Archaeological Narratives of the North American Great Plains: From Ancient Pasts to Historic Resettlement

By Sarah J. Trabert and Kacy L. Hollenback

Stretching from Canada to Texas and the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi River, the North American Great Plains have a complex and ancient history. The region has been home to Native peoples for at least 16,000 years. This volume is a synthesis of what is known about the Great Plains from an archaeological perspective, but it also highlights Indigenous knowledge, viewpoints, and concerns for a more holistic understanding of both ancient and more recent pasts. Written for readers unfamiliar with archaeology in the region, the book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series emphasizes connections between past peoples and contemporary Indigenous nations, highlighting not only the history of the area but also new theoretical understandings that move beyond culture history. This overview illustrates the importance of the Plains in studies of exchange, migration, conflict, and sacred landscapes, as well as contact and colonialism in North America. In addition, the volume includes considerations of federal policies and legislation, as well as Indigenous social movements and protests over the last hundred years so that archaeologists can better situate Indigenous heritage, contemporary Indigenous concerns, and lasting legacies of colonialism today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Aug 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780932839640

Book preview

cover.jpg

Archaeological Narratives of the North American Great Plains

From Ancient Pasts to Historic Resettlement

Sarah J. Trabert and Kacy L. Hollenback

The SAA Press

Washington, DC

The Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC

Copyright © 2021 by the Society for American Archaeology

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Trabert, Sarah J., author. | Hollenback, Kacy L., author.

Title: Archaeological narratives of the North American Great Plains : from

ancient pasts to historic resettlement / Sarah J. Trabert and Kacy L.

Hollenback.

Description: Washington, DC : The Society for American Archaeology ; The

SAA Press 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Summary: "Stretching from Canada to Texas and the foothills of the

Rockies to the Mississippi River, the North American Great Plains have a

complex and ancient history. The region has been home to Native peoples

for at least 16,000 years. This volume is a synthesis of what is known

about the Great Plains from an archaeological perspective, but it also

highlights Indigenous knowledge, viewpoints, and concerns for a more

holistic understanding of both ancient and more recent pasts. Written

for readers unfamiliar with archaeology in the region, the book

emphasizes connections between past peoples and contemporary Indigenous

nations, highlighting not only the history of the area but also new

theoretical understandings that move beyond culture history. This

overview illustrates the importance of the Plains in studies of

exchange, migration, conflict, and sacred landscapes, as well as contact

and colonialism in North America. In addition, the volume includes

considerations of federal policies and legislation, as well as

Indigenous social movements and protests over the last hundred years so

that archaeologists can better situate Indigenous heritage, contemporary

Indigenous concerns, and lasting legacies of colonialism today"—

Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021012158 (print) | LCCN 2021012159 (ebook) | ISBN

9780932839633 (paperback) | ISBN 9780932839640 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America—Great Plains—Antiquities. |

Great Plains—Antiquities. | Excavations (Archaeology)—Great Plains.

Classification: LCC E78.G73 T73 2021 (print) | LCC E78.G73 (ebook) | DDC

978/.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012158

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012159

On the cover: Givers of Life (2018) by Travis Blackbird (Omaha/Lakota). With permission from the artist and made possible by a donation from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Foundations of Contemporary Great Plains Archaeology

