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.

The earliest evidence for people on the Great Plains leaves many questions unanswered, but we know enough to set the stage for the changes that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene. We have seen that it is effectively impossible for the small sample of dated early sites to tell us about the continent’s very first occupants, whether Clovis was first or not. This means that people must have been on the Plains not for a few centuries prior to 10,800 BC (12,800 cal BP), but, rather, probably for thousands of years prior to that date. This has surpassingly important implications for the human context of change on the Great Plains at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the modern geologic period, the Holocene.

By the end of the Woodland times, communities who led very different kinds of lives and who participated in very different pan-regional social and economic networks lived across the Great Plains. The social and adaptive mosaic that they formed underlies the development of horticultural societies on the Plains that began in the 10th century. The people who occupied the northern and Northwestern Plains at the end of Woodland times were mobile and may have been the most sophisticated and intensive big-game hunters that North America has ever seen. Whether or not they directly met people from the Eastern Woodlands, they were an integral part of continent-wide exchange networks with them. South of these hunters, semi-sedentary communities of more generalist hunters and gatherers were scattered across the central Plains, from Nebraska probably as far south as Oklahoma and north Texas. These groups, too, knew their eastern neighbors, and the easternmost of them (in Iowa and eastern Kansas and Nebraska) grew small amounts of domesticated plants. The more northern of these groups shared a general common tradition of Woodland-style ceramic production, albeit with local interpretations of this tradition evident in at least some areas. Late Woodland traditions of collective secondary burials are also especially evident on the Central Plains and speak to organized social networks that bound dispersed residence groups together through rituals that had strong similarities to mortuary rituals to the east. The more southern of these seem to have organized themselves in different ways and connected into the Southeast rather than into the Midwest.

I live in Longmont, Colorado, on the western edge of the Great Plains. Settlers from Chicago founded the modern city of Longmont in 1871 by the St. Vrain River (a generous term for a small watercourse), adjacent to the slightly older community of Burlington (Estes et al. 1971). Longmont has grown since then from a population of a couple of hundred to a community of nearly 100,000. My city’s many amenities include Sandstone Ranch, a park just east of town that includes athletic fields, a wildlife refuge, and an elegant late-19th-century home that a pioneer named Morse Coffin built at the base of a sandstone cliff overlooking the St. Vrain.

Dividing time into discrete chronological periods like those that organize the chapters here is a mixed blessing. On one hand, such divisions reflect real differences in the archaeological record, differences that tell us about important changes in the past. On the other, they often overemphasize those differences, as if massive changes occurred instantaneously. Looking for dividing lines teaches us to divide time into segments even though we know that it flowed continuously and it focuses our attention on archaeologically visible shifts, often blinding us to important patterns of continuity.

By the mid-1200s, a traveler across the Plains would have encountered a wide array of communities and lifeways. In the far southwest, scattered households of small-scale farmers with strong ties to the southern part of the American Southwest lived in much of the Pecos Valley, while similar communities with closer connections to the Taos area lived to the north of them, perhaps into Colorado. People who made brownware pottery like that in the southern Southwest also occupied the grasslands from the Pecos across the southern Llano Estacado and may still have had settlements in the eastern Texas Panhandle and to the edge of central Texas, where they perhaps lacked maize horticulture but retained southwestern ceramic and other traditions. In Texas, these eastern groups would have met aceramic, probably seasonally settled, generalist hunter-gatherers. From Oklahoma to North Dakota, farmers dominated much of the eastern two-thirds or so of the region, living in fairly small communities in more southern areas and in substantial towns with hundreds of inhabitants in the north. All of these farmers grew maize and other cultigens, although they varied widely in their emphasis on this and there were persistent enclaves of communities (in areas like southeastern Kansas and the eastern part of the Dakotas) who knew and interacted with them but whose ways of life had changed relatively little since Late Woodland times. Much of the Western Plains of Colorado and Wyoming seems to have been substantially depopulated at this time, but farmers certainly reached out to the west in ways that we still do not fully understand. And industrial bison hunters filled the grasslands to the north and northwest, as they had for centuries.

I began this volume by noting the disconnect between widespread and long-standing views of the indigenous people and environment of the Great Plains and the reality of the character and history of that region. Mounted bison hunters like the ones we often visualize did live on the grasslands, but they existed for little more than a century and a half and many of the most famous groups who lived this way migrated to the Plains during the Colonial Era. Focusing on them neglects not only the farmers who dominated the Plains for a millennium but also the diversity of hunter-gatherer ways of life that people have lived there for perhaps 15,000 years or more. Like human history throughout North America, human history on the Plains is not a story of an unchanging way of life fixed for centuries in the forms that Euroamericans encountered; it is a story of constant change and interaction between human beings and the region’s potentials and limits. It is also a story that is difficult to understand without thinking about how Plains people reached out beyond the grasslands, establishing social and economic connections that spanned much of North America.

As the next three chapters discuss, communities of maize farmers appeared in a limited area at the northeastern edge of the grasslands during the 10th century and over a much larger area in the following centuries. This shift had implications for virtually every aspect of the lives the people in these communities and their neighbors lived, as did similar shifts throughout the world. This chapter presents a background to these changes on the Great Plains. Chapters 8 through 10 examine the archaeology of Plains farmers and their hunter-gatherer neighbors from AD 950 to AD 1500 more concretely with this background in mind.