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Tracing Time on the Plains: From Paleoindian to Ceramic Periods - Ep 03
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In this episode of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast, host Carlton Shield Chief Gover provides an overview of the major cultural periods that have shaped the Great Plains' rich history. Starting with the Paleoindian period, we delve into the earliest known inhabitants, exploring their hunting practices and survival strategies in a changing landscape. We then journey through the Archaic period, marked by a shift in subsistence strategies and adaptation to diverse environments. As we move into the Woodland period, we'll discuss the introduction of new technologies and social complexities, followed by the Plains Village period, where agricultural practices and settled communities became more prominent. Carlton also introduces listeners to the concept of the Ceramic Period, which combines the Woodland and Plains Village periods, highlighting the evolution of pottery and other cultural developments that defined this era. This episode offers a brief look at the timeline of human occupation on the Great Plains, providing insights into how these periods are interconnected and how they have been interpreted through the archaeological record. Whether you're new to Plains archaeology or looking to deepen your understanding of these cultural periods, this episode offers a fascinating exploration of the region's past.
Youtube Version:
Links:
- The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains by Douglas B. Bamforth (2021)
- Archaeology on the Great Plains Edited by W. Raymond Wood (1998)
- Carlton's KU Anthropology Faculty Bio
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode, go to: https://www.archpodnet.com/great-plains-archaeology/03
Contact:
- Instagram: @pawnee_archaeologist
- Email: [email protected]
Affiliates
Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. Join me as we uncover the rich histories of North America's Great Plains, exploring the latest archaeological discoveries and past cultures that shaped this storied region. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 3 of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Carlton Shill, Chief Gover, and I am absolutely excited and thrilled to have
00:00:40
Speaker
So on last episode, I said today's episode would be on Great Plains taxonomic units, so the different types of archaeological cultures, their names, how they got them, and how they're broken down into this very complex web of cultural taxa. But as I was doing more research on this subject, it's really complicated in the Great Plains. And so what I thought would be a better use of our time today is actually rather than talk about taxonomy, talk about time and time periods and how archaeologists in the Great Plains date archaeological assemblages and how we construct chronologies
00:01:22
Speaker
So I think that's that's just where we're going to go today. So um here in the Great Plains, we have really two schools of thought. We have what generally most archaeologists divide ah time periods in.
00:01:38
Speaker
And then we also have like a very Kansas-specific and like Central Plains-specific time period makeup that even before coming to Kansas, I gravitated towards because I really appreciated what Dr. Bob Hoard, who was the candidacy archaeologist for a very long time, ah was putting forth. And so we're going to talk about these together. There's only really one big change between the two but generally let's just kick off by talking about what we have. Also, as you guys noticed, I'm not, I'm not recording in my office today. If you're watching, I need to recording my, my apartment in my apartment office. So Laramie cat may make an appearance. She's definitely on one this morning. 30 minutes playtime was apparently not enough for this little princess. So she you may or may not hear her anyways. So let's ah go ahead and begin. So under the traditional or except traditionally the white, the widely held planes chronology, you have,
00:02:33
Speaker
four different periods. You have Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Plains Village. And each one of these time periods is, if you look at a textbook record, they're they're pretty sharply bracketed between one another. But of course, as as a theme of this this podcast and and Great Plains Archipelago in general, these there are no clear and concise transitions either in time or between cultures. that is It's a process.
00:03:03
Speaker
ah process that does that's not constant. So there is a lot of variability in between where you see these transitions occurring, especially in the plains, right? Very large geographic region, north, south, and east and west. So the Paleo-Indian period. Paleo-Indian, it is hard to put a start date on it because it is it is frequently in the crosshairs for how further back people got to the North America, to the Great Plains. And so we know for a fact, right?
00:03:33
Speaker
widely held accepted, we all can agree that the Palaeonian period starts about 13,000 B.C. or B.C.E. If there's not familiar, like, science is trying to move away from the Judeo-Christian kind of before Christ and A.D.A. and free of the Latin for that is, and move towards B.C.E. before common era, and then C.E., which is common era. Like, nothing else changes other than the abbreviations.
00:04:01
Speaker
and And I'll float between the two. I generally ah hold the BCE and CE lexicon, but you'll also hear me say like before present. And so the paleo-Indian period.
