Community, Household & Landscape:

Examining Spatial Structure for Evidence of Integration
at the Morton Village Site, Fulton County, Illinois
Speaker: Nicole Marie “Nikki” Klarmann, M.A.

Social Hour/Member Meetings begin at 3:00pm.
Lectures begin at 3:30pm. All are welcome.
Evanston Public Library: Community Meeting Room,
1703 Orrington Ave, Evanston 60201
May 19, 2019 Ms. Nicole Marie Klarmann 
The Fulton Morton Village Site

Ms. Nikki Klarmann asks “What happens when two populations with differing cultural identities interact and cohabitate?”  In our final program in the lecture series this year, she will propose answers to that question based on field work at the Morton Village Site in Fulton County, Illinois.

Klarmann suggests that coalescence, or the cultural reorganization and formation of multiethnic and multilingual communities, is one possible outcome.

In archaeological contexts, material culture can help determine the level of integration or coalescence between distinct groups that interacted or cohabitated. However, it should not be assumed that a one-to-one relationship between cultural materials and people exists. In many contexts of interaction, a mixture of materials attributable to differing groups of people may be found. How then can the mixing of archaeological materials be used to identify the degree of coalescence? Beyond archaeological contexts, understanding prolonged, spatially-based interactions and coalescence has larger implications for understanding today’s cultural groups who find themselves cohabitating with other groups (e.g., post migration or as refugees) and possibly affecting policy and practice that could promote integration of these migrant or refugee groups into the larger society.

Morton Village (11F2), located in Fulton County, Illinois, is the case study for this multiscalar spatial analysis. Dating to a single occupation, ca. AD 1200 to 1400, the site provides clear evidence for the cohabitation of Middle Mississippian and Bold Counselor Phase Oneota groups.  However, the level of cultural integration at the site is under-explored. Ceramic attributes and architectural styles have typically been used to discern Oneota and Mississippian contexts. Material culture provides a valuable line of evidence for examining coalescence, but how people organized themselves spatially allows an innovative and finer contextualization of the distinctions and the merging of material culture. Research adds to the scholarship of coalescence. A multi-scalar spatial approach is employed to detect the level of coalescence within the Morton Village archaeological site, integrating data from the landscape, community, and household spatial scales. Initial findings of the case study and future directions of the research will be presented.

Nikki Klarmann, MA, originally from Texas, earned a BS in Anthropology at Baylor University. While there, she excavated in Belize. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at Michigan State University. Ms. Klarmann began working at the Morton Village archaeological site in Fulton County in the summer of 2013 as part of the joint Michigan State University and Dickson Mounds Museum Archaeological Project. For five summers since 2013, she excavated at Morton Village in a variety of roles, as a research assistant, teaching assistant, public programming supervisor, graduate student mentor, and as the coordinator of excavations, also doing archaeology lab work cleaning and cataloging artifacts recovered during excavations. Klarmann’s doctoral dissertation focuses on the spatial organization of Morton Village and whether the migrant Bold Counselor Oneota and local Middle Mississippian populations had an integrated, coalesced community at Morton Village.