2 The Ancient History of the Great Plains: Paleoindian and Plains Archaic Lifeways

3 Plains Woodland Regionalism and the Beginnings of Agriculture

4 Homesteads, Hamlets, and Villages: Semisedentary Agricultural Life

5 Population Movement and Collective Stress: Dynamics in and outside of Village Life

6 (Peri)Colonialism: Indigenous Agency and Euro-American Entanglements

7 Resettlement, War, Reservations, and Cultural Survivance

8 Shifting Federal Policy, Heritage, and Contemporary Native Plains Nations

References Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the work of so many who have dedicated their lives to the large and complex region that is the Great Plains. This is especially true of our tribal collaborators and their communities, as well as their ancestors without whom this work would not exist. We are indebted to our mentors and those we may not have met, but who inspired us through their writings. It is perhaps cliché, but we have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Matthew Pailes initially approached us to write this volume. We both agreed to the project, and it opened the door to a multiyear partnership, much learning, and many debates—and we are still speaking to each other. We are grateful to the editors and staff of the SAA Press, especially Michelle Hegmon and Jennifer Birch, for their patience, support, and assistance, as well as Kerry Smith and Maya Allen-Gallegos for copyedits. We are also indebted to David J. Meltzer, Christopher I. Roos, Brad Logan, Richard Drass, Mary Adair, Tim McLeary, Todd Surovell, and two anonymous reviewers who helped ensure we accurately presented foundational work, as well as contemporary perspectives, on Great Plains archaeology. Their comments were immensely helpful. Any mistakes or inaccuracies are our own. We owe special thanks to Calvin Grinnell (Tribal Historian, Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara Nation) for his support of this book and for his permission to use his words and photographs in this volume, as well as Kathryn Cross who created map figures and Christopher I. Roos who generated climate figures and radiocarbon calibrations. We feel honored that Travis Blackbird (Omaha/Lakota) agreed to allow us to use his ledger art Givers of Life (2018) for the book’s cover and are grateful to Steve Nash and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for making this financially possible. To our families, we cannot say how much we appreciate the love and support you provided in this process. Thank you Chris, Eliot, James, and Tattoo (from Kacy) and Justin, Waldo, and Wedel (from Sarah).

Preface

This volume was written explicitly for those new to Great Plains archaeology. It is meant as an introduction to a vast body of research on the region and its Indigenous peoples. The SAA’s series Current Perspectives, of which this book is a part, provides brief up-to-date overviews of contemporary archaeological knowledge in a geographic region. We focus our discussion on specific sites, archaeological complexes, and Indigenous communities to highlight archaeological patterns and trends over the last 30 years. There was not room to cover everything. We reference easily accessible published books and journal articles. However, for those who wish to explore state, federal, and other contract reports, we include site numbers (at first mention) to make navigation of the gray literature easier.

Readers will find that our volume dedicates its final chapters to the recent history of the Plains. Some do not consider this archaeology. We argue that it is important information for situating contemporary Indigenous identities and motivations, as well as current tensions between archaeologists and stakeholder communities. Experiences with Euro-American colonialism and Native navigations of federal policies affect how contemporary archaeological research and practices are viewed.

This is an Indigenous-focused narrative of the Great Plains. Other volumes in the SAA series are as well. As such, we do not discuss the large body of research on European and American colonial sites in the Plains. Most existing overviews of the region’s archaeological past stop at Indigenous-European contact. This implies that archaeological research of Indigenous Plains occupations also stops at contact. This is certainly not true. A growing number of Plains archaeologists are dedicated to understanding recent Indigenous histories and we highlight this work over the historical archaeology of Euro-American settlement and expansion.

A main argument we wish to make is that all archaeologists, regardless of the time periods they study, need to be aware of colonial histories, how settler colonialism varied over space and time, as well as the colonial policies that attempted and failed to separate Indigenous peoples from their lands, languages, and cultures. Archaeologists should not forget that they study the history and lifeways of contemporary Indigenous descendant communities. It is everyone’s ethical obligation to understand how the past and present are intrinsically linked.

1

Foundations of Contemporary Great Plains Archaeology

All people have connections to the places where they live, work, and play. People form relationships with these places. People define places as good, powerful, and safe. They find comfort by living in these places. There is a sense of belonging that is valued. This sense of belonging is based on the compatibility between the group’s way of life and its environment.

