Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

20 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY
career of 50 years has centered in the Plains area.
He has carried on excavations in most of the
Plains states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas,
Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas; and in so doing
he has explored cultural remains of Indians of the
paleolithic period, of the prehistoric periods (Archaic,
Central Plains, Nebraska Culture, and socalled
classic Oneota), and of historic Pawnee,
Kansas, and Wichita. It is his vast experience in
the Plains as a whole and his interest in broadly
based anthropological research problems dealing
with culture continuity and change, with dynamic
problems of the relationship between man
and his changing environment, and with the
interaction between neighboring Indian groups
that have prepared him for writing general summaries
of Plains prehistory, certainly the best ever
presented. They have appeared in his book Prehistoric
Man On the Great Plains (1961a) and subsequently
in chapter-length expositions (1963,
1978b, and revision of 1963 now in press). Other
archeologists have published monographs on specific
sites and subregions or have included summaries
of Plains prehistory as parts of broader
treatments of prehistory, but none has provided
comparable Plains-wide syntheses.
The title of "Dean of Plains Archeology" would
be completely appropriate for Wedel today. However,
in his autobiographical article, Wedel
(1977a) recognizes and appreciates the value of
the groundwork laid before his professional career
took shape by individuals without professional
training in archeology, as for example, in Nebraska,
E.E. Blackman, A.T. Hill, and Robert
Gilder (for others, see Wedel, 1981). He also
acknowledges the inspiring influence that William
Duncan Strong had on his developing
professional orientation, as will be noted. What
does not come out is the influence that Wedel,
the student, had on the thinking of his mentor
and good friend. When Wedel entered the University
of Nebraska in 1930, Strong had been in
the anthropology department there for only a
year, having come directly from ethnographic
field work in Labrador. However, Strong had
done some archeology on the northwest coast
where he had grown up. Wedel was a Kansan by
birth and the Plains were a part of him. A fruitful
exchange of ideas prevailed. Interestingly, it was
Wedel who plugged for the classificatory term
"Upper Republican," finally persuading his professor
to substitute it for "Prehistoric Pawnee,"
Strong's original name for that category of archeological
materials. It was Wedel, too, who later
refined and continued to make more precise
Strong's first temporal and geographical ordering
of Central Plains archeological units resulting,
among others, in the classic presentations titled
"Culture Sequence in the Central Great Plains"
(1940), and "Culture Chronology in the Central
Great Plains" (1947).
Wedel's influence on the development of archeology
in areas outside the Plains has been far
greater than his outlying field work would suggest.
It has been primarily methodological. Wedel
was one of the early proponents of studies involving
environment and prehistoric peoples. His paper
(1956) on changing settlement patterns in the
Great Plains was an early presentation of that
concept. Through his own effective use of the
"direct historical approach" and explanations of
benefits to be derived from the methodology, he
has persuaded a number of others to employ it.
More subtle has been his influence on other
scholars through his caution in interpretation and
his insistence that it be based firmly on hard data.
Much of his field work has been problem-oriented
in order to provide the data base necessary for
sound interpretation.
During Wedel's student days, much of the
emphasis in Plains archeology was on taxonomy.
The Midwestern Taxonomic System had recently
been formulated by W.C. McKern (1939) and
others. Plains archeology still shows its linguistic
survivals. Some of Wedel's early writing reflects
this concern with taxonomy, but where he presents
trait lists, he shows none of the preoccupation
with taxonomy as an end in itself common
at the time. Even when using the Midwestern
Taxonomic System, Wedel concentrated on the
smaller units—components, foci, and aspects—
where he was close to the basic data. He has been
more concerned with diagnostic traits or index
artifacts than with percentages of traits. At times