Remote Sensing Insights into Storage Capacities among Plains Village Horticulturalists

Maize was a fundamental component of the diet and economy of Middle Missouri Plains Village groups, sedentary farmers with settlements along the Missouri River during the last millennia. More than a century of study has contributed to our understanding of agricultural production among these peoples, but little effort has been made to consider temporal variation in production. Such an understanding is crucial to examining changes that occurred before and after the arrival of colonists and their trade goods in the seventeenth century. Plains archaeologists have suggested that the storage capacity of Middle Missouri villages increased during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In fact, the number and size of subterranean storage pits, ubiquitous features within most settlements, are thought to have grown during these centuries, which reflects greater agricultural production. To further examine changes in production and storage capacity during this centuries-long period, I combine information from historical documents, excavations, and geophysical investigations. At Huff Village, a fifteenth-century community, excavations and magnetic gradiometry surveys reveal the size and distribution of storage pits. Their number and average volume suggest the villagers grew immense amounts of food and contributed to widespread intertribal trade. Furthermore, storage pit excavation data from 20 regional sites, dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, indicate pit volumes increased through the seventeenth century. A sharp decrease subsequently occurred during the eighteenth century due to epidemic disease. However, mean pit volumes were significantly larger during the nineteenth century, evidence of the resilience of Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras and the continued significance of maize. In fact, historical documents and remote sensing data suggest the Mandans and Arikaras, successive occupants of an earthlodge village near the American Fur Company’s Fort Clark, traded crucial resources, namely maize, to neighboring Native groups and fur traders during the early to mid-nineteenth century. While traditional colonial narratives describe the period in terms of culture decline and dependency, my study indicates the Mandans and Arikaras acted in their own self-interest and influenced and accommodated colonial fur traders along the Missouri River in the Northern Plains during the nineteenth century

Archaeological aerial thermography: A case study at the Chaco-era Blue J community, New Mexico

Despite a long history of studies that demonstrate the potential of aerial thermography to reveal surface and subsurface cultural features, technological and cost barriers have prevented the widespread application of thermal imaging in archaeology. This paper presents a method for collection of high-resolution thermal imagery using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), as well as a means to efficiently process and orthorectify imagery using photogrammetric software. To test the method, aerial surveys were conducted at the Chaco-period Blue J community in northwestern New Mexico. Results enable the size and organization of most habitation sites to be readily mapped, and also reveal previously undocumented architectural features. Our easily replicable methodology produces data that rivals traditional archaeological geophysics in terms of feature visibility, but which can be collected very rapidly, over large areas, with minimal cost and processing requirements. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

The Nelson Site: A Cody Occupation in Northeastern Colorado

The Nelson site in northeastern Colorado represents a Cody age occupation of the High Plains. Because Paleoindian sites of any age are sparse in the archaeological record, each known occurrence adds significant information about prehistory. The Nelson site has received no formal field investigation; however, a small quantity of data has accumulated over nearly one half century of collecting. The cultural affiliation can be demonstrated with the recovered chipped stone assemblage and a new radiocarbon date, while zooarchaeological assessment of the fauna yields preliminary information about the nature of the occupation and Paleoindian lifeways