—William V. Tallbull (Northern Cheyenne) and Sherri Deaver, Foreword: Living Human Values in Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground

For 16,000 years or more, the North American Great Plains have been home to a diverse array of resilient Indigenous cultures, from highly mobile hunter-harvesters to mostly sedentary village farmers. This is a region where foragers experimented with and spread agriculture to its ecological limits, and where farmers gave up crops in favor of the hunt. Today, more than 50 Federally Recognized Tribes call this place home—some since time immemorial. Others migrated here by choice or were forced to resettle due to external factors. The Plains is a place that people have entered, and sometimes left, for millennia. It was certainly connected to other regions as trade goods reveal a long history of interregional and intertribal interaction prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Like the rest of the Americas, the Plains is also a place with a complicated colonial history. Groups from across the continent were forced to leave their homelands for Indian Territory by the U.S. government. They have now called the area home for almost 200 years. In addition, and unlike other regions (e.g., California and parts of the U.S. Southeast and Southwest where Spanish conquest and missionization were common), many Native Plains nations maintained their sovereignty until the mid- to late nineteenth century, long after first contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans. Their histories are filled with stories of autonomy, cooperation, resistance, and conflict. To understand contemporary tribal identities, we must understand their deep historical roots, periods of adaptation and cultural change, and eventual entanglements with colonial processes.

Plains Indians are perhaps most widely known from stereotypes such as horse-mounted bison hunting, tipis, war bonnets, and counting coup. While these did occur, there is much about the Plains that is not well known by nonspecialists. Native Plains peoples today retain their complex tribal identities and traditions despite a hundred years or more of assimilationist policies and attempts at forced acculturation. Theirs is a story of perseverance, and today for many Plains groups one of cultural survivance. The concept of survivance was introduced by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor (1998, 1999) to counter Eurocentric narratives of Indigenous cultural loss, victimry, and assimilation. It serves as a pivot point for this text.

Ethnographers and archaeologists, many in consultation with individuals from specific tribes, have worked together for more than 125 years to study Plains groups and understand their ancestral connections to the archaeological record (e.g., Davis 2010; Dorsey 1995; Ewers 1958; Howard 1965; Hyde 1951; Kavanagh 2008; Meadows 2010; Walker and DeMallie 1992; Wedel 1981a; Weltfish 1965; Wilson 1917). It was here that William Duncan Strong (1935, 1940), Waldo Wedel (1938), and others developed the direct historical approach in their study of historic Pawnee culture and ties to Lower Loup phase sites. In addition, scholars such as Mildred Mott Wedel (1938, 1976, 1988; see also Wedel and DeMallie 1980) and W. Raymond Wood (1967, 1986, 1990) pioneered the ethnohistorical method or approach to meticulously examine cultural continuity among groups such as the Hidatsa, Ioway, Mandan, Omaha, Otoe, Ponca, and Wichita. This work is unique in that much of it includes tribal oral histories in combination with analyses of historical sources. These works should be required readings for all North American archaeologists.

The archaeology of the Great Plains is also diverse. Its practitioners are driven by different research foci, paradigms, relationships with Native nations, time periods, and subregions. Archaeological research here has contributed to our understanding of continent-wide processes and we will highlight the rich history of work, as well as contemporary approaches, throughout the volume.

The Plains are immense. They encompass portions of two countries and more than 2.9 million km², or one-fourth of the continent (Hirmas and Mandel 2017:131). The Plains stretch from subarctic boreal forests in Canada to the Gulf Coastal Plain in Texas (Figure 1-1). They are bounded by the Rocky Mountains in the west, with tallgrass prairies on their eastern margins (Hirmas and Mandel 2017; Wedel 1961a:20–45). With harsh winters, scorching summers, and limited rainfall, it might surprise some to know that the region is home to a diverse array of plant and animal life. And while this is a vast and open plain and big sky country, there is stunning ecological, geological, and physiographic variability (Cross 2017; Hirmas and Mandel 2017). The Great Plains contain the pine forests of the Black Hills, stunning viewscapes of the dissected Little Missouri Badlands, and wetlands of the Nebraska Sandhills, as well as deep river valleys, their rolling breaks to the uplands, and steep canyons such as Palo Duro in the Texas Panhandle.

