Plains Earthlodges: Ethnographic and Archaeological Perspectives

3. Architecture as a Source of Cultural Conservation: Gendered Social, Economic, and Ritual Practices Associated with Hidatsa Earthlodges

3 Architecture as a Source of Cultural Conservation Gendered Social, Economic, and Ritual Practices Associated with Hidatsa Earthlodges Elizabeth P . Pauls This chapter considers the cultural encoding of homes as material objects and as containers of action. In focusing on the interactions between the form, organization, and meaning of a given kind of dwelling, this approach is a descendant of many previous studies by anthropologists and architectural historians (e.g., Bourdieu 1973; Deetz 1977, 1982; Donley-Reid 1990; Glassie 1975; Griaule 1965; Groth and Bressi 1997; Upton 1983, 1985). It also draws from work emphasizing the interconnected roles of place, culture, and individual agency (e.g., Bender 1992, 1993; Jackson 1953, 1984, 1994; Johnson 1989, 1993), although I do not attempt to address individual agency as such. How does an anthropologist move between studies of the material and the symbolic to understand a culture? To some extent, the answer to this question depends upon the time under study; does one hope to explore and explain the present or the past? Certain limits inhere in both time venues. Anthropologists working in the present may directly observe a culture in action, but they may also be in®uenced by the immediacy of the moment to describe unique events rather than broad cultural patterns. Anthropologists working in the past cannot observe behavior directly, but they are more easily able to emphasize the broad sweep of the human experience because of the diachronic nature of the data they work with. Perhaps the most opportune con®uence of directly observed behavior and material data susceptible to long-term pattern recognition occurs from late prehistory onward. This era comprises about the past 1,000 years in North America and is notable because archaeological studies and direct historical and ethnographic observations can be con¤dently combined to create an exceedingly rich data set. Although ethnographic materials from the ¤fteenth through nineteenth centuries are often biased by the colonialist perspectives of their authors, their eyewitness point of view provides a unique window on indigenous people and the material world they made, owned, and used. The people considered in this chapter, the Hidatsa, were one of the groups most frequently recorded by early nineteenth-century colonizers. At that time, the region that is now central North Dakota made up the core territory of the Hidatsa and their neighbors, the Mandan. Because they controlled key strategic transit routes connecting the mercantile east with the fur-trapping west (Figure 3.1), the Mandan and Hidatsa quickly became the subject of commercial, and later of ethnographic, interest. Building upon methods that were devised in the early twentieth century as part of a “direct historical approach” (Steward 1942), I pursue an “anthropology of history” (Biersack 1991; Kirch 1992; Sahlins 1981, 1992) that draws upon a wide variety of data sources. Direct eyewitness accounts relating to the Hidatsa date to at least the 1790s. At that time, the extraordinary English explorer, surveyor, and trader David Thompson set up trading operations at the tribe’s three large villages near the con®uence of the Knife and Missouri Rivers (cf. Glover 1962; Wood and Thiessen 1985). Period accounts include not only textual descriptions but also a wide array of visual media such as the Figure 3.1. Location of traditional Hidatsa territory. 52 Elizabeth P . Pauls Hidatsa villages paintings and sketches of artists Karl Bodmer and George Catlin (see Hunt et al. 1984 and Catlin 1973 [1844], respectively). These early records are well supplemented by ¤eld data and analyses from later cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians, and Hidatsa informants, all of which can be combined to illuminate Hidatsa life and culture during the past millennium. EX AMINING CULTURE CHANGE V IA ARTIFACT STABILITY As anthropologists who study culture over the long term, archaeologists frequently emphasize periods of great transformation in their scholarship. During the past millennium, the Hidatsa nation has experienced two momentous culture transitions. The ¤rst transition consisted of a signi¤cant change in economics, from foraging to horticulture, and took place between a.d. 1000 and 1200 (Ahler 2003; Wood 2001). This transition is a local instance of one of the greatest revolutions in the human experience—the shift from using wholly wild foods to food production. The second great transition began in the late ¤fteenth century, when Europeans arrived on the shores of the Americas. Its effects have ultimately been as global in scope as the agricultural revolution, yet its ¤rst...