Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Native American Archaeology'

This research focuses on the problem of how early pottery in New York State is defined and analyzed. Many traditional models suggest early pottery developed from an earlier steatite stone bowl technology. Thus far, studies that examine early pottery in the Northeast, called the Vinette Type Series, focus on the potential functions, archaeological contexts, and surface appearance of these vessels and fail to account for the social practices and technological choices inherent within these artifacts. This dissertation reevaluates early pottery using a non-typological approach. In the place of descriptive analysis, this research uses petrography, experimental geo-archaeology, and technical choice and agency theories to identify the different types of temper present in early ceramic vessels. This study also looks at the patterns of different technical choices made by early potters. The redefinition of early ceramic technology using post-modern theories allows the author to better understand the social practices involved in the rise of ceramic technology. The ceramic technological patterns identified are then compared with steatite stone bowl technology. This study concludes that early ceramic technology is more closely related to the practices of earth oven convection cooking than it is to any other cooking artifact. A reclassification of early ceramic fabrics is presented and the traditional early ceramic Vinette type categories are rejected.

Despite decades of Chaco-style great house research, the impetus for their construction and the extent to which their communities directly interacted across the northern Southwest remain poorly understood. A key question is whether great houses represent an articulated system centered at Chaco Canyon or whether they are a regional conceptualization of communal activities enacted on a local scale. The amount of documented great house variability suggests that local social and environmental contexts played an important role in the construction and use of these structures.

I present a case study of three late Pueblo II (A.D. 1050-1130) communities in the southern Cibola sub-region, located on the southern extent of the Pueblo culture area, to evaluate the role of great houses within their local and broader social contexts. I argue great houses in this area were constructed as costly signaling displays directed by local leaders to gain community prestige and access to non-local resources. I draw on survey, architectural, ceramic, faunal, and compositional data from each community to identify links between these great houses and others across the northern Southwest, examine the nature of great house use within the context of each associated community, and evaluate patterns of interaction with local and more distant communities. I then expand this analysis to evaluate evidence for costly signaling activities between great house communities from across the Chacoan sphere.

The results suggest that southern Cibola great houses were locally constructed using elements from the traditional Chaco architectural canon, and utilized remodeling events to increase their architectural link to Chaco Canyon. These great houses hosted community-integrating activities that incorporated ceramics from both the Pueblo and Mogollon ancestral traditions, possibly in an effort to socially integrate a multi-ethnic population. No evidence was identified to support the historically dominant model that southern Cibola great houses were built and controlled by Chaco Canyon populations. Based on this analysis, a costly signaling model better accounts for the construction of southern Cibola great houses than others posed for a Chaco regional system. This inference is supported at other great houses across the Chaco sphere, given the available macro-regional great house data.

This research involved low powered microscopic analysis of usewear patterns on the utilized edges of formal and informal tools sampled from the Nenana component (C1) and the Denali component (C2) of the Dry Creek Site. Dry Creek is one of the type sites for the Nenana Complex, which is often contrasted with the Denali Complex in Late Pleistocene archaeological studies of central Alaska (12,000–10,000 B.P.). There are twice as many unifacial scrapers than bifacial tools in the C1 formal tool assemblage. The C1 worked lithic assemblage contains a relatively high number of unifacially worked endscrapers and side scrapers when compared to the number of bifacial knife and point technology. The technological makeup of the formal tools sampled from the Denali component is characterized by the manufacture and use of a higher number of bifacial knives and projectile points. The presence of microblades within C2 and the absence of microblades in C1 are often cited as the most significant technological difference between these two tool kits. The analysis presented here suggests that with or without microblades, the Nenana and Denali components are different tool kits. However, differences in utilization signatures between formal bifacial knives and scrapers tools indicate that technological variability within C1 and C2 at Dry Creek may largely be shaped by early hunting and butchering versus later stage butchering and processing activities.

