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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

From Sacred To Profane: European Materials Integration Into Mississippian Cosmology, Campbell Walker Dec 2016

From Sacred To Profane: European Materials Integration Into Mississippian Cosmology, Campbell Walker

Anthropology Undergraduate Senior Theses

Interpreting the significance of materials used by southeastern Native Americans to express their cosmological beliefs reveals certain trends that reflect changes in culture over time. We recognize that, for many hundreds of years within the Mississippian period, artifacts fashioned from specific materials reflected the relationship between these materials and their place in native cosmology. In the post-Mississippian period, nontraditional materials became available that were used to fashion these same traditional artifact forms. I present research on how Native Americans integrated these new materials into their cosmology by drawing analogies and distinctions between uses of traditional and nontraditional materials in relation …


Tracking Trajectories: Charting Changes Of Late Archaic Shell Ring Formation And Use, Martin Peter Walker May 2016

Tracking Trajectories: Charting Changes Of Late Archaic Shell Ring Formation And Use, Martin Peter Walker

Masters Theses

For the past fifty years the shell rings of the North American, southeastern, Late Archaic period, have been a continuous object of archaeological research. They have been studied within contexts of the initial creation and use of ceramics in North America, mounding and monumentality of hunter-gatherers, early sedentism and social complexity, forager feasting, ritual, and ceremonialism, and human-environment interactions. The aim of this project was to bring together the cumulative data generated by this continuous research focus and centralize it within a single database, the Late Archaic Shell Rings Repository. In utilizing this consolidated data set, it is possible to …


The Western Stemmed Point Tradition: Evolutionary Perspectives On Cultural Change In Projectile Points During The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition, Lindsay D. Scott Jan 2016

The Western Stemmed Point Tradition: Evolutionary Perspectives On Cultural Change In Projectile Points During The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition, Lindsay D. Scott

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this thesis I analyze the cultural techniques of Paleoindians in North America by examining the diversification and fusion of stemmed projectile point traditions using an evolutionary analysis. The Western Stemmed Point tradition has an extensive regional and temporal distribution throughout the Intermountain West and High Plains during the Paleoindian period. In an effort to determine how stemmed projectile point technologies relate to each other, I applied a phylogenetic approach to construct heritable patterns of projectile point histories. By measuring the physical traits of those points and using a macro-evolutionary theoretical approach, changes in artifact form can be acquired and …