Robert A Cook
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 77232 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Robert A Cook |
| NOMBRES | Robert A |
| APELLIDO | Cook |
| FIRMA | COOK R A |
| AFILIACIONES | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1443-8516 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 192 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2001 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Taking Things Apart, Letting Things Go, and Reforming American Archaeology
A major issue that American archaeologists have faced since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 is how to deal with the return/loss of significant portions of museum collections to descendant groups. By “deal with” the authors are not referring to the process of identifying descendant groups or the actual transfer of collections, one case for which is well documented in the essays in the pres…
Middle Ohio Valley Maize Histories
The transition to maize agriculture frames important cultural shifts in the Eastern Woodlands. However, the tempo and mode of this transition are unclear, particularly when analytical techniques are not standard across the region. In this article, we present evidence of directly dated maize macrobotanical fragments from the Turpin site in southwest Ohio that date between cal AD 552-649 and 684-994. These dates add to current dialogues on the spre…
Modeling Diachronic Changes in Site Location Preferences Related to an Agricultural Transition
This article explores changes in site location preferences that accompanied the shift to a maize-farming lifestyle in the Middle Ohio River valley. Criteria including distance between sites, distance to earthen mounds, distance to rivers, and soil types are documented for both Late Woodland and Fort Ancient sites in southwest Ohio. These data are incorporated into a multivariate model suggesting that, in addition to significant shifts in subsiste…
Following the Mississippian Spread
Contextualizing Mississippian Migration in Early Fort Ancient Villages
The transition to sedentary village life and maize agriculture was an important turning point in the prehistory of the American midcontinent. This article presents the results of excavations at the Turpin site, one of the earliest agricultural villages in the Middle Ohio Valley, located just east of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although earlier researchers suggested that Turpin was occupied later during the Fort Ancient period, our work confidently anchors …
Wealth inequality, social stratification, and the built environment in Late Prehispanic Highland Mexico
Practical Application of Digital Photogrammetry for Fieldwork in the American Midwest
The use of close-range digital photogrammetry for field documentation has been steadily increasing in the past half decade in several parts of the world. However, this technology has not been widely utilized in archaeological contexts in the American Midwest. We explore the utility of close-range photogrammetry in this region with examples from the Guard site (12D29), a Fort Ancient village located in southeastern Indiana. This article outlines t…
Practical Application of Digital Photogrammetry for Fieldwork in the American Midwest
The use of close-range digital photogrammetry for field documentation has been steadily increasing in the past half decade in several parts of the world. However, this technology has not been widely utilized in archaeological contexts in the American Midwest. We explore the utility of close-range photogrammetry in this region with examples from the Guard site (12D29), a Fort Ancient village located in southeastern Indiana. This article outlines t…
Growth of a Village
Examining the formation histories of single-component prehistoric villages is difficult using only radiocarbon dating. This study investigates such a case with the added considerations of two relative dating techniques, artifact accumulation and fluoride dating, at the Guard site (12D29), an early (ca. AD 1000-1300) Fort Ancient/Mississippian village located in southeast Indiana. The goal was to assess the depositional history of the individual h…
Climate Change and Migration Along a Mississippian Periphery
Archaeologists have long recognized an important relationship between climate change and the trajectory of the Mississippian polity at Cahokia, with twelfth- and thirteenth-century droughts playing a key role in transforming social relationships and the pace of monument construction. This environmental transition may have spurred emigration from Cahokia and surrounding farming communities. This raises the questions: What was the nature of environ…
Mississippian Processes and Histories
The spread of Mississippian culture throughout much of the Eastern US has long been of interest to archaeologists. Interpretations of this spread have oscillated widely over the development of the discipline between what are generally referred to as historical and processual approaches. This chapter briefly summarizes these approaches and then directly examines some key aspects of each. Integration of mortuary data with biodistance and chemical a…
Continuity and Change in the Native American Village
Two common questions asked in archaeological investigations are: where did a particular culture come from, and which living cultures is it related to? In this book, Robert A. Cook brings a theoretically and methodologically holistic perspective to his study on the origins and continuity of Native American villages in the North American Midcontinent. He shows that to affiliate archaeological remains with descendant communities fully we need to una…
