Some two and a half decades ago, Carole Crumley noted the “almost unconscious assumption of hierarchy-as-order … among social scientists, especially in the area of complex society” (1995: 3). At the time, the prevailing view was that large-scale, complex groups were functionally impossible without a centralized power and hierarchical organization. Yet, Crumley went on, any number of biological and social structures that are hard to characterize as hierarchical are, by most any measure, complex. Drawing from cognitive scientist Warren McCulloch’s (1945) work on the collective organization of the brain, she dubbed these organizations heterarchies, where heterarchy is “defined as the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked, or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways, depending on systemic requirements” (Crumley, 1979: 144; 2015: 1)

This volume is like déjà vu – here we are again trying to break away from hierarchy. In 2009, a major conference on social formations set an ambitious dual agenda: to summarize the research on that subject up to this point with a strong critique of the favored but not always justified hierarchical approach, and to offer a range of alternatives to studying and understanding human organization (Kienlin, 2012). This conference came after years of excellent scholarship on the development of contrary models (e.g. Crumley, 1987; Friedman & Rowlands, 1977) to the study and proliferation of hierarchical societies (or what are assumed to be hierarchical societies) that dominate our discipline. The contributions to this volume are part of the same cycle of the utter predominance of approaches equating power with hierarchy and centralization that are periodically challenged by the increasing number of archaeological case studies for which such approaches simply do not work.

Literacy and the exercise of power are intimately entangled. Claude Lévi-Strauss once famously argued that, by enabling “the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes … the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery” (Lévi-Strauss, 1973: 299). An analogous hegemony is propagated in academic discourses that rely upon the textual products of past elites. This is especially pertinent to the study of early China, which until recently “has concentrated, expressly or not, on the relationship between exceptional individuals, elite classes, power holders, and the written word” (Sanft, 2019: 2), influenced largely by the received canon of classics, histories, and masters literature. It would be presumptuous, however, to deny non-elite agency in the power dynamics contested through literacy; and it is therefore equally imperative that our scholarship reaches beyond elite texts to accommodate non-elite actors. To these ends, this chapter examines the impact of non-elite access to scribal literacy in early China, through the analysis of an archaeological context in which manuscript fragments of a scribal primer were recovered.

We have seen objects moving great distances within the Plains and coming onto the grasslands from much of the North American continent more and more over time, albeit in small numbers. However, objects move because people move them, and people rarely move the kinds of small, durable items that preserve in the archaeological record in isolation. Instead, they usually move them along with a variety of other things, including nondurable things like food. That things move with people also means that those people move, and that their knowledge – language, customs, technical information, ideology – moves, too. But objects, people, and ideas do not necessarily move together in equal proportion or with equal effect.

This book is about the human history of the Great Plains, the immense grassland at the heart of North America, beginning with its initial settlement by human beings toward the end of the Ice Age and continuing into the early 20th century. The Great Plains include a million or more square kilometers from the Canadian parkland in the north to Central Texas in the south and from the Rocky Mountains in the west to roughly the 94th meridian in the east (Figure 1.1). We know the deep human history of this region primarily through archaeological evidence and indigenous traditional histories, although this evidence is not widely known outside the Plains. This part of the world is a neglected and often maligned region, perhaps as much among professional archaeologists as among the urban elites of New York and Los Angeles.

The century and a half from AD 1250 to AD 1400 saw massive shifts in the distributions of human populations on the Plains, the social groups that they lived in, and the interactions among these groups. These shifted again in the next 100 years, transforming the human landscape of the Plains in just a few generations. We see these changes more precisely in at least some areas because the radiocarbon calibration curve is smooth and straight for the 1400s (Figure 7.8). There seems especially to have been a major shift in settlement in the mid-1400s that corresponded with a dramatic drought (a “megadrought”) extending from the Dakotas into Texas (interestingly, tree-ring data suggest that the Canadian prairies were not affected by this drought, although the later 1400s were relatively dry there; Case and MacDonald 2003; Cook et al. 2007; Stahle et al. 2007). I consider this interval among farmers first and then turn to hunter-gatherers.

Like more standard histories, archaeological histories begin at the beginning. As Chapter 2 notes, the archaeology of the Great Plains first found national attention in the early 20th century as sites like Folsom and Blackwater Draw produced incontestable evidence that humans lived side by side with extinct Pleistocene mammals. After nearly a century with this early occupation in the archaeological spotlight, it ought to be relatively straightforward to document the time and pattern of the first arrival of humans on the grasslands. Sadly, though, it is not, and identifying the beginning of human occupation of the Great Plains is as controversial as identifying the beginning of human occupation anywhere else in North America. This chapter reviews the evidence for the first peopling of the Great Plains in the context of the peopling of the New World as a whole and then turns to the environmental setting in which the first humans appeared in the region and the earliest definite evidence of human occupation on the Plains.