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Multidimensional prospecting in North American Great Plains village sites
Author(s) -
Kvamme Kenneth L.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
archaeological prospection
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.785
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1099-0763
pISSN - 1075-2196
DOI - 10.1002/arp.207
Subject(s) - settlement (finance) , archaeology , excavation , human settlement , prehistory , geophysical survey , geology , geography , prospecting , structural basin , geophysics , mining engineering , paleontology , world wide web , computer science , payment
Geophysical survey results are described for four prehistoric and historic fortified earthlodge settlements located in the Middle Missouri River basin of North and South Dakota, USA. One impetus for this work is the upcoming bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806 that used the Missouri as its route of travel. Celebrated as an event that helped to open the American West to Euroamerican settlement, tourism at archaeological parks is expected to markedly increase. Multidimensional geophysical surveys were used to pin‐point cultural anomalies for archaeological excavation and interpretation, but more importantly, the wide‐area mapping of the subsurface at these villages allowed visualization of their structure and organization, yielding many new insights. At Menoken Village ( AD 1240) previously unknown houses, oval in form, were revealed magnetically owing to their intense burning, as was an intravillage trail system seen in resistivity data. At Whistling Elk Village ( AD 1300) the first glimpse of the nature of this deeply buried settlement was achieved by resistivity and conductivity surveys, with magnetic indications that half of the houses had been burned. The geophysical evidence also hints at a second village, much more compact, that may lie within the primary settlement, supporting an attack theory established by limited excavation evidence. At Huff Village ( AD 1450) the magnetometry survey revealed the presence of vast numbers of previously unsuspected food storage pits outside of the numerous dwellings that lie within this settlement. At Mitu'tahakto's (1822–1861), an early historic Mandan/Arikara settlement, resistivity and GPR surveys discovered the presence of new and overlapping houses, and magnetometry indicated large differences in the number of iron artefacts between households, pointing to possible variations in access or status. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.