Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ancient Andean Tattooing Practices, Madison Auten

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the practice of tattooing in the ancient Andean world focusing on Peru. I ask the question: What can we learn about how people in the ancient Andean world used tattoos? For example, who were the people receiving tattoos, where on the body were tattoos located and what did they depict? To address this, I collected data on tattoos preserved on human remains. Mummies originating from Peru were examined and their tattoos were photographed. The mummies I examined come from collections in three museums in the United States, including: the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), the Field Museum (FM) …

Population Change In Times Of War: Biodistance Analysis Of Medieval And Early Modern Skeletal Populations From Adriatic Croatia, Lindsey Jo Helms Thorson

Theses and Dissertations

Research by doctoral candidate Lindsey Jo Helms Thorson, under the supervision of Dr. Patricia Richards, investigated population during the Ottoman expansion into Croatian territories to determine whether migration contributed significantly to changes in the biological make-up of the population. The study focused on phenotypic trait variation, using cranial and dental metric and nonmetric data, in two skeletal samples from the Medieval (pre-Ottoman) period and two skeletal samples from the Early Modern (Ottoman) period in the central Dalmatian region of Croatia, curated at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts – Anthropology Center. Historical narratives suggest that as the Ottoman Empire …

Death In Anonymity: Population Dynamics And The Individual Within The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery, 1882–1925, Brooke L. Drew

Theses and Dissertations

Prior to hospital construction in late 1991 and early 1992, and again in 2013, archaeologists were called upon to excavate 1,649 and 831 burials, respectively, from the unmarked Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery. The individuals disinterred during these field seasons represent what remains of a much larger indigent population buried by Milwaukee County between 1882 and 1925 in what has been designated as Cemetery II. Long before the expanding facilities at Wauwatosa’s Milwaukee Regional Medical Center threatened these graves, however, the very nature of pauper burial grounds caused the identities of these disenfranchised individuals to be systematically obliterated.

The research …

The Koshkonong Creek Village Site (47je0379): Ceramic Production, Function, And Deposition At An Oneota Occupation In Southeastern Wisconsin, Natalie Carpiaux

Theses and Dissertations

The ceramic assemblage recovered from excavations at the Koshkonong Creek Village (KCV) site (47JE0379) is examined to determine functional and stylistic significance from a temporal and spatial perspective. Occupied from circa A.D. 1000 to 4000, KCV presents an opportunity to look at Oneota in the locality from its early to late iterations. The ceramics were analyzed by attributes and categorized in a type-variety system laid out by Schneider (2015) for comparative purposes. Using a household approach and a feature-level analysis, ceramics trends are mapped and explored using GIS. The research collected lends credence to noted trends of cultural continuity in …

A Zooarchaeological Study Of Fishing Strategies Over Time At The Rio Chico Site On The Central Coast Of Ecuador, Amy Milson Klemmer

Theses and Dissertations

Human response to environmental crises is an issue we face today and will continue to face in the future. Food security, in the sense of access to sufficient nutrition, is a part of that. Ocean fisheries are among the critical resources affected. The archaeological record can provide insights into ecological strategies that did – or did not - work. Archaeological evidence of human occupation on the Ecuadorian coast stretches back 11,000 years, making this region of South America well-suited to evaluating ecological resilience and sustainability; however, detailed analyses of prehistoric fish remains from coastal Ecuador are rare. This thesis concerns …

The Heart Of The Madder: An Important Prehistoric Pigment And Its Botanical And Cultural Roots, Michelle Laberge

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, an interest in natural botanical dye sources has prompted new research into the cultivation and processing of prehistoric dye plants. Advances in chemical analyses of ancient European textiles have provided more information about dye plants such as woad (Isatis tinctoria) weld (Reseda luteola) and madder (Rubia tinctorum), which were important sources of color in early textile production. Evidence of madder dye has been reported in the archaeological record of the European Bronze and Iron Ages in textiles preserved in the Hallstatt salt mines, Scandinavian bog sites and other elite European burials but the picture of madder usage …

Identity In The Archaeological Record: Richardville, Natoequah And The Fur Trade In Northeastern Indiana., Elizabeth Spott

Theses and Dissertations

Gender, ethnicity and social class are powerful structuring components that influence the formation of personal identity and social groups, as well as constrain interpersonal interactions within social groups. The following dissertation is an examination of how gender, ethnicity and class were actively negotiated and employed by Native Americans, Métis and whites to construct personal and social identities on the frontier during the nineteenth century fur trade. This discussion of identity will focus on the example of John B. Richardville to examine how he used material culture to construct, portray and maintain multiple personal and social identities in the nineteenth century …

Stone Tools And Agricultural Communities: Economic, Microwear, And Residue Analyses Of Wisconsin Oneota Lithic Assemblages, Katherine Sterner

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an investigation into community organization as an approach to understanding the shift from typologically complex to a simpler lithic technology after circa A.D. 500 in the Prairie Peninsula. The research compares Oneota lithic practice in western Wisconsin (A.D. 1400-1700) at the La Crosse locality to that in eastern Wisconsin (A.D. 1100-1450) at the Koshkonong locality to develop a model for communities in two different geographic and temporal contexts.

Three types of lithic analyses were conducted on nine different Wisconsin Oneota sites to achieve research goals. Assemblage analysis was conducted on all nine assemblages. The goal of this …