Lecture 6 Notes
Crow Creek Case Study
In this class period we examine the Crow Creek Massacre. You will be seeing a slide show from the 1978 excavations and subsequent analysis. Be certain to look at the Crow Creek Massacre web site for more photos and background.
Details to accompany slides:
Location: 34BF11, Buffalo County, South Dakota, along the Missouri River near its confluence with Wolf and Crow Creeks. On the southern edge of the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation.
Date: Around 1325 AD, based on radiocarbon dating of charcoal from a small fire placed atop the thin layer of clay covering the remains.
Culture of Victims: Initial Coalescent, an archaeological term indicating people of Caddoan origin who moved in from the Central Plains areas in south. These people are generally believed to be ancestral to the Arikara and Pawnee.
The Site: The Crow Creek site is a National Historic Landmark site loated on a point of land that sticks into the Missouri River valley, about 50-75 feet above the floodplain. The point is created where Crow Creek flows into the Missouri floodplain by the southward-flowing Wolf Creek which enters the floodplain near the same place. The site has two components. The earliest is the Middle Missouri tradition, a culture believed to be ancestral to the Mandan and probably Siouan in origin. The Middle Missouri remains are near the point. The Initial Coalescent are farther up (northeast) the point of land.The depressions of more than 50 earthlodges can still be seen. The whole area is surrounded by a dry, earthen, fortification ditch ranging from 6-12 feet wide and up to 9 feet deep. Bastions protrude from the ditch.
The site was in danger of heavy erosion in 1978. Looting destabilized the bank near the west end of the fortification, uncovering the remains. Excavations, under Contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, carefully exhumed the remains.
Earlier excavations by the Nebraska State Historical Society in 1954-55 observed that almost all the lodges had been burned.
The Remains: Near the end of the fortification ditch archaeologists found a roughly conical pile of human bones, about three feet thick covering a 20 x 20 feet area. This pile contained the remains of at least 486 individuals. Many remains:
showed evidence of scalping and other mutilations,
showed evidence of having been killed by blows to the head, and
showed evidence of manutrition, especially of protein and iron.
The victims covered all age ranges, from infants to the elderly, with the only category in smaller numbers than expected from the group of females aged 15-39.
The remains lay out some time after death. Almost all were disarticulated and many showed evidence of gnawing by canids (dog like animals, perhaps dogs, wolves, or coyotes). Someone came back later, picked up the bones, and dumped them into a pile at the end of the ditch. A small layer of clay was brought up from the floodplain and a small fire built on top.
The remains were reburied in 1981.
Who Carried Out the Massacre and Why?: We cannot know for certain. Several explanations are possible. One is that it was some outside group, perhaps displaced Middle Missouri villagers from the north. Another suggests that some distant group from the east or west came through the area and massacred the villagers. Though neither can be ruled out, some problems suggest that it would have been difficult to do due to villages size, protection, and the fact that relatives lived in villages nearby.
Another explanation suggests that overpopulation combined with climatic instability caused competition for arable land. The massacre may have been carried out by one or several allied villages of the same culture. Evidence of malnutrition in the paleopathology suggests part of the hypothesis could be true. Computer simulation suggests that the hypothesis is feasible.
Additional Resources:
Bumsted, M. Pamela
1984 Human Variation: Isotopic C13 in Adult bone Collagen and the
Relation to Diet in an Isochronous C4 (Maize) Archaeological
Population. Los Alamos National Laboratory, LA-10259-T Thesis
(originally PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.
Galloway, A., P.
Willey, and L. Snyder
1997 Human Bone Mineral Densities and Survival of Bone Elements:
A Contemporary Sample. In, W.D. Haglund and M. Sorg, eds., Foresnic
Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains. Boca Raton:
CDC Press. pp. 295-317.
Gregg, J., P. Steele,
P. Gregg, L.J. Zimmerman and H. Ferwerda.
1981 Ante-Mortem Crow Creek Osteopathology. Plains
Anthropologist 26(94):287-300.
Gregg, J., P. Gregg, L. J. Zimmerman and S. Clifford
1981 Craniofacial Anomalies in the Upper Missouri River Over a
Millennium: Archaeological and Clinical
Evidence. With. Cleft Palate Journal 18(3):210-222.
