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.
The Allen Site in southwestern Nebraska has nurtured the interest of archaeologists and paleontologists with abundant signs of a long history of human, animal, and environmental activity. Douglas Bamf
Part of a series on interdisciplinary contributions to archaeology, the book was originally completed by the author as a doctoral project. Included are sections on resource structure and human organiz
The Great Plains has been central to academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because the region’s well-documented violence was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican sett
