A Preliminary Assessment of Prehistoric-Contact Period Blackfoot Camp Demographics

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The weakest link in reconstructing patterns of organizational complexity among Late Prehistoric Blackfoot ancestors known archaeologically as the Old Women’s Phase (1000-250 BP) is the dearth of population estimates that would explain the need to adopt institutions of social control such as esoteric societies and systems of political influence beyond those built on prestige (e.g., hereditary chieftancies). Despite the large number of domestic stone architecture in the form of stone rings, little is known about population dynamics of prehistoric camps along the Rocky Mountain foothills. A great part of the problem is the difficulty in establishing contemporaneity of individual rings within aggregated camps. Yet, contact period accounts of camp composition and size provide a solid foundation to analyze the spatial structure of Late Prehistoric camps and aggregation processes. Here we present an assessment of camp aggregation on the Kutoyis Complex, located along the Two Medicine River within the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana, to find new lines of evidence for estimating population and spatial arrangement of large camps, and to suggest future avenues for securing precise radiocarbon dates to aid in reconstruction of camp demographics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25663