Mississippian (Other Keyword)
26-50 (318 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decade, the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) has expanded to include entries on over 100,000 radiocarbon dates from the lower 48 states, serving as a freely accessible database that can help reassess big picture questions involving archaeological chronology. In this paper, we use data from CARD to contextualize the timing...
Big Meat Feasting in the Pisgah Phase of Western North Carolina. (2017)
Animal remains from three late prehistoric Pisgah phase sites in mountainous western North Carolina are described and compared. The sites include a mound (Garden Creek Mound No.1) and adjacent village, and a village with no mound (the Cane River Middle School site). Deer, black bear, turkey, and box turtle remains dominate all three assemblages. Three large bones from the mound, previously reported as bones of Bison, are definitively Elk. Whole large mammal bones, recovered almost exclusively...
Bioarchaeological Evidence of Occupational Stress and Specialized Task Activity at Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Spiro Mounds was a ceremonial complex with an associated village of artisans and priests. Located on the Arkansas River, a tributary of the Mississippi River, the site is situated in a natural corridor between the Southeast, the Plains, and the Southwestern United States. Long considered a quintessential Mississippian site (AD...
Bridge Replacement on S.C. Route 302/4 at Shaws Creek, ·Aiken County (1986)
"The South Carolina Department of Highways and Public Transportation has proposed to replace the bridge on a downstream location of Shaws Creek on South Carolina Route 302/4 (Figure 1). The roadway on the eastern side of the creek will be relocated approximately 100 feet to the south to improve the curve on the existing highway. The roadway on the western side of the creek will be relocated approximately 50 feet to the south."
A Brief History of Mississippian Period Art Styles in the American Southeast (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. Focused stylistic analysis over the past 60 years has made clear that graphic depiction of the creative forces became a vehicle of artistic expression for southeastern societies. Between the 1100s and 1400 such expression was nearly ubiquitous by including, without being confined to, pottery surfaces, marine shell, sheet...
Building Below the Surface: Earth Moving and Caching at Cahokia’s CABB Tract (2017)
Human engagement with the world includes forging and maintaining relationships with social agents, both visible and invisible. Among Native North Americans, these relationships are simultaneously religious, social, and political. We explore these relationships using data from our 2016 excavations at Cahokia’s CABB (Courtyard Area Between Borrows) Tract, located southeast of Woodhenge and west of the Grand Plaza. The CABB Tract is situated north of two known borrow pits (Fowler’s 5-5 and 5-6) and...
Building Village Communities: Early Fort Ancient Villages in the Ohio Valley (2018)
The Fort Ancient Period (AD 1000-1700) saw the introduction of formal villages to the peoples of the Middle Ohio Valley. To help understand the transition to full time sedentary villages, this paper explores how these new villages operated as communities. This allows for an examination of the relationship between communities and villages as concepts and as organizational units. This paper uses the Guard Village site (12D29), an Early Fort Ancient village, as a case study to examine this new form...
Building, Burying, Tearing Down: The Role of Destruction in Mississippian Mound Building (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With their consistent themes of mantle construction, summit use, burning, and burial, earthen monuments of the Mississippi period conveyed shared meanings between people across wide geographical areas. Exceptions to these broader patterns, however, convey meanings that are steeped in local histories and the communities that create those histories. Drawing on...
Bundled Transfers and Water Shrines:the big-historical implications of a pan-American phenomenon (2017)
Even a cursory outline of the pan-continental history of non-domestic circular architecture impels us to relate similar buildings, some of which are water shrines, in the greater Cahokia region to Mesoamerica and the Southwest. In the central Mississippi valley, standardized steam baths, rotundas, and circular platforms make a dramatic appearance in the late eleventh century CE. Explaining the big-historical patterns, of which this appearance is a part, entails theorizing the bundled transfer of...
Burning Down the House: Evidence for Controlled and Uncontrolled Structure Fires among the Late Woodland and Mississippian Settlements at the Orendorf Site in Fulton County, Illinois (2018)
The Orendorf site (11F107), located on a bluff overlooking the central Illinois River valley, comprises a mound group and a series of Late Woodland and Mississippian habitations. The occupation of the site is characterized by a gradual migration of the community to the west through successive abandonment and rebuilding. Burned structures have been found in all Orendorf settlements, and at least two of the abandonments followed complete burning of all structures. Intensive salvage excavations of...
Cahokia After Dark: Affect, Water, and the Moon (2019)
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...
Caohkia Style Engraved Stone Tablets (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cahokia Birdman Tablet is the iconic example of what defines this artifact category, with engraved graphics on the obverse and crosshatching on the reverse of a rectangular stone tablet. Other tablets from Mississippian contexts have similar combinations or variations of these three features. Some may only exhibit crosshatching on one or both sides....
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...
The Chip-a-Canoe Project: Stone Tools, 40 Volunteers, Over 400 Hours of Labor . . . and It Floats! (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2023, a large group of volunteers engaged in an experimental archaeology project to manufacture a dugout canoe with stone tools. A large tulip poplar was felled with stone axes and the 8,600-pound tree was then transformed with stone axes and adzes into a 1,600-pound, 4 m long dugout. The tree felling and reduction process combined took over...
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 and Environment in Cahokia’s History (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists, particularly in the southeast, have often looked to the environment and climate change to understand the evolution of past societies. Droughts, floods, and environmental degradation have been implicated in the rise and fall of societies, especially Mississippian period societies like the city of Cahokia. Despite calls...
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...