From Micro-histories to Macro-trends: Constructing Time and Temporality in the Lower Illinois Valley

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.

One of Stuart Struever’s primary contributions to the archaeology of the Lower Illinois Valley was his work outlining a regional culture-history that sought to organize and lend substantive temporality to critical trends and transformations in human social processes. The empirical foundations of these histories were primarily variability of ceramic styles and technologies across space and time. We build on Struever’s contributions by leveraging a Bayesian interpretative framework that formally integrates ceramic data and radiocarbon data at multiple scales. At the macroregional scale, we evaluate the temporal framework of the regional ceramic chronology using extant radiocarbon and ceramic data. With a suite of new AMS dates from the Middle Woodland period Mound House site (11GE7), we explore (1) how regional ceramic chronologies articulate with site-based assemblages and (2) construct a high-resolution internal chronology for the site, which Struever considered to be one of the most important mound centers in the region.

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): 37798.0