Evaluating the utility of archaeological index fossils
Intracemetery biological variation at the fort ancient sunwatch village
OBJECTIVES: We investigate intracemetery biological variation at the Fort Ancient SunWatch village (800-500 BP.) to test the hypothesis that the SunWatch population consisted of spatially structured biologically differentiated kin groups consisting of distinct local Late Woodland and non-local Mississippian biological populations. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The SunWatch sample contains 166 individuals: 63 adults and 103 subadults. We analyze intraceme…
Early Village Life in Southeastern Indiana
Investigations at the Guard site (12D29), located in Dearborn County, Indiana, have provided evidence pertaining to the development of early Fort Ancient villages. Recent geophysical survey and excavations alongside many new radiocarbon dates have allowed for improved understanding of household architecture and intrasite variability. Although some scholars have hypothesized that Middle Fort Ancient villages developed out of small early Fort Ancie…
Maize, mounds, and the movement of people
Focusing on the Old Wood Problem
Our recent paper demonstrated that radiocarbon assays sampled from wood charcoal were not systematically skewed when compared to non-wood samples from the same site. This suggests that the “old wood” problem may not be quite as problematic in the temperate Middle Ohio Valley as many suspect. In their comment, Hart and Nolan missed our broader point and mischaracterized our findings. Specifically, we did not suggest that our findings apply to the …
Sense and Sensibility in Midwestern Archaeology and the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology , Part III
Toward More Continuous and Practical Artifact Analyses
Artifact typologies are routinely created, debated, and modified, but too rarely is the goal to focus on small geographic regions and to define key axes of variation. Our goal is to further this practice by examining the utility of a long-standing artifact typology from the U.S. Midwest, one associated with discerning temporal changes in triangular projectile-point forms. Our samples are derived from nine well-dated Fort Ancient villages along th…
Aggregation, interregional interaction, and postmarital residence patterning
This study examines a perennial problem in anthropology, changes in postmarital residence patterning. Cross‐cultural patterns related to shifts from patrilocal to matrilocal patterns have been attributed to changes in subsistence and/or the result of migrants entering a populated region. Shifts from matrilocal to multilocal patterns have been found to be related to depopulation. This study examines these possibilities in an archeological context …
Evaluating the Old Wood Problem in a Temperate Climate
Schiffer (1986) first identified the old wood problem for wood charcoal-based dates from archaeological contexts in the American Southwest. The potential for dates to be skewed toward excessively old calendar ages in this region has recently generated reticence in part of the archaeological community towards including wood charcoal dates in general. Some scholars have even begun to cleanse the radiocarbon databases of regions throughout North Ame…
Lake levels, mobility and lithic raw material selection and reduction strategies
It has recently been proposed that lowered lake levels after 4250 BP broadened opportunities for mobility and interaction patterns among hunter-gatherer populations in the Saginaw drainage and in Michigan more broadly (; ). Here, data are presented on chipped stone reduction strategies as reflected in two site assemblages in Bay City, Michigan (20BY28, 20BY387) that bridge this key point in time. The earliest Late Archaic components of these site…
Deer use in good times and in bad
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) utilisation before and during increased moisture variability and pronounced drought conditions during the late prehistory of southwestern Ohio is examined to assess the fit with the expectations of foraging efficiency models. The focus is on three Fort Ancient sites in the upper portion of the Great Miami River, including SunWatch, a large village located in present-day Dayton, Ohio. SunWatch was occupie…
Dogs of War
Interpreting ritual activity at ancient sites, such as Sun Watch Village in the Middle Ohio Valley, can be difficult without clear and specific historical connections to later groups. This Fort Ancient site yielded evidence of ritual use of dogs and wolves that resemble those documented for several Central Algonquian and Siouan/Plains tribes. Although these ethnographic groups have not been conclusively linked as direct descendants of Middle Ohio…
A Critique of Late Prehistoric Systematics in the Middle Ohio River Valley
Most extant classification schemes for the Late Prehistoric period (LP) in the Middle Ohio River Valley (MORV) are typological and extensionally derived. Typological schemes create artificially sharp breaks among types. Implicitly constructed types rely on an essentialist ontology and a belief in a discoverable, emic reality. Most LP classificatory units in the MORV are inherited from James B. Griffin's early Culture-History work. These units, an…
Eating between the Lines
