Surviving or Thriving? Reassessing Social Interaction and Warfare Related Food Insecurity at Morton Village

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Violent interaction between people of the Oneota and Mississippian traditions in the Central Illinois River Valley in the North American Midcontinent ca. 1300–1400 CE at Norris Farms #36 is a clear example of intermittent, low-scale warfare. One aspect of initial interpretations of the interaction, based on evidence for raiding of small work groups away from the village and initial zooarchaeology findings, identified resulting stress and subsistence insecurity within the Oneota population. While evidence of violence is clear, the faunal evidence for subsistence insecurity is based on a small sample of contexts from a restricted section of the adjoining habitation site, Morton Village. Recent excavations focused on a broader sampling of the village document a more complex interaction. The expanded data support a complex and productive community of local Mississippian and migrant Oneota peoples engaged in a process of coalescence, further complicating the earlier representations. In this paper, we reexamine the evidence of violence-related food insecurity through an analysis of faunal remains from a random sample of contexts across the entire village. Our results refine past interpretations of Oneota and Mississippian interactions, and indicate that we must continue to refine our models and methods for detecting food insecurity in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Interactions across the North American Midcontinent

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33325