Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains

Antiquity

history continues through the period of Persian and Arab raids in the seventh to ninth centuries and features again in the letters of John Mauropous (archbishop c. 1050-1075). Historical, political and economic research questions follow, reflecting Haldon and Elton's concerns to understand texts relating to, for example, Euchaïta's relationship with the politicalmilitary frontier of the seventh to ninth centuries, and various shifts in administrative control between regional centres.

2002

This article reviews recent archaeological research on warfare in prestate societies of native North America. This survey comprises six regions: Arctic/Subarctic, Northwest Coast, California, Southwest/Great Basin, Great Plains, and Eastern Woodlands. Two lines of evidence, defensive settlement behavior and injuries in human skeletal remains, figure prominently in archaeological reconstructions of violence and warfare in these regions. Burning of sites and settlements also has been important for identifying the consequences of war and investigating more subtle aspects of strategy and directionality. Weaponry and iconography have to date provided important but more limited insights. Although considerable disparities exist between regions in the archaeological evidence for intra-and intergroup violence, all regions show a marked increase after A.D. 1000. These findings suggest that larger forces may have been responsible for escalating violence throughout North America at this time.

Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, 2018

Journal of Conflict Archaeology, 2011

There has been a long history of interest in the material remains of conflict, but in the last two and a half decades archaeologists have made strides in the study of war and warfare. Techniques have been developed, refined, and borrowed to expose the material record of combat. Sites associated with other military undertakings have been discovered and the material culture of conflict has been documented. This growth has expanded an understanding of past conflicts and challenged previously held ideas about warfare. Although archaeologists do not currently have interpretive frameworks to link the diverse sites and objects that form the archaeological record of war, modern military planners have developed such models. This paper uses sites from the North American Great Plains to suggest that military models of conflict analysis can contribute to a synthetic archaeological interpretation of conflict.

Between AD 1200 and 1400, the Kirikir’i·s (Wichita and Affiliated Tribes) lived in small hamlets and villages scattered across the central and southern Plains and within the western Mississippian centers in the Arkansas River Basin. This relatively peaceful life changed about AD 1400 when the decline of Mississippian culture led to a reorganization of Plains communities. People aggregating into larger towns, participated in a continental wide exchange system, and increased inter-group conflict. Using Frank Secoy’s three patterns of warfare on the Plains insights into the evolving strategies of the Kirikir’i·s from AD 1500 to 1850 may be obtained. Kirikir’i·s first responded by building fortified towns. By the eighteenth century, new patterns in Kirikir’i·s conflict developed as population loss led to new strategies of population replacement. The new strategies included the capture of women and children to compensate for those people who were lost to disease and warfare. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Wichita scouts began a new tradition of fighting on the side of American forces, a tradition that continued into the twenty-first century. keywords Wichita, social structure, conflict, warfare, fortifications, Spanish guns

Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, 2018

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2010

American Anthropologist, 2008

The seemingly preferred outlet for scholarship on children and childhood in archaeology is in the form of edited volumes. The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica is the fifth edited volume in a decade that gathers together works on childhood and archaeology, and it is the second to do so with a particular regional emphasis. It is the first volume to focus on children in Mesoamerica. As the most recent published scholarship on childhood in archaeology, the volume offers a breadth of methodological approaches and thoughtful theoretical discussions that significantly move the archaeology of childhood forward in its development as an area of inquiry.

Science, 1998

Journal of Archaeological Research, 1999

Occasionally the attacks, typically ambushes of smaU numbers of people, cumulatively resulted in numerous casualties. Variation in palisade strength is consistent with the organizational structure and warrior mobilization potential of late prehistoric societies in different parts of the Eastern Woodlands.