Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Some Observations on the
Central Plains Tradition in Iowa
ABSTRACT
A brief overview of the Central Plains tradition
is presented to identify problems and models
amenable to testing with data derived from the
Glenwood locality. Recently obtained radiocarbon
dates and other data from the Iowa excavations
are presented to address problems of settlement
pattern and chronology within the Central
Plains tradition.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.—The author wishes to
thank the Iowa Department of Transportation
and Federal Highway Administration who provided
the funding for the series of earth lodge
excavations in the Glenwood locality. Particular
thanks are due to Dr. Margaret Bender and Dr.
David Baerreis of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, for processing the majority of the radiocarbon
samples cited in this study. Without their
assistance, questions regarding many of the earlier
radiocarbon dates from the Glenwood locality
could not have been resolved. David Cook and
Dr. and Mrs. Wedel read an earlier draft of this
paper and offered many constructive comments.
Responsibility for the final product, however,
rests solely with the author. The assistance of
Karyn McAdams in editing and typing several
drafts of the manuscript is deeply appreciated.
John A. Hotopp, Louisberger International, 100 Halsled Street, East
Orange, New Jersey 07019.
John A. Hotopp
173
A Brief Overview of the Central Plains
Tradition
The first excavations of earth lodges attributed
to the Nebraska phase of the Central Plains tradition
were conducted in southwestern Iowa near
the town of Glenwood by S.V. Proudfit and Seth
Dean in the late 1870s (Dean, 1883; Proudfit
1881a, 1881b, 1886a, 1886b). Some 20 years after
the pioneering work by Proudfit and Dean, Robert
F. Gilder, a journalist and amateur archeologist,
carried out a number of excavations in eastern
Nebraska which culminated in a series of
descriptive articles (Gilder, 1907, 1909, 1911).
Gilder later named this culture the Nebraska
Culture (Gilder, 1926).
In the 1930s, largely as a result of Works Project
Administration (WPA) funding, intensive field
work was conducted in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska,
focusing in part on the square lodges of
the Central Plains. In Iowa, Charles R. Keyes,
director of the Iowa Archaeological Survey, and
Ellison Orr, his field assistant, concentrated their
attention on the Glenwood lodges during the
1938 field season. Working with a WPA crew,
Orr excavated 15 lodges and recorded an additional
68 in the Glenwood area (Orr, 1963, 10:4).
By the close of the decade, archeologists had
successfully delimited the approximate geographical
boundary of the culture and had identified
two variants, the Nebraska and Upper Republican
phases.
The Nebraska phase, which includes Glenwood
(Anderson, 1961; Brown, 1967), is centered along