Appreciating variation along the edges of traditional archaeological Culture Historical boundaries requires close consideration of social contexts associated with culture contact. We focus on dietary variation as a function of these concerns through a case study of Fort Ancient populations who, on average, consumed lower quantities of maize than their Mississippian neighbors as determined by stable carbon isotope ratios of bone collagen. However,…
Maize, mounds, and the movement of people
Climate Change and Migration Along a Mississippian Periphery
Archaeologists have long recognized an important relationship between climate change and the trajectory of the Mississippian polity at Cahokia, with twelfth- and thirteenth-century droughts playing a key role in transforming social relationships and the pace of monument construction. This environmental transition may have spurred emigration from Cahokia and surrounding farming communities. This raises the questions: What was the nature of environ…
Evaluating the Old Wood Problem in a Temperate Climate
Schiffer (1986) first identified the old wood problem for wood charcoal-based dates from archaeological contexts in the American Southwest. The potential for dates to be skewed toward excessively old calendar ages in this region has recently generated reticence in part of the archaeological community towards including wood charcoal dates in general. Some scholars have even begun to cleanse the radiocarbon databases of regions throughout North Ame…
Beyond Squier and Davis
The prehistoric earthworks of Ohio have played a major role in the development of American archaeology and they continue to figure prominently in archaeological research. However, while a select group of larger earthwork sites have been intensively studied and resurveyed with geophysical survey instruments, much of the ongoing earthwork research, and reference to less-well-known sites, still relies on nineteenth-and early twentieth-century maps. …
Single Component Sites with Long Sequences of Radiocarbon Dates
Radiocarbon dates from single-component prehistoric sites often span temporal sequences too long to be accounted for by spatial overlap in the patterning of features. One such example is the SunWatch site, which was long interpreted as a single-component occupation of relatively short duration (15-20 years), although the radiocarbon sequence comfortably spans a 500-year period (ca. A.D. 1000 to 1500). This study compares spatial contexts of the S…
Wealth inequality, social stratification, and the built environment in Late Prehispanic Highland Mexico
Early Village Life in Southeastern Indiana
Investigations at the Guard site (12D29), located in Dearborn County, Indiana, have provided evidence pertaining to the development of early Fort Ancient villages. Recent geophysical survey and excavations alongside many new radiocarbon dates have allowed for improved understanding of household architecture and intrasite variability. Although some scholars have hypothesized that Middle Fort Ancient villages developed out of small early Fort Ancie…
Following the Mississippian Spread
Intracemetery biological variation at the fort ancient sunwatch village
OBJECTIVES: We investigate intracemetery biological variation at the Fort Ancient SunWatch village (800-500 BP.) to test the hypothesis that the SunWatch population consisted of spatially structured biologically differentiated kin groups consisting of distinct local Late Woodland and non-local Mississippian biological populations. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The SunWatch sample contains 166 individuals: 63 adults and 103 subadults. We analyze intraceme…
Reconstructing Perishable Architecture
Perishable architectural evidence recovered from prehistoric sites can be used to address significant archaeological questions regarding natural formation processes, occupation duration, and the physical appearance of houses. Specifically, postholes, wall daub, and mud dauber nests hold a variety of clues. Posthole frequency can be used to refine site chronology. Posthole size can be used to examine the structural capacities of house walls, and t…
Toward More Continuous and Practical Artifact Analyses
Artifact typologies are routinely created, debated, and modified, but too rarely is the goal to focus on small geographic regions and to define key axes of variation. Our goal is to further this practice by examining the utility of a long-standing artifact typology from the U.S. Midwest, one associated with discerning temporal changes in triangular projectile-point forms. Our samples are derived from nine well-dated Fort Ancient villages along th…
Aggregation, interregional interaction, and postmarital residence patterning
This study examines a perennial problem in anthropology, changes in postmarital residence patterning. Cross‐cultural patterns related to shifts from patrilocal to matrilocal patterns have been attributed to changes in subsistence and/or the result of migrants entering a populated region. Shifts from matrilocal to multilocal patterns have been found to be related to depopulation. This study examines these possibilities in an archeological context …
The Human-Animal Link
IN RECENT YEARS, outbreaks of diseases such as avian flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Ebola virus, and mad cow disease have frightened the public, disrupted global commerce, caused massive economic losses, and jeopardized diplomatic relations. These diseases have also shared a worrisome key characteristic: the ability to cross the Darwinian divide between animals and people. None of these illnesses depends on human hosts for its…
