Introduction to the DMM-MSU Morton Village Project

Summary

Morton Village and Norris Farms #36 cemetery, located in the central Illinois River valley in Fulton County, Illinois, offer a rare opportunity to investigate migration and conflict with multiple data sets. The cemetery was excavated in the 1980s for highway improvements. Archaeologists from the Dickson Mounds Museum branch of the Illinois State Museum recovered 264 apparent Oneota burials dating to ca. A.D. 1300, and the cemetery is well known for the high level of violence evidenced. The Morton Village site is about 400 m from the cemetery on the same valley-edge ridge complex. Limited excavations in the 1980s provided evidence of both Oneota and Mississippian use of the site. In 2007 DMM and Michigan State University began a long-term effort to more fully understand the village, its relationship to the cemetery, and the nature of Mississippian and Oneota interactions at the site and in the region. Data from excavations, remote sensing, and radiocarbon assays suggest co-habitation by Oneota and Mississippian people at the village in the 1300s, engendered preliminary interpretations of site organization, and fostered questions about the role of ritual and stress in this multicultural population.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Migration and Violence in the Pre-Columbian Mid-Continent   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage