Date of Award

Spring 2013

Degree Type

Honors Project

School

College of Liberal Arts

First Advisor

Hoffman, Brian W.

Abstract

The Jeffers Petroglyphs is one of the most important ancient American Indian rock art sites in the Midwest. The site is unique with over 5,000 individual petroglyphs created over a 9,000-11,000 year span. There have been important studies and interpretations of the petroglyphs, but a large gap of information exists concerning the archaeological sites of those who helped create the petroglyphs. An analysis of the lithic (stone) raw materials found in a habitation site surrounding the Jeffers Petroglyphs was performed in order to help fill in this gap surrounding the origins of the petroglyph creators. The lithic assemblage analyzed was collected from the Gruenig Field site as part of Hamline University's archaeology field school which took place in the summers of 2011 and 2012. Comparison of the Gruenig data with the lithic materials recovered from other southwestern Minnesota sites demonstrates the unusual characteristic of the Jeffers exotic raw materials indicating a wider regional significance.

dc_type

text

dc_publisher

DigitalCommons@Hamline

dc_format

application/pdf

dc_source

Departmental Honors Project

Included in

Anthropology Commons

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