Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains

Antelope Creek people fought against Washita River people, Coalescent people fought against Middle Missouri people, and Oneota people fought against everyone.Like the widespread recognition of a link between Plains violence and resource shortages, this answer fits well with Ember and Ember's (1992) analysis, which also highlighted the importance of socialization for mistrust of outsiders.Violence across ethnic or cultural boundaries is well documented in North America, perhaps most spectacularly, and sometimes horrifically, between Inuit groups and their interior Athapaskan neighbors (e.g., Hoffecker et al. 2012:147; Melbye and Fairgrieve 1994).But this kind of inference on the Plains assumes a social reality to archaeological culture-historical units that we know is often unwarranted.The unit designated "Post-Contact Coalescent" in the Middle Missouri region, for example, certainly includes sites occupied by multiple social or ethnic groups who were at least intermittently hostile toward one another (Lehmer 1971) and the huge geographic extent and long temporal span of the occupations we subsume under the term "Oneota" suggest a similar pattern.Furthermore, inferring conflict between the kinds of groups that may be represented by archaeological traditions implies decisionmaking at a level somewhere above that of the individual community, suggesting a kind of pan-tribal organization for which we have no evidence.Despite this, though, there are at least some large-scale patterns on the Plains that make sense in terms of well-known culture-historical units.Most clearly, Boyd (1997) notes a general concentration of victims of violence during Late Woodland and early Plains Village times along the area of contact between groups in the southwestern Texas and their neighbors to the north and east.These Texas groups show clear ceramic links to the Puebloan Southwest and not to the Plains, while their neighbors show the opposite, and this area may have been a border of some kind between mutually hostile groups.The absence of skulls and mandibles in central Texas burials of about this age (see, for example, Krieger 1946) also parallels the burial of isolated skulls and mandibles in some Caddoan centers in adjacent areas of the Southeast, perhaps indicating a similar pattern (Barnes 1992;Dial and Creel 2012).Indeed, skulls and mandibles at the Crenshaw site in Arkansas do appear to have been taken from nonlocal individuals (Schambach 2014).However, the history of warfare in the Middle Missouri illustrates how complicated this issue can be.Defenses appear there by the eleventh or twelfth century and are scattered throughout the distribution of horticultural sites.In addition, sites just north of these early farmers, like Menoken (Ahler 2007; Krause 2007), occupied by hunters and gatherers, but with pottery clearly influenced by farmers, were also fortified.If the distribution of fortifications tells us

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