00:04:15
Speaker
ah Stars we can all agree ah in the Great Plains in particular, right? Just focus on the Great Plains roughly 13,000 BCE or 15,000 years BP BP being for present, right? So and before present is like before 1915 we can get into that later but So we have we have the Clovis period those people are getting situated in the Great Plains 13,000 BCE and the arcade and then it it goes to about 7,200 BCE. And once Paleontian period is over, that's when we get the Archaic period. Archaic period, 72,000 BCE to 500 BCE. Following the Archaic is the Woodland period, and this is specific to the plains. Now, there's a Woodland period in the Southeast archaeology and Midwest archaeology.
00:05:06
Speaker
Plains has its own and we'll talk about this. Woodland period is from 500 BCE to 500, lie that's not to 500, it's till 1000 AD. So it's a 1500 year period beginning in 500 BC going up until 1000 CE or 1000 AD or 1000 BP. This is then followed by the Plains village period.
00:05:33
Speaker
Plains Village starts 1000 AD and goes up until like 1600, 1550, sometimes 1800. Some folks have introduced a fifth period called the post-contact period and that which would start in 1550. Sometimes it just gets collapsed into the Plains Village period itself as rather than having the introduction of Europeans as this major transition, it's just adopted in this part of the the late Plains Village period.
00:06:03
Speaker
So it sounds pretty simple, but then we have this really Kansas introduced chronology and it keeps archaic, but it introduces the ceramic period instead. So it gets rid of Plains village and Woodlands and it collapses them into one period. So the first thing is archaic would end at, I believe. Yeah. Uh,
00:06:33
Speaker
one CE, right? Because there's no zero, it's one. So the archeric archaic period would go roughly from 7,200 or 7,000 BCE to one CD or one AD.
00:06:48
Speaker
Then you get the ceramic period. So it collapses Woodland and Plains Village into one whole unit, and that would go from one CE to 1800, realistically.
00:07:00
Speaker
And what and we'll and'll talk about in a bit. and And the reason being is, and why I like it is it's acknowledging that pottery is really becoming intrinsically a marker of time and also a huge technology that changes Great Plains lifeways. And ah in addition to that is the woodland period can get confusing when archeologists were coming up with these time periods.
00:07:28
Speaker
Southeast archaeology was a little bit more ahead and archaeologists, especially working on the Missouri River Basin project during the WPA era in the thirties under Roosevelt, they were seeing a lot of similarities, ah material culture in the Great Plains with the Southeast part of the United States. And so they just, they just adopted it as a, as an added like, well, you know, on the other side of the Mississippi and Missouri, they call this the Woodlands. Why don't we just use that here?
00:07:58
Speaker
But now, over 70 years later, there are some intrinsic differences between what's going on in the Great Plains during the same time period and the Southeast. and And the time periods also don't match up. So the Woodland period is earlier and in the Southeast than it is in the Great Plains. In the Southeast, they have the Mississippian period. And so like they they have a little bit more going on. And so when it comes to you know promoting the adoption of, well, why don't we in the Great Plains just drop Woodland and Plains Village and just call it all the ceramic period?
00:08:28
Speaker
I'm all for that, because in the Woodland period, we do have some of the earliest pottery. And so I think that's a smart move, one to reduce confusion between what's going on in the plains and the southeast, um but also to give you know promote a plains archaeologist advancing great plains archaeology. And so within within these different time periods, and I, just for the purposes of simplicity, I'm going to do my best. Well, not even for the purpose of simplicity, I'm going to complicate things.
00:08:56
Speaker
I will do my best to talk about when we get to woodland in the ceramic period, give their analogues, like we'll talk about them at the same time. It might be confusing, might it might not work out, but at least we tried. So the paleo-indian period, what characterizes this type of period? When an archaeologist says, hey, we have a paleo-indian site, there is a certain amount of baggage that comes along, you know, quote unquote baggage, baggage that comes along with these time periods, and instead of expectations. So if I see another archaeologist at a conference and say, hey, I found this paleo-union site, there's already a couple check boxes in their mental checklists that are being ticked that frame what we can expect from this site. And so with paleo-union archaeology, especially the earliest parts, we're talking about first peoples of North America and the Great Plains. We're dealing with the Ice Age. So especially with like Clovis being widely adopted as on the Great Plains as the first technological
00:09:54
Speaker
which hero culture we have right? Those are Ice Age people. These folks are hunters and gatherers. So with these sites, we can expect, well, is this paleo-Indian site? Is this a kill site? Or is it a, sometimes a camp site, a processing site, most likely? Now, paleo-Indian archaeology incredibly deals with kill sites and butchering sites of megafauna. And the reason being is with, what's the same in these other units,
00:10:26
Speaker
ah Nomadic people, hunters and gatherers, don't leave much of a footprint in the archaeological record because they're not in places for very long. But what is more likely to remain is if they butcher an animal such as an elephant, right? Mammoths are elephants, mastodons are elephants.