Dogs of War
Interpreting ritual activity at ancient sites, such as Sun Watch Village in the Middle Ohio Valley, can be difficult without clear and specific historical connections to later groups. This Fort Ancient site yielded evidence of ritual use of dogs and wolves that resemble those documented for several Central Algonquian and Siouan/Plains tribes. Although these ethnographic groups have not been conclusively linked as direct descendants of Middle Ohio…
Economic and Land-Use Implications of Prehistoric Fire-Cracked-Rock Piles, Northern Arizona
Intensive archaeological survey of 14.5 sq km of the Upper Basin, an area located near the Grand Canyon's eastern South Rim in northern Arizona, has discovered 126 fire-cracked-rock piles that are surrounded by artifact scatters of varying size and assemblage composition. Because these phenomena are unprecedented in upland conifer ecosystems of the American Southwest, several hypotheses are explored regarding their formation histories. Analyses o…
Contextualizing Mississippian Migration in Early Fort Ancient Villages
The transition to sedentary village life and maize agriculture was an important turning point in the prehistory of the American midcontinent. This article presents the results of excavations at the Turpin site, one of the earliest agricultural villages in the Middle Ohio Valley, located just east of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although earlier researchers suggested that Turpin was occupied later during the Fort Ancient period, our work confidently anchors …
Volatile Climate Conditions Cahokia
The rapidly growing archaeological literature on Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions (e.g., Benson et al. 2007; Cooper 2008; Stahle et al. 2007) demonstrates the significant gains that can be made in explaining cultural developments in prehistory when appropriate climate data are available. Benson et al. (2009) added to this literature with an analysis of the climatic conditions associated with peak social complexity in the Ameri…
Fort Ancient-Mississippian Interaction and Shell-Tempered Pottery at SunWatch Village, Ohio
The use of mussel shell for tempering pottery vessels by Fort Ancient societies is poorly understood. Suggestions have included both diffusion from neighboring Mississippian social groups and local developments, although no studies have investigated whether shell-tempered pottery is non-local or associated with Mississippian features and artifact types within Fort Ancient sites. This study begins to remedy this deficiency by examining the social …
Deer use in good times and in bad
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) utilisation before and during increased moisture variability and pronounced drought conditions during the late prehistory of southwestern Ohio is examined to assess the fit with the expectations of foraging efficiency models. The focus is on three Fort Ancient sites in the upper portion of the Great Miami River, including SunWatch, a large village located in present-day Dayton, Ohio. SunWatch was occupie…
A Critique of Late Prehistoric Systematics in the Middle Ohio River Valley
Most extant classification schemes for the Late Prehistoric period (LP) in the Middle Ohio River Valley (MORV) are typological and extensionally derived. Typological schemes create artificially sharp breaks among types. Implicitly constructed types rely on an essentialist ontology and a belief in a discoverable, emic reality. Most LP classificatory units in the MORV are inherited from James B. Griffin's early Culture-History work. These units, an…
Middle Ohio Valley Maize Histories
The transition to maize agriculture frames important cultural shifts in the Eastern Woodlands. However, the tempo and mode of this transition are unclear, particularly when analytical techniques are not standard across the region. In this article, we present evidence of directly dated maize macrobotanical fragments from the Turpin site in southwest Ohio that date between cal AD 552-649 and 684-994. These dates add to current dialogues on the spre…
Modeling Diachronic Changes in Site Location Preferences Related to an Agricultural Transition
This article explores changes in site location preferences that accompanied the shift to a maize-farming lifestyle in the Middle Ohio River valley. Criteria including distance between sites, distance to earthen mounds, distance to rivers, and soil types are documented for both Late Woodland and Fort Ancient sites in southwest Ohio. These data are incorporated into a multivariate model suggesting that, in addition to significant shifts in subsiste…
Practical Application of Digital Photogrammetry for Fieldwork in the American Midwest
The use of close-range digital photogrammetry for field documentation has been steadily increasing in the past half decade in several parts of the world. However, this technology has not been widely utilized in archaeological contexts in the American Midwest. We explore the utility of close-range photogrammetry in this region with examples from the Guard site (12D29), a Fort Ancient village located in southeastern Indiana. This article outlines t…
Evaluating the utility of archaeological index fossils
Economic and Land-Use Implications of Prehistoric Fire-Cracked-Rock Piles, Northern Arizona
