James and Dolores Gunnerson's ethnology of the high plains is a companion volume to the 1987 work by Dr. Gunnerson entitled Archaeology of the High Plains. These two documents are part of a joint USDI Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service, USDA project to provide an overview of the archaeology and ethnology in an area encompassing eastern Colorado, western Kansas, northeastern New Mexico, and parts of Texas and Oklahoma.
In broad outline, native occupation of the Central High Plains can be summarized as follows. The area west of the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in south-cental Colorado, was dominated throughout the historic period by Utes who joined the Comanche bands after 1706 to make forays onto the plains. The Central High Plains was dominated by Apaches during the 1500s and 1600s with other tribes crossing in or entering the plains only incidentally.
Plains Societies and CulturesIndians of the Great Plains, written by Daniel J. Gelo of The University of Texas at San Antonio, is a text that emphasizes that Plains societies and cultures are continuing, living entities. Through a topical exploration, it provides a contemporary view of recent scholarship on the classic Horse Culture Period while also bringing readers up-to-date with historical and cultural developments of the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition, it contains wide and balanced coverage of the many different tribal groups, including Canadian and southern populations. Teaching & Learning Experience: Improve Critical Thinking - Indians of the Great Plains provides recent scholarship and up-to-date historical and cultural developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to see the Plains societies and cultures as continuing, living entities — including charts showing tribal organization and kinship systems. Engage Students — Indians of the Great Plains features excerpts of Native poetry, songs, and ethnographic accounts, as well as Chapter Summaries and End-of-Chapter Review Questions.
This collection offers state-of-the-field work in Great Plains ethnohistory, both contemporary and historical, covering the traditional anthropological subfields of ethnography, culture history, archaeology, and linguistics.
The Southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico are rich in Paleoindian archaeological sites, including such well-known ones as Clovis, Lubbock Lake, Plainview, and Midland. These sites have been extensively researched over decades, not only by archaeologists but also by geoscientists, whose studies of soils and stratigraphy have yielded important information about cultural chronology and paleoenvironments across the region. In this book, Vance T. Holliday synthesizes the data from these earlier studies with his own recent research to offer the most current and comprehensive overview of the geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains during the earliest human occupation. He delves into twenty sites in depth, integrating new and old data on site geomorphology, stratigraphy, soils, geochronology, and paleoenvironments. He also compares the Southern High Plains sites with other sites across the Great Plains, for a broader chronological and paleoenvironmental perspective. With over ninety photographs, maps, cross sections, diagrams, and artifact drawings, this book will be essential reading for geoarchaeologists, archaeologists, and Quaternary geoscientists, as well as avocational archaeologists who take part in Paleoindian site study throughout the American West.
A vivid account of the prehistory and history of Denver as revealed in its archaeological record, Denver: An Archaeological History invites us to imagine Denver as it once was. Around 12,000 B.C., groups of leather-clad Paleoindians passed through the juncture of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, following the herds of mammoth or buffalo they hunted. In the Archaic period, people rested under the shade of trees along the riverbanks, with baskets full of plums as they waited for rabbits to be caught in their nearby snares. In the early Ceramic period, a group of mourners adorned with yellow pigment on their faces and beads of eagle bone followed Cherry Creek to the South Platte to attend a funeral at a neighboring village. And in 1858, the area was populated by the crude cottonwood log shacks with dirt floors and glassless windows, the homes of Denver's first inhabitants. For at least 10,000 years, Greater Denver has been a collection of diverse lifeways and survival strategies, a crossroads of interaction, and a locus of cultural coexistence. Setting the scene with detailed descriptions of the natural environment, summaries of prehistoric sites, and archaeologists' knowledge of Denver's early inhabitants, Nelson and her colleagues bring the region's history to life. From prehistory to the present, this is a compelling narrative of Denver's cultural heritage that will fascinate lay readers, amateur archaeologists, professional archaeologists, and academic historians alike.