While the region is defined with discrete boundaries on maps today, its edges were and are diffuse. With few exceptions, these borders were largely unrecognized by the Indigenous peoples who regularly crossed into and out of the Plains in pursuit of game and other resources. It is critical for archaeologists to explore the connections that existed between Plains peoples and those in adjacent regions if we wish to better understand continent-wide historical processes in Native North America (e.g., Irwin-Williams and Irwin 1966; Kornfeld et al. 2010; Speth and Newlander 2012; Spielmann 1983, 1991). Our goal is to show how developments on the Plains are critical to understanding broader processes of movement, interaction and exchange, violence, and colonialism.

We must also acknowledge the deep connections between many ancient Plains groups and contemporary tribes, while also recognizing significant population movement over time. Throughout the volume we highlight not only continuities in the region but also more recent discussions of social change that move beyond culture history. Incorporating Indigenous knowledge can help with this endeavor. To showcase this, text boxes in each chapter cover themes or topics important to tribes today and highlight Indigenous perspectives. Chapters stress the connectivity of the region’s peoples and lay the groundwork for discussing the active role of Indigenous peoples in contact, pericolonial (see Box 1-1), and colonial processes later in the book.

Colonialism is not an event or monolithic process, but it undeniably led to many dramatic transformations, movements of groups, and altered lifeways that have shaped contemporary social landscapes. The colonial history of the Plains is unique from surrounding regions but shares some similarities. In portions of the Great Plains the colonial process did not fully begin until the nineteenth century with military campaigns, missionization, forced acculturation, and settler colonialism. But social and economic intensifications increased as Native nations were affected by Euro-American colonialism in neighboring regions. Following Stephen Acabado (2017; see also Box 1-1), we use the terms pericolonial and colonial, instead of the problematic protohistoric (Scheiber and Mitchell 2010) or contact periods (Silliman 2005), to discuss these contexts. We recognize the complex changes that occurred in the region over the last 500 years, as well as the violence and hardship that accompanied settler colonialism and Indigenous population displacement. However, we also celebrate regional continuities and counternarratives of victimhood. Many Indigenous scholars use survivance, which is about more than simple survival, to simultaneously acknowledge extreme changes of the last half millennia while recognizing and celebrating the active, adaptable, resilient, ingenious, and persistent nature of Indigenous culture, art, and histories (Vizenor 2008). This text follows that model and ends with a discussion of federal legislation and survivance related to contemporary tribal sovereignty as well as archaeology’s role in these processes.

When and Where Are the Plains

Once known as the Great American Desert (see Stephen H. Long’s 1819–1820 map of the region), the Great Plains was viewed as a landscape unsuitable for cultivation and as such human habitation (Blackmar 1912:784–785). Alfred Kroeber (1947:76), the famous cultural anthropologist, insisted people could not thrive in the region prior to the reintroduction of horses by Europeans. But as we will show, the Plains have been peopled since the Pleistocene.

Geology, Climate, and Biotic Communities

The Great Plains was first defined by its expansive grasslands and bison herds (DeMallie 2001). Despite its name, the region contains more than just short and tall prairies. Originally formed during the Cretaceous more than 140,000,000 years ago, swaths of the continent were covered by a shallow inland sea. The seaway retreated 65,000,000 years ago. Continental uplift, which started 80,000,000 years ago, created the Rocky Mountains and western Plains, leaving a land surface that slopes eastward (Diffendal 2017). The geology is dominated by basal shales, sandstones, and limestone. The surface was further shaped by alluvial action, as well as eolian erosion and deposition (Kay 1998a; Mandel 2001; Trimble 1980). Today, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas are all part of a vast basin that filled with sediment over time through interlocking alluvial fans from the Rockies. Portions, but not all, of the northern Plains were covered during the Pleistocene Ice Age (Chapter 2). These areas were shaped by glacial processes resulting in deposits of silt, sand, and stone (e.g., erratics, which are isolated boulders; see Box 3-1) that were left on the Plains with glacial retreat, ice melt, and flooding (Diffendal 2017; Hirmas and Mandel 2017; Trimble 1980). In many areas, eolian processes created fine-grained loess deposits, varying in thickness from 1.5 to more than 7 m thick (Hirmas and Mandel 2017; Muh 2007). Sand dunes became active during periods of increased aridity, often covering new areas of the landscape.