00:10:42
Speaker
bison, or any other large animal, even small animals, those bones stay in the archaeological record. The lithics or the stone tools that they were using to butcher that animal, those will preserve in the record. So, palaeontine archaeology is very much hunting archaeology. Also,
00:11:02
Speaker
Burials during this time period, right? Generally they're going to be single internment. So one person, you know, there's there's not these designated burial sites that we're aware of. Oftentimes the individuals that have been exhumed are from cave contexts. So places anaerobic environments where there's not much oxygen that kicks off deterioration process. And the taxonomic units within the paleo Indian period are based on projectile point.
00:11:32
Speaker
morphology and typology. So basically, the shape of the arrowhead is, has traditionally been how cultures have been assigned within the Palaeomian period, that we can look at the different points and say, oh, well, this is an agate basin site. And when we say agate basin or a hell gap site or a Clovis site, what these archaeologists are speaking to is like, I found this shape of arrowhead here. This is its name. And that's the name of the discrete unit of taxonomy that we're giving to this to this site. And with that, we're going go to go ahead and take a quick break. We'll be right back and we're going to dive into you know these general overviews of archaic woodland slash ceramic period and plains village period slash war ceramic period. So we'll be right back.
00:12:23
Speaker
And we're back with the Great Plains Archeology Podcast. We were just talking about these general trends and general themes of the Paleo Indian period. And so I want to dive into you know what comes next. And what comes next is the archaic period. And the archaic period is firmly within the Holocene, right? The the Ice Age has ended. Where in the early Holocene, things are getting warmer.
00:12:48
Speaker
The prairie is beginning to expand at this point. We're still dealing with hunters and gatherers. People on the plains are bison hunting is, of course, one of the big subsistence strategies on the Great Plains that just doesn't doesn't change. These people are, of course, still nomadic.
00:13:07
Speaker
Everything is is relatively similar to like behaviorally as what's going on in the Paleo-Indian period. There are some changes, right? One, Paleo-Indian folks, especially the early Paleo-Indian folks. These are colonizing populations. and They're exploring the landscape. They're figuring out the environment. Archaic populations, you know, they've been in the Great Plains or surrounding areas for quite some time. And we can start to see more discrete boundaries of groups. So like Clovis points are found all over North America, but Oxbow and McKean points, they're bounded spatially. Now there's overlap and there are problems with ascribing cultural taxa or defining populations by the technology, such as spear points, right? Or add a lot of points.
00:13:58
Speaker
That's a whole thing. And we're going to talk about do artifacts equal people in a later episode. But for now, we do see projectile points are starting to diversify and they are starting to be spatially bounded and as well as bounded in time. Burials are still generally single internment.
00:14:16
Speaker
However, in the Northern Plains, we start seeing more discreet burial places and it's in the archaic that we start seeing the appearance of medicine wheels.
00:14:31
Speaker
as well as stone effigy sites. So the Northern Plains in particular, so like Wyoming, Montana, Canada, like people are investing time and energy into the construction of elaborate ceremonial, what we you know believe it some are ceremonial spaces. So this is different, right? We don't see this with the Paleo-Indian period.
00:14:52
Speaker
not North America, but it's with the archaic period that we begin to see these changes and that people are really becoming tied to a place, right? When you start creating burial mounds or discrete burial locations that you return to,
00:15:10
Speaker
not just, oh, someone died while we were out in the in the Platte Valley and we need to bury them somewhere, so let's just do it somewhere close. And it's like, no, when someone passes away, we bring them back to this space and bury them amongst their family and their community in a long honored practice. That's a huge shift.