Gregg, J., L. J. Zimmerman and M. Allison
1981 Possible Trepanematosis in 14th Century Dakota Territory: A
Progress Report. Paleopathology
Newsletter 34:5-6.-267.
Gregg, J., J. Steele, H. Ferwerda, L. J. Zimmerman and P. Gregg
1981 Otolaryngic Osteopathology in 14th Century Mid-America: The
Crow Creek Massacre.. Annals of Otology, Rhinology, and
Laryngology 90(3):288-293.
Gregg, J. and L.J. Zimmerman
1981 Para-Mortem Osteopathology in the Crow Creek Massacre
Victims. South Dakota Journal of Medicine 34(2):7-12.
Kivett, Marvin F. and R. E. Jensen 1976 Archaeological Investigations at the Crow Creek Site (39BF11). Nebraska State Historical Society Publications in Anthropology, 7.
Symes, Steven A.
1983 harris Lines as Indictors of Stress: An Analysis of Tibiae
from the Crow Creek Massacre Victims. MA Thesis, Department of
Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Willey, P.
1981 Another View by One of the Crow Creek Researchers. Early
Man 3(3): 26.
1982 Osteology of the Crow Creek Massacre. Ph.D. Dissertation,
Department of Anthropology, University
of Tennessee, Knoxville.
1990 Prehistoric Warfare on the Great Plains. New York:
Garland.
P. Willey and T. Emerson
1993 The Osteology and Archaeolgoy of the Crow Creek Massacre. Plains
Anthropologist Memoir. Essays in Memory of Robert Alex.
38(145):227-269.
Willey, P., A. Galloway and L. Snyder
1997 Bone Mineral Density and Survival of Elements and Element
Portions in the Bones of the Crow
Creek Massacre Victims. American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 104:513-528.
Zimmerman, Larry J.
1981 The Crow Creek Massacre. In D. Holden (ed.), Dakota
Visions: A County Approach. Center for
Western Studies, Augustana College, Sioux Falls. pp. 265
1997 The Crow Creek Massacre. In J. Carman, (ed.) Material
Harm: Archaeological Studies of War and
Violence. Glasgow: Cruthine Press. pp. 75-94.
Zimmerman, Larry J. and Robert A. Alex
1981 How the Crow Creek Archaeologists View the Question of
Reburial. Early Man
3(3):25-26.
1981 Digging Ancient Burials: The Crow Creek Experience. Early
Man 3(3):3-10.
Zimmerman, Larry J. and Lawrence E. Bradley
1986 Simulation of Competition for Scarce Resources: The Crow
Creek Massacre in Ancient North
America. Proceedings of the 2nd European Simulation Congress.
Society for
Computer Simulation, Ghent, Belgium. pp. 763-768.
1993 The Crow Creek Massacre, Initial Coalescent Warfare and
Speculations about the Genesis of
Extended Coalescent. Plains Anthropologist, Memoir. Essays
in Memory of Robert Alex. 38(145):215-
226. With L.E. Bradley.
Zimmerman, Larry J. and James R. Stewart
1989 To Dehumanize and Slaughter: A Natural History Model of
Massacres. Great Plains Sociologist 2:1-
17.
1991 An Application of the Massacre Model to a 700 Year Old
Mystery. Great Plains Sociologist 4(1):
23-39.
Zimmerman, Larry J. and John B. Gregg
1986 Malnutrition in 14th Century South Dakota: Osteopathological
Manifestations. With.
North American Archaeologist 7(3):191- 214.
Larry J. Zimmerman and R. Whitten
1980 Mass Grave at Crow Creek in South Dakota Reveals How Indians
Massacred Indians in 14th Century
Attack. Smithsonian 11(6):100-109.
L. J. Zimmerman, P. Willey, T. Emerson, M. Swegle, J. Gregg, P.
Gregg, T. Haberman, E. White, C. Smith and P. Bumsted.
1981 The Crow Creek Site Massacre: A Preliminary Report.
Corps of Engineers-Omaha District.
What similarities and differences do you see between the nature of warfare fought by small scale societies and warfare fought by larger scale societies like our own?
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ljz, 2/23/98