Geographical Areas of Specialization:
North America, Plains
Topical Interests:
Zooarchaeology, Faunal Analysis, North American Archaeology, Native
American Ethnohistory, Culture Contact, Archaeological Theory and
Practice, Historical Anthropology, Landscapes, Identity, Archaeological
Fiction
Current Courses: P360 Archaeology of North America, E104 People and Animals
Profile:
In my research, I address long-term social dynamics on the North American Plains by considering culture contact and colonialism, household production, and micro-scale daily activities. My specialty is the identification and analysis of large mammal bones, particularly bison. I emphasize processes of production, transportation, processing, cooking, and discard.
Since 1990 I have been studying the intersection between food processing and cultural identity during the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric periods, trying to unravel relationships between High Plains hunter-gatherers and Central Plains villagers. With the help of countless students, I am analyzing faunal material from several sites, including the Donovan site, a hunting camp in northeastern Colorado , A.D. 1000-1300, the Albert Bell site, a farmstead in western Kansas , A.D. 1300, and the Little River Site 14RC410, a Protohistoric Wichita farmstead in south-central Kansas , A.D. 1450.
I am also the co-director of an archaeological research project Exploring Social and Historical Landscapes of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It consists of two spatially separate locations around the Bighorn Basin of northern Wyoming and southern Montana , one adjacent to the Crow Indian Reservation on the western slope of the Bighorn Mountains and the other in the Shoshone homeland of the Absaroka Mountains . This is collaborative research with Northwest College (Powell, Wyoming), Little Big Horn College (Crow Agency, Montana), St. Cloud State University (Minnesota), the National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service. I address historical and cultural topics by examining the ways that Native American inhabitants of the Rocky Mountains crafted social identities, manipulated material culture, and situated themselves within the broader landscape.
The first of these locations is at the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. My focus is on the domestic architecture of stone circles, the former locations of tipis. Many of these sites are located along the Bad Pass Trail, a National Register site in Bighorn Canyon constructed during prehistoric times and used by numerous Native American tribes, early 19th century trapping expeditions, and U.S. army patrols during the Plains Indian campaigns. By combining traditional mapping techniques with digital technology (integrating GIS, GPS, geophysical survey, and artifact and feature attribute data), our collective data provide a comprehensive package for understanding domestic space and everyday lives.
This project has expanded to the wilderness mountain areas of northwestern Wyoming, where I am investigating Shoshone campsites and bighorn sheep traps of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because the residents of these sites were pushed into this remote mountainous location by expanding American Indian and Euroamerican populations, virtually nothing is known about them.
The material inventory includes a wide range of both aboriginal and introduced materials, many of which date to the fur trade era. The materials are clustered into distinct activity areas, such as tool manufacture, animal butchery and bone processing, cooking facilities, and craft production. This reveals information about the relationships among the artifacts and the spatiality of everyday practice. The exceptional range of aboriginal and introduced materials at these sites is the only example of its kind in the west.
As part of this research, I also teach a summer archaeological fieldschool http://www.indiana.edu/~anthro/about/news/archfieldschool.html. Come see us sometime!
Selected Publications:
| 2008 |
Scheiber, Laura L. and Bonnie J. Clark (editors). Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains . University Press of Colorado, Boulder.
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| 2008 |
Scheiber, Laura L. Intersecting Landscapes in Northeastern Colorado: A Case Study from the Donovan Site In Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Bonnie J. Clark, pp. 17-40. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.
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| 2008 |
Clark, Bonnie J. and Laura L. Scheiber. A Sloping Land: An Introduction to Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains In Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Bonnie J. Clark, pp. 1-16. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. |
| 2008 |
Scheiber, Laura L. Life and Death on the Northwestern Plains: Mortuary Practices and Cultural Transformations. In Skeletal Biology and Bioarchaeology of the Northwestern Plains, edited by George W. Gill and Rick L. Weathermon, pp. 22-41. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. |
| 2008 |
Scheiber, Laura L., Judson Byrd Finley, and Maureen P. Boyle. Bad Pass Archaeology. American Surveyor 5(4):12-23. |
| 2007 |
Scheiber, Laura L. The Economy of Bison Exploitation on the Late Prehistoric North American High Plains. Journal of Field Archaeology. 32(3):297–313 |
| 2007 |
Scheiber, Laura L. and Charles A. Reher. The Donovan Site (5LO204: An Upper Republican Animal Processing Camp on the High Plains Plains Anthropologist 52(203):337-364. |
| 2006 |
Scheiber, Laura L., Skeletal Biology: Plains. In Handbook
of North American Indians: Environment, Population, and Origins,
Volume 3, edited by Douglas Ubelaker, pp. 595-609. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
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| 2006 |
Scheiber, Laura L., The Late Prehistoric on the High Plains of Western Kansas In Kansas Archaeology, edited by Robert
J. Hoard and William E. Banks, pp. 133-150. University of Kansas,
Lawrence. |
| 2005 |
Scheiber, Laura L. Late Prehistoric Bison Hide Production and Hunter Gatherer Identities on the North American Plains. In Gender and Hide Production, edited by Lisa Frink and Kathryn
Weedman, pp. 57-75. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California.
In Gender and Archaeology Series, edited by Sarah M. Nelson. |
| 2001 |
Scheiber, Laura L. Late Prehistoric Daily Practice and Culture Contact on the North American High Plains: A Zooarchaeological Perspective. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley. ANYONE WHO WOULD LIKE A COPY OF THIS DOCUMENT, PLEASE CONTACT DR. SCHEIBER DIRECTLY. |
| 1997 |
Scheiber, Laura L. and George W. Gill, Bioarcheology of the
Northwestern Plains. In Bioarcheology of the North Central United
States, edited by D. W. Owsley and J. C. Rose, pp. 88-114. Arkansas
Archeological Survey Research Series, No. 49. |
| 1995 |
Wyatt, Deborah J. and Laura L. Scheiber, Squatting Facets
on the Northwestern Plains Collection: Postural Habits and Ethnic
Diversity. Wyoming Contributions to Anthropology 4:39-49. |
| 1995 |
Reher, Charles A. and Laura L. Scheiber, Tree Growth on the Snake River Floodplain, Jackson Hole, Wyoming.. US Army Corps
of Engineers, Wetlands Program Technical Report WRP-RE-9. US Army Engineer Watersways Experiment Station, Vicksburg, MS. NTIS No. AD A302 - 962.
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| 1994 |
Scheiber, Laura L., A Probable Early Ninteenth Century Crow Burial: The Pitchfork Rockshelter Reexamined Plains Anthropologist 39(147):37-51. |