00:15:31
Speaker
in how people think about themselves, spirituality, as well as place. That place is really, we can physically write, we can make these and inferences that places are becoming sacred. Now, the archaic is when we do find the earliest recovered pottery in the Great Plains. It's brief, and it's only around Kansas City, which is like one of the eastern extents of the Great Plains along the Missouri River,
00:16:06
Speaker
And this pottery is incredibly similar to other contemporary early earliest pottery sites recovered in the American Southeast. So there's like right off the top of my head, there's there's ah less than a dozen sites around the same time from Georgia, Florida, Kansas City, where we see pottery appear. It's very crude. It's all very simplistic. They all show up. They're all somewhat connected by a water system.
00:16:32
Speaker
So it's the first one then and then it goes away, but pottery doesn't really take off or become widely adopted and utilized till later, but it's just like a fun note and one that I enjoy because that site, Nebo Hill, is in the collection here at the University of Kansas. So I've been able to hold the earliest pottery in the Great Plains. And when I showed it to, when we did a ah ah visit with the Polynesian nation and showed Matt Reed, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and one of the chief band sheets for the tribe,
00:17:02
Speaker
you know The look on his face was just priceless. I'm like, man, you want to see something cool? like How about this pottery from Nebo Hill? And he was just like, oh. So it was cool. It's it's it's something I deeply, I don't want to say treasure. I'm not a hoarder and I'm not a dragon over the collections. But like ha being the steward of that ancestral material is is an incredibly humbling you know position to have.
00:17:26
Speaker
Moving on, so these sites are all still in the archaic, predominantly but ah dominated by kill sites or animal processing sites, right? We do have this the the ceremonial sites, don't get me wrong, they're starting to show up, but by and large, archaic period archaeology is still dominated by animal hunting and animal processing. These people are still mobile hunter gatherers. They don't leave much of a foot pirate in the ground. Think about when you and your families go camping, how long do you think those 10 state posts are going to last? And if they give enough time, they're even going to be visible in their archaeological record.
00:18:02
Speaker
your're you're Campfire, right, can be, especially if you go to a designated campsites where people have been building fires in those fire pits for, you know, for as long as that campsite's been developed, that leaves a signature. So we do see campsites in the Archaic where people will camp at the same place over time. That hasn't changed. And so some of those rock shelter sites like in Wyoming in other places where you get rock shelters and caves, those are always going to be natural localities in which people are going to congregate to seek shelter. That's when you start seeing like, oh wow, you know this we can see campfires here over a thousand years, sometimes more because it's a naturally good place to hide in the elements than there's already designated areas. Like people are still doing people things back in the past that they do today. So that hasn't changed. And still here,
00:18:57
Speaker
the taxonomy, how we describe cultures is still based on projectile point typologies, right? So we're still like, oh, this is a McKian site. This is an Oxbow site. They're all based on the the arrowheads that are found at these sites. Now, after the archaic Woodlands or early ceramic,
00:19:18
Speaker
I like early ceramic because in the woodland period, this is woodland early ceramic. This is when pottery really starts taking off. Now the pottery, especially in the early parts of the woodland slash early ceramic, they're conical pots. They don't really stand up very well. What they're probably being used for is um they're really good at rendering bison fat, that conical shape to them. Like think of an an inverted triangle.
00:19:41
Speaker
And the hole on top is where you put bison jello. And if you put these conical pots in the ground next to a fire, kind of like an easy bake oven, I suppose, or like an early baking pan that, you know, you've been certain to the ground. It's really good at rendering bison fat.
00:19:59
Speaker
and The western part of the plains, especially during this period, the high plains, not much changes archaeologically in terms of behavior. The points will change, you know sometimes the show pots show up, but generally, by and large, the western plains continues to be dominated by animal kills and processing sites. The eastern part of the plains is where we start seeing the most dramatic changes, right? These are where the confluence of the rivers are meeting the Missouri River,
00:20:30
Speaker
This is the tall grass prairie where there is a lot of vegetation turnover, where there's a lot of agricultural potential. And that's where in the eastern part of the plains is where we start seeing early horticulture and gardening. Maze hasn't taken off yet. We're still probably primarily at this point beans, squash, sunflower seeds, goose foot, a couple other species of plants that people don't eat anymore. We're starting to see people play with tending to these. to these early domesticates. The habitation sites that we do see that are associated with the gardening, they're small and non-permanent. These people are semi-nomadic, still predominantly nomadic, but when they do stay in one place, we're starting to see a little bit more of a footprint. They're not staying there for a couple of days or a couple of weeks, probably a couple of months.
