Director | Center for Archaeological Investigations | SIU

Mark Wagner, Director
& Associate Professor of Anthropology

Email: mjwagner@siu.edu

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My interests include the prehistory and early history of both Native Americans and Europeans in Illinois and the lower Ohio River Valley. I am particularly interested in culture contact issues between Native Americans and Euro-Americans and the variable outcomes contact had for members of both groups. Current projects include the investigation of an 1801-1802 U.S. Army post (Cantonment Wilkinson) that represented a reserve base for an invasion of the then Spanish-held Mississippi River Valley that never took place as well as the documentation of nineteenth century shipwrecks in the lower Ohio River. I also have a strong interest in Native American rock art sites focused around my belief that these sites represent largely untapped sources of information regarding prehistoric Native American spirituality and religious beliefs.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

2006   Going to See the Varmint: Piracy in Myth and Reality on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, 1785-1830 (first author with Mary R. McCorvie). In The Archaeology of Piracy, edited by Charles R. Ewen and Russell Skowronek. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

2005   The Flatboat America (11Pu280): An Early Nineteenth Century Flatboat Wreck in Pulaski County, Illinois. Illinois Archaeology 14.

2004a   Mississippian Cosmology and Rock Art at the Millstone Bluff Site in Southern Illinois (first author with Mary R. McCorvie and Charles Swedlund). In The Rock-Art of Eastern North America: Capturing Images and Insight, edited by Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

2004b   Visions of Other Worlds: The Native American Rock Art of Illinois. An Internet publication on rock art for the general public on the Illinois Archaeological Survey website.

2003   Smoking Pipe Manufacture and Use Among the Potawatomi of Illinois. In Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era, edited by Charles Cobb. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

2001a   The Archaeology and Rock Art of the Piney Creek Ravine. Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Series, Volume 12. Urbana, Illinois.

2001b   The Windrose Site: An Early Nineteenth Century Potawatomi Settlement in the Kankakee River Valley of Northeastern Illinois. Illinois State Museum Reports of Investigations No. 56. Springfield, Illinois.

1997   Some Doubt That They Can be Civilized at All": Cultural Change and Continuity Among the Nineteenth Century Potawatomi. In Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change and Archaeology, edited by James Cusick. Center for Archaeological Occasional Paper No. 25, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

1996   Written in Stone: An Overview of the Rock Art of Illinois. In Rock Art of the Eastern Woodlands, edited by Charles H. Faulkner, pp. 47-79. American Rock Art Research Association Occasional Paper 2. San Miguel, California.