The 2011 excavation of Feature 9, a 3800 cal B.P. semisubterranean house at ADK-00237 on southwest Adak Island, is the only Neoglacial house excavated in the central Aleutian Islands and the only upland site excavation in the Aleutian Islands. House structural features, lithic debitage and tool analysis, sediment analysis, and spatial analysis are used to determine if upland household activities in Feature 9 differ from household activities in coastal Neoglacial houses. The complex hearth features at ADK-00237 are similar to those at the Amaknak Bridge (UNL-00050) site on Unalaska Island. The artifact assemblage at ADK-00237 is similar to other Margaret Bay phase sites in the eastern Aleutian Islands with the notable absence of fishing and hunting equipment and midden remains. Core and blade technology include one microblade core and two blade-like unifaces. Unifacial technology was more prevalent than bifacial technology and most tools were informal flake tools. The comparable tool assemblages suggest similar activities occurred in Feature 9 as at other Margaret Bay phase houses in the eastern Aleutian Islands. There is no evidence the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt)-like artifacts from Chaluka (SAM-00001) and Margaret Bay (UNL-00048) were identified at ADK-00237. The measurable differences in the upland site of ADK-00237 to coastal houses are that Feature 9 and the two additional houses were not stone-lined, it has a smaller assemblage size, there is a lower frequency of points within the assemblage, and no definitive fishing or hunting equipment was found. Given the available evidence, ADK-00237 was likely a lookout location, based on its proximity to a coastal village (ADK-00025) and its views and easy access to three other water bodies, Adak Strait to the west, South Arm Bay to the north, and Bay of Waterfalls to the southeast. ADK-00237 could also have been a refuge.

The examination of the tools that prehistoric people crafted for subsistence and related practices offers distinctive insights into how they lived their lives. Most often, researchers study these practices in isolation, by tool type or by material. However, by using a relational perspective, my research explores the tool assemblage as a whole including bone, stone and shell. This allows me to study the changes in tool industries in relation to one another, something that I could not accomplish by studying only one material or tool type. I use this broader approach to tool manufacture and use for the artifact assemblage from Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI41), two sequential Middle and Late Woodland Period (A.D. 1-1050) archaeological sites on the central Gulf coast of Florida. The results of my research show that people made different choices, both in the type of material they used and the kind of tools they manufactured during the time they lived at these sites as subsistence practices shifted. Evidence of these trends aligns with discrete changes in strata within our excavations. The timing of depositional events and the artifacts found within each suggest people also used the sites differently through time. These trends exemplify the role of crafting tools in the way people maintain connections with their mutable social and physical world.

The Toltec Mounds site (3LN42) (A.D. 700-1050) in central Arkansas has intrigued archaeologists for decades. Although it dates well within the Woodland Period and has many features characteristic of a Woodland Period site, including grog-tempered pottery and a reliance on hunting and gathering, its mound-and-plaza layout is an architectural design suggestive of the later Mississippi Period (A.D. 1000-1500). This confusion is addressed in this thesis by examining two ceramic assemblages from different building stages of Mound D, the last mound to be altered at the site. The ceramics show an affiliation with northeastern Arkansas that has been underemphasized in the past, and that may provide more information on Toltec's relationships with its neighbors through the end of the Woodland Period.

Town Creek is a prehistoric Native American site in central North Carolina. The Mississippian period occupation, from about A.D. 1150-1350, saw the most intensive use of the site. The community transformed from a residential village during the first half of the occupation to a necropolis later on. The cemeteries were created within the original public and domestic structures, the largest of which is Structure 7, the focus of this thesis. According to historic accounts of Southeastern Indian groups, communities were comprised of ranked clans made up of multiple kin groups that maintained separate household spaces. Through visual analysis and the spatial analysis of the distribution of burial attributes that include burial depth, age, sex, grave goods, body positioning and body orientation, I identify five spatially discrete groups within the Structure 7 cemetery. I argue that these five groups represent smaller social groups within the clan. The first group is a Central Square cluster that includes key members from the smaller social groups in the cemetery. There burials were arranged in a square, a formation repeated throughout Southeastern Indian ideology and site architecture. A small, Central cluster enclosed by the Central Square cluster, is consistent with ritual activity, as the interred are all children without any grave goods or other distinguishing attributes. A cluster in the northern part of the cemetery is made up entirely of adult males and children. This Northern cluster is interpreted as a politically-based grouping, as adult males most often held positions of political power in historic native groups. The children interred are likely kin or youth in line for positions of significant social status. Alternatively, they could represent ritual offerings associated with the interments of the adult males. Adult males, adult females, and children were found in the Southeastern and Southwestern clusters, which led to their interpretation as kin groups. Each of these groups was distinguishable through the distribution of specific artifact types and body positioning. The presence of all five of these groups contributed to the 50 person burial population in Structure 7, making it the largest cemetery at Town Creek. Its large size indicates that those interred in the Structure 7 cemetery were part of the largest and /or longest lasting group in the Town Creek community. Should other clans at Town Creek have had similar organization, the burial attribute patterning identified through this analysis may assist in the interpretation of other cemeteries at the site.