The Plains climate is particularly dynamic, contributing to its fragile beauty and influencing its myriad native biotic communities. Significant shifts have occurred over the past 18,000 years related to precipitation and temperature oscillations (see Chapter 2). Yet in general, frigid winters and hot summers are influenced by cold, dry arctic winds, variable Pacific fronts, and warm, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico (Hirmas and Mandel 2017). Rainfall patterns on either side of the ninety-eighth meridian mean that to the east there is high soil productivity where crops like corn, beans, squash, and sunflower can grow. In the west, with some exceptions, agriculture is risky without irrigation (see Chapter 4; Salley et al. 2016).

In the late Quaternary, the southern Plains (Figure 1-2) have been drier than northern latitudes. In response, people have moved in and out of the area depending on the availability of water and tethered themselves to productive locations on the landscape, or found ways to adapt (see Archaic adaptations in Chapter 2). Playas that formed during the postglacial period and perennial springs were critical resources and magnets for human use (Hirmas and Mandel 2017). The oases attracted animals to hunt and provided good places for camps. Periods of aridity activated dune fields, which also changed where people lived, as well as how archaeologists find sites today. Dune fields erode and move sediment and artifacts downslope, just as alluvial contexts can move them downriver. In the Nebraska Sand Hills, the largest dune fields in the western hemisphere, which cover 50,000–60,000 km², eolian processes were active during several periods beginning 10,000 years ago, often correlating with persistent drought associated with La Niña–dominated climatic states (Forman et al. 2001; Hirmas and Mandel 2017).

The balance of precipitation and aridity is what makes the Plains a delicate, yet rich, grassland environment. Lack of water and regular fires limit trees in much of the region (Anderson 1990; Pyne 2017). Shortgrass prairie and bunchgrass steppes dominate the western Rocky Mountain foothills and extend east into Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and parts of the Dakotas. Blue grama and buffalo grass as well as yucca, prickly pear cactus, and sagebrush are common species in the western Plains. The east is dominated by mixed grasses including bluestem. Portions of the southern Plains are marked by mixed shrubs and grasses such as creosote, mesquite, and juniper (Trimble 1980). Animal communities including bison, pronghorn, elk, deer, hares, and prairie dogs play key roles in maintaining the prairie ecosystem. The eastern margins have tallgrass species and hardwoods such as oak, hickory, maple, and black walnut (Hirmas and Mandel 2017). Cottonwood, willow, and American elm dominate river valleys of the cooler northern Plains (Gilmore 1991; Stevens 1963). Human adaptations in the regions reflect this diversity.

Cultural Diversity

Anthropologists have long struggled with how best to characterize and classify North American Native cultures (Mason 1896). Clark Wissler (1917, 1923, 1926) and Alfred Kroeber (1931, 1939), both of whom worked for a time in the Plains, refined the culture area concept to categorize regions where cultural groups share a number of traits, largely related to resource use and subsistence practices, as well as language. Today, the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, California, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Northeast, and Southeast are standards in studying North America and its Indigenous peoples. However, this approach does not capture the variability and nuance of cultures within each of these regions. It instead forces a normative view of societies (Neusius and Neusius 2014).

Some of the earliest Great Plains museum exhibits, relying on the culture area approach, only considered a few of the most widely known tribes as representative of the entire region. They also depicted them as largely static. This problem persists. A current display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for example, depicts the Arapaho, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Cree, Crow, Dakota (Sioux), Hidatsa, Pawnee, and Wichita (DeMallie 2001). There are many more tribes than this. Additionally, some groups depicted as strictly mobile, such as some bands of Sioux, actually experimented with agriculture (Posthumus 2016). Others, such as the maize-farming, earthlodge-dwelling Arikara, were mobile for a time (Murray and Swenson 2016). For a region as large, complex, and diverse as the Great Plains, the culture area concept overly simplifies Indigenous societies and places artificial boundaries between regions not useful for contemporary research.

