The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains (Cambridge World Archaeology)
Cambridge University Press, 9/23/2021
EAN 9780521873468, ISBN10: 0521873460
Hardcover, 350 pages, 25.9 x 20.3 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
In this volume, Douglas B. Bamforth offers an archaeological overview of the Great Plains, the vast, open grassland bordered by forests and mountain ranges situated in the heart of North America. Synthesizing a century of scholarship and new archaeological evidence, he focuses on changes in resource use, continental trade connections, social formations, and warfare over a period of 15,000 years. Bamforth investigates how foragers harvested the grasslands more intensively over time, ultimately turning to maize farming, and examines the persistence of industrial mobile bison hunters in much of the region as farmers lived in communities ranging from hamlets to towns with thousands of occupants. He also explores how social groups formed and changed, migrations of peoples in and out of the Plains, and the conflicts that occurred over time and space. Significantly, Bamforth's volume demonstrates how archaeology can be used as the basis for telling long-term, problem-oriented human history.
1. Introduction
2.Where and what are the Great Plains?
3. Peopling the continent, peopling the Plains
pre-Clovis to 10,800 B.C
4. Paleoindian hunters (and gatherers)
10,800 to 6900 B.C.
5. Diversity, environmental change
and external connection
the Plains Archaic, 6900 to 600 B.C.
6. Mounds, pots, pipes, and bison
the Plains Woodland Period, 600 B.C. to A.D. 950
7. The context of maize farming on the Great Plains
8. Settled farmers and their neighbors, Part I
the early Plains Village period, A.D. 950 to 1250
9. Settled farmers and their neighbors continued
the Plains Village Period Part II
A.D. 1250 to 1400
10. The Plains Village Period, Part III
fifteenth century transformations
11. One promise kept
the Colonial Era, A.D. 1500 to the twentieth century
12. Afterward.