Modern studies of site distribution, utilization of near-coastal riverine resources, and the development of cultural complexity during the Holocene in southwestern Washington are hampered by the limited amount of data from previous archaeological investigations. This study of Willapa River Valley archaeology provides a context in which to interpret southern Northwest Coast near-coastal pre-contact archaeological sites.

Three areas for investigation became evident during the initial research phase and directed subsequent inquiries. The first dealt with prehistoric site distribution in the Willapa region landscape, the potential for locating sites, and site distribution patterns on the Willapa River Valley alluvial terraces. Bayesian GIS modeling and geomorphologic-based survey techniques identified a new sample of 26 localities representing approximately 10,000 years of occupation. Eustatic sea level rise, seismic movement, tsunamis, and fluvial processes formed the Willapa region's landscape, and promoted natural redox reaction formation processes within submerged archaeological contexts.

The second involved the pre-contact utilization of lithic, floral, and faunal natural resources, and how these adaptations relate to what we know from past work at coastal-adjacent midden sites. Excavation at the Forks Creek terrace site revealed a detailed chronology of a 2700 BP Willapa River Valley camp oriented toward the seasonal hazelnut, bitter cherry, elk, deer, and salmon resources of a fire-maintained prairie "garden" and the Willapa River. Microblades were manufactured for their technological qualities, illustrating similarities to Salish Sea "Locarno Beach" assemblages.

The third encompassed the archaeology of the Athabaskan Kwalhioqua, and addressed the potential for recognizing cultural enclaves in the archaeological record through the study of exotic obsidian and blueschist artifacts. Obsidian "wealth blades," blueschist clubs, and nephrite adze artifacts define a pattern of late prehistoric long-distance trade and exchange. The "Pacific Athabaskan coastal trade network" hypothesis poses that direct sea-going canoe trade occurred between Athabaskan cultures of the southern Northwest Coast within a counter-seismic ceremonial dance network prior to the great earthquake of AD 1700.

New insights into the prehistory of the Willapa River Valley are provided with consideration given to site location, age of occupation, cultural landscapes, and the position of the Willapa River Valley prehistoric occupation within the Pacific Northwest.

Individual burials are always representative of both individuals and collective actors. The physical remains, material culture, and represented practices in burials can be used in concert to study identities and social personas amongst individual and collective actors. These identities and social personas are the result of the interaction between agency and structure, where both individuals and groups act to change and reproduce social structures.

The three burials upon which this study is based are currently held in the collections of the Milwaukee Public Museum. They are all indigenous burials created in Wisconsin in the 19^th century. Biological sex, stature, age, and pathologies were identified from skeletal analysis and the material culture of each burial was analyzed using a Use/Origin model to attempt to understand how these individuals negotiated and constructed identities within a colonial system.

The Town Creek mound site, located in Montgomery County, North Carolina, is classified as Mississippian based on the archaeological evidence for intensive maize agriculture, the presence of complicated stamped ceramics, and the presence of an earthen platform mound. In my research, I studied hinterland sites within a 40-km radius of the mound site to determine how Mississippian settlement patterns in the surrounding region changed through time. I used ceramic analysis and the presence and absence of diagnostic artifacts to create an occupational history of hinterland sites. I also used spatial analysis to delineate polity boundaries and compare spatial patterns to others established in the region. When ceramic and spatial data were combined, patterns emerged suggesting that fewer hinterland sites were occupied during the height of Town Creek’s occupation, and more hinterland sites were occupied when Town Creek’s population was dwindling. These patterns suggest that as people moved away from Town Creek, they were relocating within the mound site’s immediate vicinity. Spatial analysis also showed a break in hinterland sites at 18 km during all of Town Creek’s occupation, indicating that the administrative center at Town Creek had an influence of at least 18 km.

Rock art documentation often draws from a range of recording perspectives, in which each framework facilitates different recording goals, preconceptions, and methods. As a result, each recording project collects different types of information from a rock art panel. The intricate and visually striking rock art murals painted on rockshelter walls in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwestern Texas demand and benefit from the application of artistic, avocational archaeological, and professional archaeological documentation frameworks.

This research provided a case study that analyzed different recording projects of the Rattlesnake Canyon mural (41VV180), a Pecos River style pictograph panel located in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. I applied a critical theoretical framework and the concept of “capta” to review and analyze the rock art documentation perspectives, methods, and materials collected from three major recording projects of the Rattlesnake Canyon mural. I focused on projects completed by artist Forrest Kirkland, the Texas Archeological Society (TAS) avocational archaeological Rock Art Task Force (RATF), and an illustration of the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center’s (Shumla) recording process, to examine differences between artistic, avocational archaeological, and professional archaeological recording frameworks and methods.