It is true that many groups share(d) a number of traits. Plains peoples were seasonally mobile. Bison hunting played a critical role in many subsistence strategies, and many peoples extensively utilized bison products such as hides and scapula hoes. Farming communities clustered near major rivers and their tributaries (DeMallie 2001). As such, exchange was economically and ceremonially important to bands and villages. Practices such as Calumet ceremonialism, which extended kinship connections to visiting peoples and created balance and peace in possibly uncertain times, helped forge new alliances and maintain relations between groups (see Box 4-1; Blakeslee 1981; Rodning 2014). Intermarriage and the transfer of ceremonial items, such as communal bundles, or entire rituals, such as the Sun Dance, also helped tie groups together (for an example from the Kiowa, see Scott [1911]).

Plains peoples were also connected with those living outside of the region. Evidence of exchange is regularly seen at trade centers such as Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico (Kidder 1958); Scott County Pueblo in western Kansas (Beck and Trabert 2014; Trabert et al. 2016); Wichita villages on the Arkansas and Red Rivers (Hoard 2012; Trabert 2018; Vehik 2006); Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages in the Dakotas (Wood 1980); and Shoshone rendezvous in Wyoming (Adams 2006; Becker 2010; Shimkin 1942). Raw materials and finished tools from the Plains are also found beyond trading centers such as Knife River flint in Hopewell sites in the Midwest (Clark 1984; Genheimer 1997:286), lithics and pottery in Caddo sites in the Southeast (Perttula 1992; Vehik and Baugh 1994), and bison products (scapula hoes, hide shields, robes, and dried meat) in communities across the Southwest (Habicht-­Mauche 2000; LeBlanc 2000:58; Spielmann 1991).

Many researchers today, while acknowledging these shared practices, also stress the unique traditions and technologies that make each Plains group distinct. There is a complex history here of movement pre- and postcontact leading to myriad sociopolitical identities, languages, and economies (e.g., mobile hunters and semisedentary farmers). Plains cultures are quite diverse and while at the beginning of the nineteenth century over 32 tribes were recorded in the region, this number is unlikely accurate (DeMallie 2001). Many tribes owe their contemporary identities to complex processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to this, band- or village-level identities were more important in terms of social identity and political and economic decision-making. The Blackfoot (Niitsitapi), for example, are a confederacy of the Kainai (Blood), Piikani (Peigan), and Siksika (Bastien 2004:9–10). The period preceding, during, and after initial European colonization of the continent saw a great deal of population movement in and outside of the region. This paired with introduced diseases, increased conflict, and attempts to counter Euro-American encroachment led to significant social, political, and demographic change.

A Brief Narrative of Great Plains Research

Plains societies left a rich archaeological record. Furthermore, we have other sources of information about the region’s past, including historic accounts from explorers and traders, nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographies, and vibrant oral traditions from tribes themselves. All have been used by the archaeologists over the last century as multimethod datasets to understand specific groups and the culture history of different subareas.

Ethnography on the Great Plains

European explorers, fur traders, naturalists, artists, photographers, missionaries, and military personnel documented Plains cultures prior to the late nineteenth century (e.g., Catlin 1842; Curtis 1907–1930; Matthews 1877). Early anthropologists did as well. Lewis Henry Morgan, for example, applied anthropological methods in his study of kinship among Upper Missouri and Red River groups between 1859 and 1862 (White 1959). Trained anthropologists, however, began collecting salvage ethnographies to categorize and describe Plains lifeways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for institutions such as the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), founded in 1879 (Bowers 1992; Bushnell 1922, 1927; Densmore 1918, 1923, 1929; Dorsey 1884–1885; Ewers 1955; Fletcher 1904; Fletcher and La Flesche 1911; Harrington 1928; Hilger 1952; Howard 1965; Mooney 1896–1897) and later for federal undertakings such as the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) starting in 1946 (Bell et al. 1974; Cash and Wolff 1974; Champe et al. 1974; Ewers et al. 1974; Gussow et al. 1974; Hurt 1974; Jablow 1974; Plummer 1974; Ray and Opler 1974; Smith 1974; Woolworth and Champe 1974).

