"Buried Horizons: Koster and the Kingdom of Lowilva"

Описание: "Buried Horizons: Koster and the Kingdom of Lowilva"

Steve Boles –Senior Research Archaeologist, Illinois State Archaeological Survey

Buried cultural horizons offer relatively clean temporal assemblages but are unfortunately, rarely encountered during archaeological investigations. Perhaps the premier example of such a site is the Koster site located in Greene County in southwestern Illinois. Stuart Struever from Northwestern University investigated this site from 1969 thru 1978. Cyclic occupation and abandonment of the site occurred over a span of 10,000 years. The various cultural horizons were buried by slope wash that provided sterile layers between cultural layers to a depth of over 30 feet below the surface. While the amount of data retrieved from the site is staggering, and perhaps because the data is staggering, very little has been written about the site. In 1979, Struever published an overview of the site that was written for the general public and this provides many of the highlights presented here. In addition to Struever’s book, I offer some unwritten stories provided by interviews with archaeologists that worked at Koster and other sites in the Lower Illinois River Valley, an area that Struever referred to as the Kingdom of Lowilva.