Archeologists like to talk about sediment, natural fill and disturbed fill, how alluvial deposits are altered to form soil horizons, and post-depositional processes that describe how cultural materials get altered after they become buried in the ground. Archeologists like to talk about artifacts they find buried in the earth and ceramics that are made from the earth. Archeologists can spend hours talking about dirt! Correction—according to certain geomorphologists, it is always called sediment, not dirt.

Archeologists study these things to learn about the people, but we cannot understand the people without thinking about the earth (a.k.a., sediment, deposits, stratigraphy) and the relationships between past peoples and the earth they lived on.

In the first ten exhibits, PAR Research and Education Director Doug Wilkens looks in depth at various aspects of one simple question:

How did the Native Americans living in the West Pasture valley on the Erickson’s M-Cross Ranch use the earth in their everyday lives? 

To address this question, Wilkens reviews some of the more significant research findings made during two decades of archeological investigations on the ranch. The discussions focus on the Plains Village period as it is expressed on the M-Cross Ranch from about A.D. 1160­–1400, and they are organized into a series of earth-related research topics. These illustrated discussions look at how these people used the earth’s abundant resources to their best advantage. The first ten research topics start at a large scale—the prehistoric houses we found in the West Pasture—and work down to the smallest scale—that being individual artifacts made of earth.

The last two research topics are a collaboration between Wilkens, Doug Boyd, Charles Frederick, and John Erickson, and they take a step back to look at the big picture. Topic 11 takes a panoramic view of the West Pasture landscape to consider how Plains Villagers were practicing agriculture in this small tributary valley near the Canadian River.

Topic 12 then examines an important research question, perhaps the most important question for many Plains archeologists:  Who were the West Pasture Plains Villagers? These people had an intimate relationship with the earth, and they thrived in this stretch of the Canadian River valley for several hundred years. But, in many ways, they remain a mysterious group of people that we seek to understand.