This ceramic analysis is focused on a combination of technical and decorative analyses involving energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) and petrographic data unused by or unavailable to previous researchers. The ceramics used in this study are non-collared forms of Late Woodland (AD 700 - 1200) types found across southern Wisconsin. Ceramic attributes from these data sets are analyzed using multi-variate statistical methods and the resulting clusters are plotted geographically. Results indicate regionalization of particular attributes with a major east-west trend noted in some cases. However, geographical plotting shows broad overlap among river valleys and locales. Importantly, EDXRF data demonstrates that ceramics or clays were transported across the landscape.

The results are used to assess three models commonly used to explain Late Woodland group spatial distribution and interaction: Monolithic, Low-level Territorial, and High-level Territorial. However, while it is argued the Low-level Territorial model best represents the data, the ceramic attributes indicate that multiple types of social organizations were practiced over space and time during the Late Woodland and that multiple territorial models are necessary to fully understand the social interactions occurring during this period.

Finally, it is hypothesized that these results are best approached from a performance perspective where the social organization provides a contextual basis for investigating the daily performance of pottery making. Pottery manufacture is used to assess the constant making and re-making of social relationships at multiple levels of interaction in an egalitarian setting. It is hypothesized that different suites of attributes reflect different levels of group membership and that potters are consciously selecting attributes to negotiate these nested relationships through the practice of pottery construction.

The lithic assemblage from the Crescent Bay Hunt Club site (47Je904), an Oneota habitation on the shore of Lake Koshkonong in Southeastern Wisconsin provides valuable insight into 13th-14th century material culture and technology in the Great Lakes.  This study examines materials from the 2004 UWM field school excavations at the site. The analysis first addresses the topics of resource procurement, tool assemblage complexity and diversity, and energetic efficiency, with information derived from a macroscopic analysis of the lithic tools and mass analysis of the debitage.  A combination of low power (10-50x) and high power (200x) microscopic use-wear analyses address issues of tool form and function, including traditional categories of Madison points, humpback bifaces, and thumbnail scrapers as well as the rarely examined class of unretouched flake tools.

On the Ozark Plateau, human occupation spanning the last 11,500 14C yr B.P. is well documented in the archaeological record.  Recently, geoarchaeological investigations have been conducted in the reach of the Current River valley contained within Ozark National Scenic Riverways (NSR).  The current study was conducted in an effort to establish a geoarchaeological model for Ozark NSR.  Alluvial stratigraphy, particle-size distribution data, and optically stimulated luminescence ages were used to investigate late-Quaternary landscape evolution and model the geologic preservation potential for cultural deposits. Stable carbon isotope data were used to reconstruct paleoenvironmental change during the late Pleistocene and Holocene.

This dissertation integrates ethnographic information and computational modeling to build theory about hunter-gatherer social networks and the relationships between the characteristics of those networks and patterns of variability in material culture.  Key mechanisms of personal network formation (mobility, marriage, and kinship) and social learning are represented in an agent-based model which allows both system-level social networks and large-scale patterns of artifact variability to emerge from the “bottom up” through numerous human-level behaviors and interactions.  This model is used to: (1) identify patterned relationships between the human-level behaviors that we can observe ethnographically and the characteristics of the system-level social networks that emerge through those behaviors; and (2) explore how the characteristics of system-level social networks are related to the patterns of variability in items of material culture whose production is mediated through those networks.  Comparisons between archaeological artifact assemblages and artifact assemblages produced during model experiments are used to evaluate network-based explanations for the appearance and disappearance of stylistic regions during the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods (ca. 11,050-8000 radiocarbon years before present) in midcontinental North America.  These comparisons suggest that the appearance of stylistic regions during the Middle and Late Paleoindian periods was most likely the result of processes of stylistic drift operating across social networks that were less inter-connected than those of the Early Paleoindian period.  Decreasing social connectivity across the midcontinent was probably related to an uneven distribution of population as hunter-gatherer individuals, groups, and systems responded to environmental change at the end of the Pleistocene.  Population growth and the emergence of relatively homogenous environments at the beginning of the Holocene (ca. 10,000 radiocarbon years before present) would have increased social connectivity and diminished the capacity of drift processes to produce stylistically differentiated regions.

This study is an examination of how sociopolitical change occurs, particularly the formation of large scale polities from culturally diverse populations. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” and recent developments in archaeological theory, particularly agency and practice theory, I contend that the social construction of space and community identities at multiple scales were instrumental in the creation of the Cahokia polity in the American Bottom region of southwestern Illinois around A.D. 1050. 

In this study, I employ a multi-scalar perspective that includes detailed analyses of material culture, architecture, and spatial organization at five sites located in the American Bottom floodplain near the monumental Mississippian site of Cahokia. All five sites include occupations dating to the Mississippian Transition (A.D. 975–1100) which spans the Terminal Late Woodland Lindeman and Edelhardt phases (A.D. 1000–1050) and the early Mississippian Lohmann phase (A.D. 1050–1100). The mapping, geophysical survey, excavation, and material analyses for each of these sites combined with regional comparisons using a Geographic Information System provide evidence for changes in the construction of space, movement of people into and around the region, and the simultaneous dissolution of local communities and the construction of a large–scale community identity centered on Cahokia.

The following dissertation is focused upon use of Plainview lithic technology as represented by lithic debitage and tools at the Dalles site (47IA374) and the Kelly North Tract at Carcajou Point (47JE02) in southern Wisconsin.  This work takes an assemblage approach to understanding the structure of the lithic economy in use at these sites.  The primary reason to examine not only tools, but the broader aspects of lithic reduction strategies at this site is to examine Paleoindian mobility, site structure, household makeup, and ritual in the western Great Lakes during the early Holocene (circa 8600 B.P.).  Since very few sites from this period have been scientifically excavated in the western Great Lakes, the Dalles site and the Kelly North Tract offer an opportunity to provide useful information about the lithic economies of these groups.

