Fall 2012  

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Washington University in
St. Louis

Department of Anthropology

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College of Arts & Sciences

Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

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Environmental Archaeologist at the National Park Service
by Timothy Schilling, PhD 2010

Tim Schilling conducting an excavation on Monks Mound at the Cahokia Mounds site in 2009. His dissertation, An Archaeological Model of the Construction of Monks Mound and Implications for the Development of the Cahokian Society (800-1400 A.D.), investigated the relationship between monumental construction and social organization in Late Woodland and Mississippi societies in the American Bottom region.

After graduating with a doctorate in archaeology in 2010, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Indiana University's Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology. One of the most exciting projects was revising the chronology of the Angel Mounds in southeastern Indiana using methods that I first employed in my dissertation research at Wash U. This work involves using advanced statistical methods to model radiocarbon dates and contexts to provide a higher-resolution chronology than previously possible. I am also involved in many longer-term projects. In particular, I am collaborating with several researchers throughout the Midwest and Southeast to understand the changing diet of late prehistoric people. Our research focuses on tracing the diffusion of the common bean across eastern North America using high-resolution radiocarbon dates done directly on ancient beans from archaeological sites.

Beans spread across the Midwest and Southeast beginning after about 1000 AD, but the pathway and ultimate timing of their movement are not well-understood. In association with this project, we are trying to develop a better understanding of the environments into which the beans spread. This will involve extracting continuous, solid sediment cores from lake bottoms to recover ancient pollen and other environmental proxies. We believe that the spread of beans may be associated with changing climate in the late prehistoric period when conditions became cooler and wetter as the Medieval Warm Period transitioned into the Little Ice Age. During this period, Native American lifestyles changed dramatically, particularly in the Central Mississippi River Valley and Lower Ohio River Valley, but the chronology of climate changes and localized effects are not well studied in these regions.

After leaving the Glenn Black Lab in June 2011, I started a job as an archaeologist with the National Park Service. Specifically, my job duties involve advising national parks in the Midwest Region on how to care for the archaeological resources on these public lands. My first project is investigating a possible buffalo jump site in Wind Cave National Park near Black Hills, South Dakota. Buffalo jumps are locations where Native Americans stampeded buffalo over a cliff as a mass-kill hunting technique. The buffalo jump was first discovered in 1949, but the park only very recently acquired ownership of the land. This project will be the first comprehensive investigations at the site. It will include a geoarchaeological component where we will investigate changing environments within the canyon where the buffalo jump is located. I look forward to applying my training to pre-Columbian sites that will be accessible to the public and will provide a deeper understanding of past human use of the environment.