Interdisciplinary Research, Zooarchaeology, Electronic Databases, and the Impacts of Struever's Vision

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Village, the Region, and Beyond: Stuart Struever (1931–2022) and the Lower Illinois River Valley Research Program" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Struever’s passion for multidisciplinary archaeological research in the lower Illinois River valley (LIV) attracted both authors to Northwestern University and to our specializations in zooarchaeology. Struever’s primary interest was in anthropological interpretations of subsistence, settlement, and social systems, and he encouraged us to go beyond the natural history orientations of our zoology colleagues in our zooarchaeological research. Research on LIV Archaic and Woodland subsistence considered the influences of climate and environmental change and also of cultural factors such as settlement function and cultural traditions. Standard use of screening and flotation yielded large collections of faunal remains, and to make sense of them, we developed some of the earliest coding formats for computer-assisted analyses of faunal data. The electronic databases we generated and the methods we used facilitated systematic comparative research. Regional zooarchaeological research demonstrated the early importance of aquatic animals and the increased importance of fish as gardening and larger settlements emerged. Struever’s perspectives, our interdisciplinary experiences, commitment to analysis of small-scale remains, and development and use of electronic databases have been foundational in our careers and in our recent synthetic zooarchaeological research documenting the great variability in human use of fauna across the midwestern and interior eastern United States.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• The Village, the Region, and Beyond: Stuart Struever (1931–2022) and the Lower Illinois River Valley Research Program

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38061.0