Indeed, Plains anthropology was quite influential on the broader discipline in the United States (Hoebel 1980). For example, almost a third of all the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City focused on Plains groups prior to 1950 (e.g., Kroeber 1908; Lowie 1909, 1917, 1922, 1993; Murie 1914; Skinner 1914, 1915; Spier 1921; Walker 1917; Wissler 1912; Wissler and Duval 1908). It was 43% prior to 1930. Between 1950 and 1970, Plains ethnographies and archaeological studies were featured in 35% of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins. Of note, some early ethnographers worked and published with tribal members like Buffalo Bird Woman (Hidatsa; Wilson 1917), James R. Murie (Pawnee; Fletcher 1904), and Francis La Flesche (Omaha; Fletcher and La Flesche 1911). These works provide a rich documentary record of Indigenous histories, traditions, ceremonies, subsistence practices, and technology. Though some have criticized early ethnographies for a number of reasons (e.g., ethnocentrism or a failure to recognize dynamic and adaptive changes within Indigenous communities because of a focus on the traditional [for more detail, see Yellow Bird 2016]), many of these sources are used today by tribes and archaeologists in reconstructions of social organization, dress, and ornamentation, as well as revitalization efforts (DeMallie and Ewers 2001).

With such intense scrutiny of Plains groups, it is not surprising that anthropologists featured prominently in the Sioux activist, historian, and scholar Vine Deloria Jr.’s (1969) Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, which lambasted the discipline. His childhood involved time near or on the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge and Standing Rock Reservations in North and South Dakota. He and others had seen their lands infest[ed] with anthropologists for half a century (Deloria 1969:78). However, nearly 30 years after Custer Died for Your Sins, Deloria (1997) acknowledged changes in the relationships between anthropologists and Indians and that it had not been all bad. For example, anthropologists and archaeologists proved useful in legal cases related to land claims and treaty rights. Yet Deloria stressed a continued need to leave the colonial mentality behind us if we are to bring the accumulated knowledge and insights of anthropology to bear on the larger arena of human activities (Deloria 1997:221). Many contemporary Plains archaeologists who collaborate closely with Native nations acknowledge the need to de-colonize and Indigenize (see Box 1-1).

Toward a Culture History of the Great Plains: Archaeology prior to 1969

Prior to 1900, archaeology on the Great Plains was largely carried out by antiquarians and avocationalists (for a history of Plains research, see Bamforth 2021; Krause 1998; Mitchell 2006; Wedel 1961b, 1981, 1982; Wedel and Krause 2001). Early work after 1900 was undertaken by anthropologically trained scholars, some of whom were associated with state agencies. The State of Nebraska, for example, commissioned E. E. Blackman to survey portions of the state in 1901 (Wedel and Krause 2001). Elsewhere excavations began at locations such as the large ancestral Mandan site Double Ditch (32BL8) in North Dakota, carried out by the State Historical Society’s George F. Will and Herbert J. Spinden (1906) in 1905. Yet much of the earliest systematic work in the region involved surveys and site visits initiated by museums and universities outside of the Plains. For instance, the Smithsonian sent William H. Holmes (1902) to survey the Sulphur Springs area near Afton, Oklahoma, in 1901 and the Field Museum in Chicago dispatched Stephen C. Simms (1903) to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel (48BH302) in Wyoming (see Box 3-1). Some researchers like Asa T. Hill and William Duncan Strong (1935) made use of a matching federal fund program through the Smithsonian and the University