The Dalles site was excavated and reported by Overstreet et al. 2005.  Investigations at the site yielded diagnostic artifacts and dates from an occupation assignable to the Plainview tradition.  The site is located in an environment containing abundant lithic resources, including cobbles and pebbles of Galena chert found in a streambed crosscutting the site.   The Kelly North Tract was excavated and reported on by Jeske et al. (2002 and 2003).  The site also contained diagnostic Plainview artifacts.  The site is located in a chert poor environment, with sporadic pebbles and cobbles of chert contained within the glacial till in the region.  Current studies in the western Great Lakes have focused on the hafted bifaces and tools produced by groups at the late Pleistocene/early Holocene transition.  In contrast, this dissertation is focused on the structure of the lithic economy, based on the debitage from the Dalles site and the Kelly North Tract using multiple lithic schemes including mass analysis and individual debitage analysis to determine how Plainview groups in the western Great Lakes created, modified, and maintained their tool kits in different environments.

The following dissertation is a comparative analysis of mortuary practices displayed by two archaeological cultures: Oneota and Langford.  The Oneota Tradition is a manifestation of Upper Mississippian concentrated in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa and Minnesota that lasted from approximately AD 1050-1450, while the Langford Tradition is concentrated in northeast Illinois, and lasted from approximately A.D. 1100-1450. Previous research identified two broad burial programs for Developmental Horizon Oneota in southeast Wisconsin (Foley Winkler 2004).  This dissertation expands upon the preceding study by incorporating additional data from southeast Wisconsin and data from Oneota and Langford sites in northeast Illinois.

Burial data are used to make inferences about the social, political, and economic structures represented by Langford and Oneota archaeological cultures.  In particular, culture contact, boundary maintenance and violence across the northern edge of the Prairie Peninsula are examined using mortuary and related data among the sites.  Analysis was conducted on the burial practices and skeletal remains from the Crescent Bay Hunt Club, Schmeling, Wild Rose Mounds, Calumetville, Walker-Hooper, Pipe and Zimmerman sites, and using literature on the Carcajou Point, Gentleman Farm, Robinson Reserve, Oakwood Mound, Material Service Quarry, and Hoxie Farm sites.

It was expected that 1. The mortuary programs for Oneota were different from those of Langford 2. Oneota in Wisconsin were settled in a more stable political and social milieu as contrasted with the marked conflict and violence associated with Langford sites; and 3.  Oneota society was more egalitarian than Langford.  The results demonstrate that Oneota and Langford mortuary programs do vary, however variation appears greater between all the sites than between the two cultures.  Distinctions in burial programs reflect cultural variation which is correlated with regional environmental adaptations within the larger Prairie Peninsula.  Both Oneota and Langford exhibit egalitarian socio-political structures and violence appears localized at sites in Illinois rather than widespread across the region.

Many reconstructions and models of the Late Prehistoric period in the Ohio Valley discuss changes in the structure and organization of primary habitations. These changes are often associated with changes in social organization, intra-community relationships, and socio-political complexity. It is also being increasingly recognized that typological Culture Historical narratives often over-simplify or misconstrue actual local trajectories. What is needed to both develop accurate historical narratives and test extant models is a very large sample of communities with a reconstructed organization pattern. Excavation is not an efficient way to increase the size of the known sample of community organization patterns; however, excavation is still the dominant method of archaeological investigation in the region. In this dissertation I illustrate a multi-staged approach to quickly reconstruct the structure of a given archaeological site (irrespective of time period) applied specifically to a Late Prehistoric community in the Middle Scioto Valley: the Reinhardt Village (33PI880). The approach used here begins with a suite of minimally invasive/destructive data-generation techniques (extensive surface survey, intensive surface survey, volumetric shovel testing, gradiometry, magnetic susceptibility, and soil phosphate) supplemented by excavation. The minimally invasive techniques provided most of the salient details regarding settlement structure and if employed iteratively in a regional survey could quickly increase the database to reconstruct local prehistory and test extant models. Specifically, the strategy employed at Reinhardt could be used to reconstruct 2 – 4 community structures in the typical field school, summer season. The results at the Reinhardt site reveal a small, late fourteenth century planned community. The Reinhardt community is organized around an open, oblong plaza oriented northeast-southwest with multiple activity areas roughly concentrically around the plaza. The Reinhardt community varies from a typical plan in that the activity zones are irregularly distributed around the plaza, with an isolated productive area south and outside of the concentric zones. The Reinhardt investigations add to the knowledge of variability of community structure for the Middle Ohio River Valley in general, but specifically for the Middle Late Prehistoric period of the Scioto River Valley. 

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An environmental catchment analysis was conducted to determine the nature of Oneota settlement patterns on the western shore of Lake Koshkonong in Jefferson County, Wisconsin. Previous studies have used coarse-grained analyses which have led to an over generalization of Oneota settlement patterns. This research uses a fine-grained analysis to elucidate the variation of Oneota village placement within the study area. Prehistoric vegetation patterns were recreated using the General Land Office Survey notes and soil data. Two kilometer catchments were drawn around four sites; Crescent Bay Hunt Club (47JE904), Schmeling (47JE833), Twin Knolls (47JE379), and the Carcajou Point (47JE002). Analysis of these catchments clarified the nature of environmental variation in Oneota settlement patterns, increasing our understanding of their overall lifeways.