National Museum of the American Indian

ABSTRACT Many textiles produced by Native American Woodlands cultures are made from bast (phloem) fibers from North American plants. While bast fibers are easy to identify with microscopy, determining the exact species has long been a challenge. Historically, bast fibers from Native American communities have been referred to as “Indian hemp,” a confusing term at best. This project undertaken as part of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) focused on a combined approach by working with both community members and scientists to provide a cultural background for these important fibers as well as useful diagnostic tools for identification. Both macroscopic and microscopic characteristics were examined including color, feel, microfibrillar orientation, crystal species, and cross section analysis. A physical and digital reference collection was created for comparison. Eight fiber samples taken from six historic objects in NMAI’s collection were then examined to test effectiveness of bast fiber identification protocol. Results from this study confirm there continues to be limited success when identifying the exact bast fiber species in historic artifacts because of small sample size and aging characteristics.

ABSTRACT By studying the distribution of wind instruments made of bone, we investigate the presence of musical traditions in the American Southeast and nearby regions during the last few centuries prior to European arrival. Our findings show that southeastern Indigenous peoples used bone instruments far less than their neighbors, suggesting that they almost exclusively made whistles and flutes from reeds, wood, and other materials that do not survive in the archaeological record. This variation in materials was not based on a lack of knowledge, as we detail the presence of several bone wind instruments in the Southeast, but rather, we suggest, a unique musical tradition in the region.

¶ a Citizen of Navajo Nation and the Dine ´community. ¶ b Kanaka 'O ¯iwi diaspora from Micronesia.

Curricula and educational practices in schools largely define the collective understanding of what society has deemed relevant, accurate, and valued. From the earliest days of colonial contact, the narrative of the presence and role of Indigenous peoples has been offered from a primarily Eurocentric perspective. This process has become normalized and ingrained in the educational system and dictated stereotypes and biases about Indigenous nations and peoples. This process continues to do harm to Indigenous as well as non-Native learners. While this state of affairs has been clearly documented, and the harm is ongoing and pervasive, there are practices and policies that have been successful in mitigating these deleterious effects. Within a framework of conceptual change, educational leaders are called upon to help all stakeholders recognize more culturally appropriate and accurate representations of Indigenous nations and people.KeywordsIndigenous learnersCurriculum revisionMulticultural educationDecolonizing educationSystemic racismSystemic biasAmerican IndianNative AmericanIndigenous nationsIndigeneityEducational leadershipIndigenous sovereigntySettler orientation

Abstract Circular shell rings along the Atlantic Coast of southeastern North America are the remnants of some of the earliest villages that emerged during the Late Archaic Period (5000 – 3000 BP). Many of these villages, however, were abandoned during the Terminal Late Archaic Period (ca 3800 – 3000 BP). Here, we combine Bayesian chronological modeling with multiple environmental proxies to understand the nature and timing of environmental change associated with the emergence and abandonment of shell ring villages on Sapleo Island, Georgia. Our Bayesian models indicate that Native Americans occupied the three Sapelo shell rings at varying times with some generational overlap. By the end of the complex’s occupation, only Ring III was occupied before abandonment ca. 3845 BP. Ring III also consists of statistically smaller oysters (Crassostrea virginica) that people harvested from less saline estuaries compared to earlier occupations. These data, when integrated with recent tree ring analyses, show a clear pattern of environmental instability throughout the period in which the rings were occupied. We argue that as the climate became unstable around 4300 BP, aggregation at shell ring villages provided a way to effectively manage fisheries that are highly sensitive to environmental change. However, with the eventual collapse of oyster fisheries and subsequent rebound in environmental conditions ca. 3800 BP, people dispersed from shell rings, and shifted to non-marine subsistence economies and other types of settlements. This study provides the most comprehensive evidence correlations between large-scale environmental change and societal transformations on the Georgia coast during the Late Archaic period.

Among archaeologists using remote sensing there is tremendous potential for the use of deep learning models for the prospection of archaeological features. The need for relatively large training datasets, technical expertise, and computational requirements, however, has slowed the adoption of these techniques. Here, we train a series of deep earning models using two different model architectures (i.e., single-stage and dual-stage) to detect shell rings, a circular midden feature that is found across the American Southeast. Native American groups constructed these features during the mid-Holocene (5000-3000 cal B.P.). These deposits offer important information about pre-European contact socioeconomic organization among Native American groups (Figure 1). In the coastal area of the Atlantic, however, these features are relatively rare: only about 50 shell rings have been documented by archaeologists to date. To expand our knowledge of these features, we test RetinaNet and MaskRCNN deep learning models as means of detecting shell rings from wide-area LiDAR data using extremely small training datasets. We demonstrate that the use of "negative" training data to identify non-archaeological features helps to improve model performance. Furthermore, we show that while popular dual-stage detectors like Mask R-CNN perform better than single-stage models like RetinaNet, single-stage models still achieve acceptable levels of accuracy and require a fraction of the computational and time requirements of dual-stage detectors.

The eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) is an important proxy for examining historical trajectories of coastal ecosystems. Measurement of ~40,000 oyster shells from archaeological sites along the Atlantic Coast of the United States provides a long-term record of oyster abundance and size. The data demonstrate increases in oyster size across time and a nonrandom pattern in their distributions across sites. We attribute this variation to processes related to Native American fishing rights and environmental variability. Mean oyster length is correlated with total oyster bed length within foraging radii (5 and 10 km) as mapped in 1889 and 1890. These data demonstrate the stability of oyster reefs despite different population densities and environmental shifts and have implications for oyster reef restoration in an age of global climate change.

ABSTRACTArchaeologists have struggled to combine remotely sensed datasets with preexisting information for landscape-level analyses. In the American Southeast, for example, analyses of lidar data using automated feature extraction algorithms have led to the identification of over 40 potential new pre-European-contact Native American shell ring deposits in Beaufort County, South Carolina. Such datasets are vital for understanding settlement distributions, yet a comprehensive assessment requires remotely sensed and previously surveyed archaeological data. Here, we use legacy data and airborne lidar-derived information to conduct a series of point pattern analyses using spatial models that we designed to assess the factors that best explain the location of shell rings. The results reveal that ring deposit locations are highly clustered and best explained through a combination of environmental conditions such as distance to water and elevation as well as social factors.

The art history of Native North America built its corpus through considerations of “art-by-appropriation,” referring to selections of historically produced objects reconsidered as art, due to their artful properties, in addition to “art-by-intention,” referring to the work by known artists intended for the art market. The work of Siyosapa, a Hunkpapa/Yanktonai holy man active at Fort Peck, Montana during the 1880s and 1890s, troubles these distinctions with his painted drums and muslin paintings featuring the Sun Dance sold to figures of colonial authority: Military officers, agency officials, and others. This essay reassembles the corpus of his work through the analysis of documentary and collections records. In their unattributed state, some of his creations proved very influential during early attempts by art museums to define American Indian art within a modernist, twentieth century sense of world art history. However, after reestablishing Siyosapa’s agency in the creation and deployment of his drums and paintings, a far more complicated story emerges. While seemly offering “tourist art” or “market art,” his works also resemble diplomatic presentations, and represent material representations of his spiritual powers.