Aquatic Faunal Resources in the Middle and Late Archaic Periods: Using tDAR integration to Compare the Saginaw Valley and the Northern Prairie Peninsula Regions of the Upper Midwest

Within the broad region of the central and upper Midwest, zooarchaeologists of the Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group (EAFWG) are using tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record) to explore the utility of fine-scale comparison of faunal databases to address the use of aquatic resources during the Archaic period. This paper addresses the Middle and Late Archaic periods in the upper Midwest/Great Lakes with a comparison of sites in the Saginaw Valley and northern Illinois Prairie Peninsula using data integration analytic tools in tDAR at multiple scales. The paper will demonstrate that when datasets are rendered comparable through structured ontologies, observable trends emerge in the use of aquatic and terrestrial resources within and between subregions. With the tools to consider a range of variables, we can test hypotheses that we have generated about the use of animals during the Archaic and assess existing models using the comparable EAFWG faunal datasets.