Upper Mississippian Stone Tools and Community Organization

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This research investigates community organization as an approach to understanding the shift from typologically complex to a simpler lithic technology after circa A.D. 500 in the Prairie Peninsula. I compare the lithic practice of Upper Mississippian groups settled in western Wisconsin (A.D. 1400-1700) at the La Crosse locality to that of groups in eastern Wisconsin (A.D. 1100-1450) at the Koshkonong locality to develop a model for communities in two different geographic and temporal contexts. The data indicate that the Koshkonong tradition was characterized by a tightly knit multi-village community while evidence of such a community unit at La Crosse does not exist. Evidence from microwear analysis indicates that both men and women used lithic tools and that women produced some, if not most of the lithic tools. The decline in formal lithic tool complexity and diversity through time was likely the result of a shift in the gendered division of labor of producing stone tools.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25479