Pensacola culture area, people created hybrid cultures by...
Space and Place in Mississippian Societies; Lynne Goldstein’s Impact on the Study of Aztalan and Cahokia Landscapes (2018)
Lynne Goldstein’s contribution to our understanding of Mississippian societies in the Midwest is still an ongoing endeavor. Her research with its roots in the greater Cahokia area and within a few years at Aztalan has an important impact on my own efforts. Her dissertation research into the Mississippian cemeteries, Schild and Moss, was methodologically rigorous and provided insights into the manner in which non-elite cemeteries some 100 km north of Cahokia were spatially and socially...
Spatial, Architectural, and Economic Dimensions of Neighborhoods: A Comparison of Three Large Mississippian Sites in Indiana (2016)
The vast majority of Mississippian research in southwestern Indiana has focused on Angel Mounds, specifically the extensive excavations of the Eastern Village and analysis of decorated ceramics. Recently, a site wide magnetometry survey and large scale analysis of Mississippian Plain Pottery from the Angel site were completed by the first and second author of this paper. Additionally, recent magnetometry and excavations at the Stephan-Steinkamp site, the second largest Angel phase site in the...
The Spiro Panoply: An Examination, Structural Analysis, and Hypothetical Re-creation of Middle Mississippian Defensive Equipment and Weapon Systems (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the recognition that violence, warfare, and trophy display within the North American Southeast was endemic during the Mississippian Cultural Period, an in-depth analysis of the equipment used by warring groups is now necessary. By examining the “Conquering Warrior” and associated human effigy pipes from the Great Mortuary at Spiro Mounds and...
Stable-Isotope Analysis and Dental Micro-Wear Texture Analysis of Domestic Dogs from the Tennessee River Valley (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. In the Southeastern United States, the relationship between indigenous peoples and their domestic dogs is known to be long and complicated. Dog burials and dog skeletal remains are ubiquitous from archaeological sites in the region from as early as 7,000 years ago through the Historic Period. A previous paleopathology study of...
Standardization and Variability of Decorated and Undecorated Pottery Vessels from Angel Mounds, Indiana (2015)
At the Mississippian site of Angel Mounds (12Vg1), people crafted both plain, utilitarian-appearing vessels, and a variety of highly decorated wares, including Negative Painted plates that are frequently associated with the site. Previous researchers have suggested that Negative Painted vessels were made by ceramic or ritual specialists, who were perhaps sponsored by a chief or other elite individual. These decorated vessels are indeed rare at Angel Mounds, but no evidence has been found to...
Star Bridge: A Late 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. The late pre-Columbian period in the central Illinois River valley (CIRV) is demarcated by the development of large, oftentimes fortified Mississippian towns, farming hamlets, extensive trade networks, and shifting political alliances between AD 1050 and 1400. The fission and fusion of local polities ceased with abrupt abandonment of the CIRV by AD 1450 as...
The State of the (Conch) Republic: Renewed Archaeology in the Imperiled Florida Keys (2018)
Although the Florida Keys’ archaeological record famously made possible the seriation of south Florida pre-Columbian ceramic styles in 1949, this 356 km2 archipelago has been largely ignored by academic archaeologists ever since. Today, Keys archaeological sites and historical properties are plagued by tourism-related development, a multi-faceted issue that is exacerbated by the compounding effects of weekly tidal erosion and seasonal tropical storms. Consequently, an untold number of sites have...
Stephen Williams and The Vacant Quarter Phenomenon (2018)
Stephen Williams proposed the idea of a Vacant Quarter based on the abandonment of numerous Mississippian polities throughout much of the Midsouth and Midwest. The unprecedented, large-scale depopulation of an approximately 130,000 square kilometer area has been linked with population movements as well as interpolity conflict. By taking a dendroclimatological approach we evaluate the role of climate change in this process, while also being cognizant of social processes. We postulate a staggered...
Storytelling in the Creation of Cahokia, a Native American Theater State (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. I have argued that Cahokia might best be understood as the capital of a Native American theater state, which drew people to it and spread its influence not through armies but by attracting followers through theatrical rituals (Zimmermann Holt 2009). In current research I argue that storytelling was primary among those rituals....
A Study of 3D Photogrammetry and Oneota Ceramics (2018)
3D photogrammetry is the process of creating a manipulable 3D model using only photos from a high-resolution camera that are then processed through computer software to extract 3D data and create a wireframe and mesh. This process can be accurate enough to measure a hairline fracture along the surface of prehistoric pottery with .1mm accuracy. Analyze the benefits of such methods, a study was conducted using Oneota ceramic artifacts of the La Crosse, Wisconsin locality that have been curated at...
The Study of Temper and its Wider Implications at the Cahokian Lunsford-Pulcher Site (2015)
Lunsford-Pulcher (11-S-40) is a Mississippian mound center located in the American Bottom, near modern day Dupo, Illinois. To date there has been limited excavation and analysis conducted at this important ceremonial village. For this study, 181 rim sherds from a surface collection by Timothy R. Pauketat and Bobby Pauketat were analyzed and then compared to other nearby Mississippian sites (the Washausen, Peiper, and Morrison sites), with a focus on the differences in temper usage. This paper...
Surviving or Thriving? Reassessing Social Interaction and Warfare Related Food Insecurity at Morton Village (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violent interaction between people of the Oneota and Mississippian traditions in the Central Illinois River Valley in the North American Midcontinent ca. 1300–1400 CE at Norris Farms #36 is a clear example of intermittent, low-scale warfare. One aspect of initial interpretations of the interaction, based on evidence for raiding of...
Taking High Tech Back to Basics: GIS and the Three Dimensions of Archaeology (2015)
In many ways, the Willey and Phillips’s (1958) Method and Theory in American Archaeology still sets the parameters of how we conceptualize the units of North American archaeological classification. The authors defined three types of units, in theory independently based on time, space, and material content. Integrative units juggled the three dimensions to create local sequences, which then built into larger and larger constructs. Wide use of various dating mechanisms and detailed studies of...
A Tale of Two Mounds: New Chronologies of Mississippian Movements and Mound Building in Southwestern Virginia, USA (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian expansions through the Cumberland Gap into the region has been explained as the seeking of new opportunities for elite lineages with roots to the west, particularly through the development and control of craft production and related exchange relationships on either side of the Appalachian Mountains. However, new chronologies for two primary...
Tallgrass Prairie Archaeological Landscapes Project: Investigating Occupational Histories within a US National Grassland through GIS (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tallgrass Prairie Archaeological Landscapes Project (TPALP) was established to identify the dynamic settlement lifeways within the current boundaries of the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Will County, Illinois. Previous CRM-based projects identified 214 sites spanning the Archaic to Historic periods across 18,094 acres (73.22 km2) of this US...
Taphonomy and Chronology of Mounds A and B at the Quapaw Village of Osotouy (Menard-Hodges Site; 3AR4) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Menard-Hodges (3AR4), also known as the Quapaw village of Osotouy, is a Mississippian site along the Arkansas River in southeastern Arkansas. Professional excavations have yielded French trade goods and various diagnostic artifacts that supports a predominantly Mississippian-to-protohistoric origin. The site also includes several mounds, the largest of which,...