Recent Population Movements on the Great Plains

Abstract

Chapter 2 proposes a relationship between a society’s complexity and the specific environment that that society exploits, but the specific locations of the recent occupants of the Great Plains changed dramatically during the centuries just before and after white contact. It is therefore necessary to consider these changes in studying the relationship between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Plains grasslands and the people living in them. This chapter discusses the pattern of hunter—gatherer migration across the Plains between a. d. 1650 and 1850, summarizing the tribal movements and the accepted explanations for them and identifying several points for which these explanations do not account. Chapter 8 tests the hypothesis proposed in Chapter 2 against data on the final distribution of the Plains tribes and then considers the migrations summarized here in light of the results of this test.