Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region. Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies. The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme--that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature. Contributors: o Paul Burnett o Oskar Burger o Minette C. Church o Philip Duke o Kevin Gilmore o Eileen Johnson o Mark D. Mitchell o Michael R. Peterson o Lawrence Todd
Author(s): Laura L. Scheiber
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 296
Contents......Page 8
Illustrations......Page 10
Tables......Page 14
1- A Sloping Land: An Introduction to Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains......Page 18
2- Intersecting Landscapes in Northeastern Colorado: A Case Study from the Donovan Site......Page 34
3- Making Places: Burned Rock Middens, Feasting, and Changing Land Use in the Upper Arkansas River Basin......Page 58
4- Ritual Landscapes, Population, and Changing Sense of Place during the Late Prehistoric Transition in Eastern Colorado......Page 88
5- Landscapes and Peoples of the Llano Estacado......Page 132
6- The Details of Home: Landscape Continuity in the High Plains......Page 174
7- Purgatorio, Purgatoire, or Picketwire: Negotiating Local, National, and Transnational Identities along the Purgatoire River in Nineteenth-Century Colorado......Page 190
8- The Behavior of Surface Artifacts: Building a Landscape Taphonomy on the High Plains......Page 220
9- Prehistoric Settlement Patterns on the High Plains of Western Nebraska and the Use of Geographic Information Systems for Landscape Analyses......Page 254
10- Places in the Heartland: Landscape Archaeology on the Plains......Page 294
About the Contributors......Page 304
Index......Page 308