Intensive archaeological survey of 14.5 sq km of the Upper Basin, an area located near the Grand Canyon's eastern South Rim in northern Arizona, has discovered 126 fire-cracked-rock piles that are surrounded by artifact scatters of varying size and assemblage composition. Because these phenomena are unprecedented in upland conifer ecosystems of the American Southwest, several hypotheses are explored regarding their formation histories. Analyses o…
Economic and Land-Use Implications of Prehistoric Fire-Cracked-Rock Piles, Northern Arizona
Alan P. Sullivan, III, Robert A. Cook, Matthew P. Purtill, Patrick M. Uphus, Economic and Land-Use Implications of Prehistoric Fire-Cracked-Rock Piles, Northern Arizona, Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 28, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 2001), pp. 367-382
We The People. Vol. II
Journal Article We The People. Vol. II: Transformations, Bruce Ackerman Get access Robert Cook Robert Cook University of Sheffield Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 467, June 2001, Pages 766–767, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/116.467.766 Published: 01 June 2001
Telling Accounts of Wound Infections
Drawing from an interpretive study this article reports on an investigation into the way that patients receive information about having a surgical wound infection. The study findings indicated that patients often struggle to gain this information and health professionals use a range of strategies to avoid rather than engage the patient in discussions about their infection. A sociological analysis of this avoidance draws upon the literature pertai…
Reconstructing Perishable Architecture
Perishable architectural evidence recovered from prehistoric sites can be used to address significant archaeological questions regarding natural formation processes, occupation duration, and the physical appearance of houses. Specifically, postholes, wall daub, and mud dauber nests hold a variety of clues. Posthole frequency can be used to refine site chronology. Posthole size can be used to examine the structural capacities of house walls, and t…
The Human-Animal Link
IN RECENT YEARS, outbreaks of diseases such as avian flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Ebola virus, and mad cow disease have frightened the public, disrupted global commerce, caused massive economic losses, and jeopardized diplomatic relations. These diseases have also shared a worrisome key characteristic: the ability to cross the Darwinian divide between animals and people. None of these illnesses depends on human hosts for its…
Fort Ancient-Mississippian Interaction and Shell-Tempered Pottery at SunWatch Village, Ohio
The use of mussel shell for tempering pottery vessels by Fort Ancient societies is poorly understood. Suggestions have included both diffusion from neighboring Mississippian social groups and local developments, although no studies have investigated whether shell-tempered pottery is non-local or associated with Mississippian features and artifact types within Fort Ancient sites. This study begins to remedy this deficiency by examining the social …
Single Component Sites with Long Sequences of Radiocarbon Dates
Radiocarbon dates from single-component prehistoric sites often span temporal sequences too long to be accounted for by spatial overlap in the patterning of features. One such example is the SunWatch site, which was long interpreted as a single-component occupation of relatively short duration (15-20 years), although the radiocarbon sequence comfortably spans a 500-year period (ca. A.D. 1000 to 1500). This study compares spatial contexts of the S…
Eating between the Lines
Appreciating variation along the edges of traditional archaeological Culture Historical boundaries requires close consideration of social contexts associated with culture contact. We focus on dietary variation as a function of these concerns through a case study of Fort Ancient populations who, on average, consumed lower quantities of maize than their Mississippian neighbors as determined by stable carbon isotope ratios of bone collagen. However,…
An evolutionary model of social change in the Middle Ohio Valley
Volatile Climate Conditions Cahokia
The rapidly growing archaeological literature on Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions (e.g., Benson et al. 2007; Cooper 2008; Stahle et al. 2007) demonstrates the significant gains that can be made in explaining cultural developments in prehistory when appropriate climate data are available. Benson et al. (2009) added to this literature with an analysis of the climatic conditions associated with peak social complexity in the Ameri…
A Critique of Late Prehistoric Systematics in the Middle Ohio River Valley
Most extant classification schemes for the Late Prehistoric period (LP) in the Middle Ohio River Valley (MORV) are typological and extensionally derived. Typological schemes create artificially sharp breaks among types. Implicitly constructed types rely on an essentialist ontology and a belief in a discoverable, emic reality. Most LP classificatory units in the MORV are inherited from James B. Griffin's early Culture-History work. These units, an…
Making and Breaking Pots in a Late Prehistoric Village in the Midwest United States
This article presents pottery manufacturing data from the SunWatch site, a late prehistoric village in the Midwest United States. The SunWatch pottery assemblage is suitable for such a study as the sherds have been refitted to a large degree, resulting in numerous complete profiles that maximize data that can be derived regarding manufacture. Additionally, previous research has shown that this village was occupied once or few brief times when pot…
