Mississippian (Other Keyword)
51-75 (318 Records)
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 Comparative Consideration of the Institutions of Governance of the Native American Polities of Florida (2024)
This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Florida once encompassed a vast landscape of Native American polities prior to and after the arrival of European colonizers. More northern groups in the region relied upon fishing, hunting, and gathering, but also practiced maize agriculture to varying degrees. Further to the south, the vast majority of...
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...
Congolmerate Mining in the Keweenaw (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the inaugural season of the Keweenaw Copper Research Collective (KCRC), excavations at the Delaware Copper Mine in the Keweenaw peninsula conclusively demonstrated pre-contact Indigenous mining in conglomerate rock formations. Archaeologists revealed the conglomerate formation along the Hogan copper vein, recovering banded and expedient hammerstones...
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...
Crafting Bones: An Analysis of a Worked Bone Assemblage from a Mississippian Ceremonial Complex in Northeast Florida (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone has been used as a medium for crafting both tools and decorative items since our earliest ancestors; however, this important component of material culture has often been overlooked, with the few published studies focusing on assemblages from either a utilitarian or burial context. The Mill Cove Complex, located along the St. Johns River near...
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 a Frontier Community: Ceremony and Political Elites in a Middle Appalachian Mississippian Village (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carter Robinson (44LE10) is a Mississippian mound site in use from the mid-14th century to the mid-15th century in the Appalachian Mountains of modern-day Southwest Virginia. This paper examines the roles of potential political elites within the community, first examining the artifact assemblage associated with the only excavated multi-phase structure at...
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...
The Dark Arts: Mississippian Dramatic Delusions and Theatrical Illusions (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Demonstrating one’s spiritual power through dramatic theatrics, based on deceptions and illusions, has long been the purview of ritual practitioners in their efforts to gain, legitimize, and maintain political and social advantages. Exclusive and secretive ritual sodalities, which often form the institutional framework for corporate-based magical...
Deer, Drought, and Warfare: An Isotopic Investigation of Hunting Strategies from the Eleventh through the Fourteenth Centuries in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) (2023)
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...
Detecting the Path: The Usefulness of Lidar in the Upper Central Tombigbee River Valley (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, lidar has been used to reveal the extent and complexity of cultural landscapes in different world areas. The Mississippi period (AD 1000–1550) is poorly understood in the Upper Central Tombigbee River Valley, especially as a broader Mississippian understanding of these settlement data come from Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway...
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...
Diagenesis and Preservation of Pb Isotopes in Ancient Human Tooth Enamel Using Multiple Samples from the Same Tooth (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complications with diagenetic contamination of ancient human tooth enamel is of primary concern for Pb isotopic studies. While conducting a study of a Caddo skull-and-mandible cemetery in southwest Arkansas (in collaboration with the Caddo Nation), it became clear that many samples were contaminated by soil Pb. Additional samples from the same teeth were...
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...