Sourcing Red Pipestone Artifacts from Oneota Villages in the Little Sioux Valley of Northwest Iowa

Drone-Acquired Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) Imagery in Landscape Archaeology: An Experimental Approach

“…Geologists have employed handheld spectrometers to create spectral libraries of the SWIR reflectance histograms for particular types of rocks and minerals, and they subsequently use these data to interpret multispectral satellite imagery or even train a classification [16,18,57]. Archaeologists have sometimes similarly used handheld spectrometers for artifact analysis, primarily as a tool for sourcing or identifying anthropogenic soils [29][30][31][32][33], and we hoped that this would enable the creation of a spectral library of artifact types in our study. However, the lack of correspondence in reflectance values between the two different SWIR sensors combined with the very-low and nearly flat histograms for most dark-colored artifacts in our study makes handheld spectrometer data difficult to utilize in our study.…”

“…Somewhat higher-resolution (3.7 m) eight-band SWIR imagery from the commercial WorldView-3 satellite program has likewise been shown to be an effective tool for archaeological-site and feature detection in the Middle East [25] and on Rapanui/Easter Island [26], but these data are costly to acquire, and the effectiveness of this imagery is highly dependent on the timing of data collection as it relates to localized ground cover. The prospects for the discovery and mapping of archaeologically significant features using higher-resolution SWIR imagery have been suggested by a handful of studies that have utilized aircraft-acquired data [27,28] or used portable spectrometers to illustrate unique reflectance properties of archaeological soils and surface artifacts [29][30][31][32][33]. However, these sensors are too large to be mounted on drones, and conventional aircraft cannot fly low or slow enough to collect imagery at a sub-decimeter resolution.…”

Identifying animate stones and sacred landscapes: Twenty-five years of native pipestone-quarries research in the American midcontinent

“…Gundersen (personal communication, 1990) was not aware of any native quarrying at its Jasper outcrop and given the scattered nature of the drift deposits, no quarries or workshops have been identified. However, native people did collect and utilize fragments from drift deposits (Fishel et al., 2010; Hadley, 2019).…”

“…Strangely enough, the red stone was not used by natives prior to Cahokia’s emergence or after the Cahokian polity declines despite what one would suspect to its high desirability in terms of native beliefs. Instead Upper Mississippi River Valley groups seem to desire the red catlinite pipestone from western Minnesota (e.g., Emerson and Hughes, 2001; Fishel et al., 2010). It appears that the Cahokian flint clay lost its power with the decline of the polity in the late AD 1200 s.…”