Beyond Squier and Davis
The prehistoric earthworks of Ohio have played a major role in the development of American archaeology and they continue to figure prominently in archaeological research. However, while a select group of larger earthwork sites have been intensively studied and resurveyed with geophysical survey instruments, much of the ongoing earthwork research, and reference to less-well-known sites, still relies on nineteenth-and early twentieth-century maps. …
Determining Site Size and Structure
A basic problem in archaeological research is determining site size and structure. In this paper we develop an approach that sequentially employs several survey techniques, including aerial photography, magnetic gradiometry, magnetic susceptibility, and shovel testing in the context of the Wildcat site (33My499), a Fort Ancient habitation site located near Dayton, Ohio. Defining site size and structure was a challenge at Wildcat since it is locat…
Dogs of War
Interpreting ritual activity at ancient sites, such as Sun Watch Village in the Middle Ohio Valley, can be difficult without clear and specific historical connections to later groups. This Fort Ancient site yielded evidence of ritual use of dogs and wolves that resemble those documented for several Central Algonquian and Siouan/Plains tribes. Although these ethnographic groups have not been conclusively linked as direct descendants of Middle Ohio…
Lake levels, mobility and lithic raw material selection and reduction strategies
It has recently been proposed that lowered lake levels after 4250 BP broadened opportunities for mobility and interaction patterns among hunter-gatherer populations in the Saginaw drainage and in Michigan more broadly (; ). Here, data are presented on chipped stone reduction strategies as reflected in two site assemblages in Bay City, Michigan (20BY28, 20BY387) that bridge this key point in time. The earliest Late Archaic components of these site…
Deer use in good times and in bad
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) utilisation before and during increased moisture variability and pronounced drought conditions during the late prehistory of southwestern Ohio is examined to assess the fit with the expectations of foraging efficiency models. The focus is on three Fort Ancient sites in the upper portion of the Great Miami River, including SunWatch, a large village located in present-day Dayton, Ohio. SunWatch was occupie…
Toward More Continuous and Practical Artifact Analyses
Artifact typologies are routinely created, debated, and modified, but too rarely is the goal to focus on small geographic regions and to define key axes of variation. Our goal is to further this practice by examining the utility of a long-standing artifact typology from the U.S. Midwest, one associated with discerning temporal changes in triangular projectile-point forms. Our samples are derived from nine well-dated Fort Ancient villages along th…
Aggregation, interregional interaction, and postmarital residence patterning
This study examines a perennial problem in anthropology, changes in postmarital residence patterning. Cross‐cultural patterns related to shifts from patrilocal to matrilocal patterns have been attributed to changes in subsistence and/or the result of migrants entering a populated region. Shifts from matrilocal to multilocal patterns have been found to be related to depopulation. This study examines these possibilities in an archeological context …
Evaluating the Old Wood Problem in a Temperate Climate
Schiffer (1986) first identified the old wood problem for wood charcoal-based dates from archaeological contexts in the American Southwest. The potential for dates to be skewed toward excessively old calendar ages in this region has recently generated reticence in part of the archaeological community towards including wood charcoal dates in general. Some scholars have even begun to cleanse the radiocarbon databases of regions throughout North Ame…
Early Village Life in Southeastern Indiana
Investigations at the Guard site (12D29), located in Dearborn County, Indiana, have provided evidence pertaining to the development of early Fort Ancient villages. Recent geophysical survey and excavations alongside many new radiocarbon dates have allowed for improved understanding of household architecture and intrasite variability. Although some scholars have hypothesized that Middle Fort Ancient villages developed out of small early Fort Ancie…
Maize, mounds, and the movement of people
Focusing on the Old Wood Problem
Our recent paper demonstrated that radiocarbon assays sampled from wood charcoal were not systematically skewed when compared to non-wood samples from the same site. This suggests that the “old wood” problem may not be quite as problematic in the temperate Middle Ohio Valley as many suspect. In their comment, Hart and Nolan missed our broader point and mischaracterized our findings. Specifically, we did not suggest that our findings apply to the …
Sense and Sensibility in Midwestern Archaeology and the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology , Part III
Archaeology (33 obras) · Geography (30 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (29 obras) · History (16 obras) · Prehistory (15 obras) · Geology (14 obras) · Ecology (11 obras) · Geology (10 obras) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (10 obras) · History (9 obras)