Archeobotany of the Lower Illinois Valley: The Legacy of Stuart Struever

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.

In 1960 Stuart Struever initiated an “Illinois Valley Archaeological Program” and devoted his research over the next decade to study of Middle Western Hopewell manifestations. He set out to test a hypothesis that the adoption of a simple mudflat agriculture conducted on raw soils of large-valley floodplains promoted more productive subsistence economies and contributed to population expansion and to emergence of Hopewell. Struever came to favor an alternative hypothesis that Intensive Harvest Collecting of multiple natural resources upgraded the Middle Woodland subsistence base. Whether or not seeds of floodplain pioneers were cultivated remained an open question. Outstanding among Struever’s accomplishments was his development of flotation as a practical method for recovering plant charcoal. By 1969 when excavations began at the Koster site, Struever was committed to collecting flotation samples from every provenience. Effectively, the CAA Archeobotanical Laboratory, which was established in 1970, studied flotation-recovered plant materials from 30 habitation components that were excavated from 1960 to 1980. These components span a time of hunter-gatherers entirely dependent on wild foods, a time when fires perhaps were employed to manage the landscape, and several millennia of developing plant cultivation and domestication.

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37789.0