People in a Sea of Grass

Archaeology's Changing Perspective on Indigenous Plains Communities

Edited by Matthew E. Hill, Lauren W. Ritterbush

Ninety years ago Great Plains archaeologists such as Waldo Wedel and William Duncan Strong made foundational contributions to American archaeology, enabling new discoveries, insights, and interpretations. This volume explores how twenty-first-century archaeologists have built upon, remodeled, and sometimes rejected the inferences of these earlier scholars with updated overviews and analyses.

Contributors highlight how Indigenous Plains groups participated in large-scale social networks in which ideas, symbols, artifacts, and people moved across North America over the last 2,000 years. They also discuss cultural transformation, focusing on key demographic, economic, social, and ceremonial factors associated with change, including colonization and integration into the social and political economies of transatlantic societies. Cultural traditions covered include Woodland-era Kansas City Hopewell, late prehistoric Central Plains tradition, and ancestral and early historic Wichita, Pawnee and Arikara, Kanza, Plains Apache, and Puebloan migrants. As the first review of Plains archaeology in more than a decade, this book brings studies of early Indigenous
peoples of the central and southern Plains into a new era.

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Matthew E. Hill Jr. is associate professor of anthropology at University of Iowa. His research focuses on issues of human-environmental interactions of Native peoples in the Great Plains. 

Lauren W. Ritterbush is professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. Her research focuses on indigenous and migrant farming and hunting societies in the central and northern Great Plains.

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Table of Contents:List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
 
1. Introduction
Matthew E. Hill, Jr., and Lauren W. Ritterbush
2. Changing Perspectives in Central Plains Archaeology
Matthew E. Hill Jr.
3. “Remote from the Culture Hearth”? Envisioning Kansas City Hopewell
Brad Logan
4. Configuring Late Prehistory in the Central Plains
Lauren W. Ritterbush  
5. Ceramic Variability within the Steed-Kisker Phase: Reassessment of Ceramics from the Steed-Kisker Site, 23PL13
William T. Billeck 
6. Ideology and Political Development: The Little River Focus Council Circles of Central Kansas
Susan C. Vehik  
7. The Growth of Pawnee Archaeology
Mary J. Adair and Jack L. Hofman
8. Archaeology of the Ancestral Kanza (Kaw) Indians
Lauren W. Ritterbush
9. Understanding the Scott County Pueblo (14SC1) Occupation: Isolated Migrants or Community Builders?
Sarah Trabert, Matthew E. Hill, Jr., and Margaret E. Beck
10. Puebloan-Plains Interaction AD 1550–1700: The Central Plains During and After the Southern Plains Macroeconomy
Margaret E. Beck
11. The Quivira Expeditions, AD 1541–1602
Donald J. Blakeslee
12. Concluding Thoughts
Matthew E. Hill, Jr., and Lauren W. Ritterbush
 
List of Contributors
References
Index