From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Growing up in Ronan, Montana, within the Flathead Indian Reservation, instilled James D. Keyser with a keen interest in Northern Plains archaeology and anthropology. PhD studies at the University of Oregon expanded the scope of his interests to the Plateau. Both regions have been the focus of his research for the subsequent four decades. Although Keyser’s early publications in the 1970s and early 1980s focused on subsistence and lithics, he increasingly began to focus on his real interests: the iconography of ledger drawings and rock art. By the 1990s Keyser added ethnographic interpretations to this mix. His efforts have yielded numerous sites documented, with detailed symbolic and historical interpretations, creating a body of evidence about Northern Plains and Plateau iconography that rivals the knowledge accumulated in other archaeological subdisciplines. The papers in this session reflect Keyser’s research interests, approaches, and results, in some cases constituting additions to our understandings of the art and iconography in these two regions, in others applying his methods elsewhere, but in all cases emphasizing the significance of research on iconography, art, and the prehistoric past.