00:21:17
Speaker
depending on the seasonality, which we can tell by the presence of some seeds or markers within animal bones that and that can you know indicate seasonality of when they were killed. And we're starting to see a lot of in trade.
00:21:33
Speaker
with Mississippian societies to the east. so The rivers are really being used as a highway in the Great Plains to transport goods, especially bison products from the plains into the Mississippian area. so like To the Mississippi River, they're following the Missouri River and trading downstream and getting goods back. so We're already seeing like a continental trade system during the Woodland period.
00:21:55
Speaker
Now, burial practices really start to change. we still they're They're mixed. So we we get cemeteries and ossuaries. We still find the occasional individual interment, but a cemetery that is a single interment that is organized, one person goes in one hole. We see ossuaries, which are you know burial mounds, where you have you have an initial internment of of an ancestor, and then over time you keep adding additional people to this pile and and put cover them with dirt so these these mounds get larger. These are becoming more prolific across the Great Plains, especially in the east.
00:22:32
Speaker
Now with the introduction of pottery, that's when we're starting to see taxonomic units. They're they're shifting away from being named after projectile points, but they're being named after pottery decorations, pottery designs, or house features. So we can start seeing a lot more of the human toolkit because now we're starting to see houses. Now we're seeing variations in pottery and ah material culture that is more reflective of individual identity is starting to appear and we can start creating taxonomic units that are more reflective of, hey, you know this house is much different than this house. These are spatially bounded. How you build a house speaks to a mental template about what a house must look like. We can make a pretty good assumption that basing taxonomies off of different houses and different pots does actually speak to real identities. So then they become far more useful.
00:23:32
Speaker
So this is early, early ceramic period slash all of the Woodland period. When we get to the Plains Village period, which is the middle ceramic period under Bob Hord's classifications. This is really where we get the ethnogenesis of contemporary indigenous nations. So right around 1000 AD, 1000 CE, this is when we start saying, you can actually be like, wow, that really looks like a Pawnee earth lodge town. Well, it's because it is. Oh, wow. That looks like a Mandan and Hadatsa earth lodge town because it is. Oh, you know, so you can start looking like, oh, the houses that people had then are either very similar or you can see the
00:24:15
Speaker
the workings of houses that you see later and you can start seeing material culture that is very much Very similar to what you we would find in 1600. So really we can start seeing these identities to take shape. Not to say these are exact carbon copies. No, 600 years is a lot of time. There's a lot of change that takes place. But really this is when we start seeing, oh wow, we can we can see these people today and we can point them to a site a thousand years ago and be like, you know, that is 99.9% likely to be ancestral to to your people.
00:24:49
Speaker
So, the Plains Village period, this is where I predominantly work. I really look at the transition between late woodland to early Plains Village or the transition between early ceramic to middle ceramic. That's my bread and butter, or that's that's my bison and corn. I don't know what the analogy would be, but that's that's the bison and corn diet and squash diet of my archaeological training and research.
00:25:15
Speaker
And then you would have late ceramic period or post-contact period. and This is essentially late Plains village archeology, but with horses and European goods. Everything else is relatively the same. So that is a really quick and deep and dirty dive into the time periods on the Great Plains, setting the stage for when ah when we go into future episodes and be like, hey, we're going to talk about the Folsom site. And it's a Paleo-Indian site. You could be like, oh, Carlton talked about Paleo-Indian archaeology in episode three, he you know there's a general checkbox that we can assume you know are going to be related to this. So I'm going to give each one of these time periods, probably its own episode, and dive into different sites and differences but between sites and different parts of the plains.
00:26:04
Speaker
But for the purposes of this, here's just some background information. So I really appreciate you guys hanging on for this morning's episode. I really appreciate all of the comments and feedback I got off of episodes one and two. I had a huge shout out to my uncle and my sister who gave me some feedback, especially my uncle who gave me some rather brutal feedback about he's he's ah he's a guy. Thank you so much, uncle. So with that, thank you all very much. And I will see you next time on the Great Plains. Archaeology podcast. I don't know why there is a difference there. Anyways, toodaloo.
00:26:36
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Great Plains archaeology podcast. You can follow me on Instagram at Pawnee underscore archaeologist, and you can also email me at Great Plains Ark Podcast at gmail dot.com. And remember, anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie. American author Willa Cather.
00:27:02
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at w www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.