This case study demonstrated the ways in which the specific framework or perspective of a recorder influenced the methods selected for documentation and the types of information collected during rock art recording. The results of this critical analysis showed that the different recording projects shared a similar goal: to preserve the Rattlesnake Canyon mural for future generations and continued archaeological study. The three different projects, however, drew from distinct recording frameworks that influenced the overall conception of the panel, the methods selected for recording, and the types of information collected.

In this case study, I suggested that rock art researchers, specifically those from a professional archaeological framework, value the incorporation of different perspectives and methods into rock art documentation. The inclusion of varied perspectives and methods brings different skillsets and expertise to rock art recording. In addition, each recording project gathers different kinds of information from rock art murals that can be used in different ways by subsequent recorders, researchers, and land managers. This critical analysis of previous rock art recording projects also demonstrated that existing rock art documentation legacy materials continue to serve as productive resources for further research, management, and public education purposes.

The degree of accuracy in portrayals of Navajo culture at Salmon Ruins Heritage Park and Rock Art Ranch was assessed by comparing the Navajo structures assembled at each site to archaeological, ethnographic and historical data for traditional Navajo construction practices. Comparison and analysis revealed different degrees of accuracy in the portrayal of features with cultural and functional importance. Authentic practices were presented in a historical framework to permit the temporal characterization of each site. The aggregate of the temporal data from features at both sites was consistent with Navajo sites of the early twentieth century. The results of this study suggest a bias in contemporary portrayals of Navajo culture favoring the most extensively documented, and the more recent, aspects of Navajo culture.

The purpose of this project was to record the private archaeological collection of the Keene family, which was previously unknown to the professional community. While at the two sites, Keene Redfield site (8Ja1847) and Keene Dog Pond site (8Ja1848), in Jackson County, northwest Florida, USF archaeologists also conducted field investigations to look for prehistoric cultural materials in undisturbed contexts.

This research was conducted at the request of the Keene family. The field crew systematically documented, cataloged and photographed each artifact in the Keene collection while at the sites. Surface survey and testing were also carried out in order to determine site boundaries, occupation and function.

]Over 1,000 artifacts from every time period from the transitional Paleo-Indian/Early Archaic through the Mississippian were documented from the collection. Field investigations resulted in the location and investigation of undisturbed cultural strata below the plow zone, enabling the researchers to obtain radiocarbon dates from these deposits. Evidence of hunting and gathering activities and of tool processing including repair, sharpening and possible re-use was found at both sites.

This work allowed for the publication of two previously unknown, rich archaeological sites and for a better understanding of the prehistoric activities and functions of this region of the southeast. While participating in this public archaeology project, several other similar opportunities presented themselves, providing USF archaeologists with the ability to maintain a presence in the area to continue public archaeology efforts to engage the community and encourage appropriate participation and good stewardship of these types of private sites.

Using a memory archaeology paradigm, this dissertation explored from 2010 to 2012 the ways people used place-based narratives to create and maintain the sacredness of four historic battlefields in Montana: Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument; Nez Perce National Historical Park- Bear Paw Battlefield; Nez Perce National Historical Park- Big Hole National Battlefield; and Rosebud Battlefield State Park. This research implemented a mixed-methods approach of four data sources: historical research about on-site interpretation and land management of the battlefields; participant observations conducted during height of tourism season for each battlefield; 1,056 questionnaires administered to park visitors; and 32 semi-structured interviews with park personnel. Before formulating hypotheses to test, a preliminary literature review was conducted on three battlefields (Culloden, Fallen Timbers, and Isandlwana) for any observable patterns concerning the research domain.

This dissertation tested two hypotheses to explain potential patterns at the four battlefields in Montana related to on-site interpretation of primary sources, the sacred perception of battlefields, and the maintenance and expression of place-based cultural heritages and historical knowledge. The first hypothesis examined whether park visitors and personnel perceived these American Indian battlefields as nationally significant or if other heritage values associated with the place-based interpretation of the sacred landscapes were more important. Although park visitors and personnel overall perceived the battlefields as nationally important, they also strongly expressed other heritage values. The second hypothesis examined whether battlefield visitors who made pilgrimages to attend or participate in official on-site commemorations had stronger place-based connections for cultural heritage or historical knowledge reasons than other visitors. Overall, these commemoration pilgrims had stronger connections to the battlefields than other park visitors.

Closer comparisons of the four battlefields demonstrated that they had both similar patterns and unique aspects of why people maintained these landscapes as sacred places.

