The Landscape Archaeology of the Northwestern Plains: Problems and Potential

Summary

The Plains of Northern Montana contain a uniquely preserved record of rock circles (tipi rings), rock piles (cairns), and other rock configurations that communicate resident, transient, and permanent aspects of prehistoric Native American life in the modern Blackfeet Indian Reservation. This paper relies on the long-term recordation of several thousand of such features to articulate a continuous architectural landscape that represents leadership, planning, seasonality, demography, and the passage of time. We seek to explain this record in the context of minimal and monumental human endeavors to conceive a better understanding of the ethnographic and archaeological pasts.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Solving Archaeological Research Problems in Rocky Mountain and Plains Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage