ARCHEOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS IN WESTERN 



KANSAS 



By WALDO R. WEDEL 



Assistant Curator, Division of Archeology, U. S. National Museum 



During the closing decades of the seventeenth century, when the 

 Spanish were reconquering the New Mexico region after the Pueblo 

 revolt of 1680, discontented Indian groups on various occasions fled 

 east and northeast into the buffalo plains seeking refuge among the 

 Apaches. Though such flights were never of sufficient duration and 

 magnitude to leave a marked impression on the alien peoples thus 

 contacted, the fact that they did take place is of considerable interest 

 to students of Plains prehistory. It raises the hope that datable 

 antiquities of Southwestern type may eventually be found in direct 

 association with remains of recognized Plains cultures. Through 

 such association a clearer perspective might be imparted to the 

 sequence of culture types postulated for the central Great Plains. 



To determine, first, the extent of Puebloan influences in western 

 Kansas, and second, the prospects for injecting time perspective into 

 the earlier archeological history of the region, the writer extended 

 into the High Plains an archeological survey begun in 1937. A month 

 was spent in and near Scott County State Park, lying in the picturesque 

 bluff-lined Beaver Creek valley, which contrasts most strikingly 

 with the flat wind-swept and drought-ridden surrounding uplands 

 (fig. 89). Traces of a seven-room pueblo ruin opened by Williston 

 and Martin in 1898 were relocated. Middens yielded potsherds and 

 artifacts of stone, bone, and horn, as well as rare objects of copper, 

 iron, and glass. Charred maize, and squash or gourd rinds indicate 

 horticulture, but quantities of animal bones suggest that subsistence 

 was primarily by hunting. Contrary to expectations, Puebloan influ- 

 ences were almost negligible. Aside from the stone-walled ruin and 

 nearby pre-white irrigation ditches there was a bare handful of 

 sherds, some painted, and a few incised clay pipe fragments pre- 

 sumably attributable to late Southwestern stimulus. Numerous bell- 

 shaped roasting pits and large irregular trash pits, as also the great 

 bulk of artifacts recovered, show close relationship to sites of the 

 protohistoric Dismal River culture of southwestern Nebraska. No 

 houses of indigenous type were found. Whatever the relationship 

 between these remains and the Pueblo structure, it is an interesting 



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