This thesis is an historical archaeological study of how Chinookan peoples at three villages and employees of the later multicultural Village at Fort Vancouver negotiated the processes of contact and colonization. Placed in the theoretical framework of practice theory, everyday ordinary activities are studied to understand how cultural identities are created, reinforced, and changed (Lightfoot et al. 1998; Martindale 2009; Voss 2008). Additionally uneven power relationships are examined, in this case between the colonizer and the colonized, which could lead to subjugation but also resistance (Silliman 2001). In order to investigate these issues, this thesis studies how the new foreign material of vessel glass was and was not used during the everyday practice of tool production.

Archaeological studies have found that vessel glass, which has physical properties similar to obsidian, was used to create a variety of tool forms by cultures worldwide (Conte and Romero 2008). Modified glass studies (Harrison 2003; Martindale and Jurakic 2006) have demonstrated that they can contribute important new insights into how cultures negotiated colonization. In this study, modified glass tools from three contact period Chinookan sites: Cathlapotle, Meier, and Middle Village, and the later multiethnic Employee Village of Fort Vancouver were examined. Glass tool and debitage analysis based on lithic macroscopic analytical techniques was used to determine manufacturing techniques, tool types, and functions. Additionally, these data were compared to previous analyses of lithics and trade goods at the study sites.

This thesis demonstrates that Chinookans modified glass into tools, though there was variation in the degree to which glass was modified and the types of tools that were produced between sites. Some of these differences are probably related to availability, how glass was conceptualized by Native Peoples, or other unidentified causes. This study suggests that in some ways glass was just another raw material, similar to stone, that was used to create tools that mirrored the existing lithic technology. However at Cathlapotle at least, glass appears to have been relatively scarce and perhaps valued even as a status item. While at Middle Village, glass (as opposed to stone) was being used about a third of the time to produce tools.

Glass tool technology at Cathlapotle, Meier, and Middle Village was very similar to the existing stone tool technology dominated by expedient/low energy tools; however, novel new bottle abraders do appear at Middle Village. This multifaceted response reflects how some traditional lifeways continued, while at the same time new materials and technology was recontextualized in ways that made sense to Chinookan peoples.

Glass tools increase at the Fort Vancouver Employee Village rather than decrease through time. This response appears to be a type of resistance to the HBC's economic hegemony and rigid social structure. Though it is impossible to know if such resistance was consciously acted on or was just part of everyday activities that made sense in the economic climate of the time.

Overall, this thesis demonstrates how a mundane object such as vessel glass, can provide a wealth of information about how groups like the Chinookans dealt with a changing world, and how the multiethnic community at Fort Vancouver dealt with the hegemony of the HBC. Chinookan peoples and the later inhabitants of the Fort Vancouver Employee Village responded to colonization in ways that made sense to their larger cultural system. These responses led to both continuity and change across time. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people visit the Native American ancestral lands in the western United States developed for tourism and recreation. The stewards of these lands seek to engage visitors and enrich their experience, and simultaneously to protect the lands’ natural and cultural resources. To achieve their mission, protected areas regularly use interpretation —materials and experiences that aim to educate visitors about resources and see them as personally meaningful. However, there is little literature on interpretive content in protected areas, few qualitative studies of interpretation as constructed by visitors and interpreters, and little literature on the representation of Native Americans in museums and protected areas.

I consider the public presentation of archaeology at exemplary protected areas in the U.S. Southwest and Great Basin within a theoretical framework of governmentality and representation. Within a mixed-method research design, this project used participant-observation at thirteen protected area locales to identify interpretive content and representational strategies, and semi-structured interviews with 31 individuals to elicit staff and visitors’ understandings of interpretation and display. This research found three types of narratives in the interpretation sampled—scientific narratives, cultural narratives, and management messages. In general, scientific narratives appeared more frequently than cultural narratives and both appeared more frequently than management messages. Archaeology dominated scientific narratives, cultural continuity dominated cultural narratives, and orientation dominated management messages. In general, archaeology appeared with greater relative frequency than any other component of interpretive content. This study also found that interpretation predominantly adopted a third-person omniscient point of view and represented people predominantly in the ancient past.

This study has both academic and applied outcomes. The work aims to contribute to the scant body of literature on interpretive content in protected areas stewarding natural and cultural resources, the few qualitative studies of interpretation as constructed by visitors and interpreters, and the existing literature on the representation of Native Americans in museums and protected areas as well as informing future interpretive practice. These findings inform a report on contemporary interpretive practice and recommendations for the public presentation of archaeology delivered to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in December 2013.