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Foreword W Raymond Wood It is curious indeed that a serious study of the Plains earthlodge has been so long in coming. The earthlodge has been known in some detail now for exactly two centuries, ever since the passage of Lewis and Clark along the upper Missouri River. It also has been nearly a century since Clark Wissler popularized the Plains culture area concept in his The American Indian. Wissler did not include the earthlodge among his diagnostics for the Plains culture area, stressing instead the horse nomads of the High Plains (Wissler 1917:206-209). The culture area concept, in one form or another, still remains viable as a geographic entity, included as it is as an organizational principle in the Smithsonian's new Handbook ofNorth American Indians (e.g., DeMallie 2001). Yet the Plains, like the American Southwest, supported a dual lifestyle, a duality that was based on hunting and gathering vs. hunting and gardening . Wissler's "typical" Plains Indians, the tipi-dwelling Plains nomads-the "true" Plains Indians-had the oldest lifeway, going back thousands of years. The Plains Villagers, or gardeners, were the most recent development, dating to the past thousand years. These were the earthlodge dwellers, whose lifeways have been so eclipsed by the romantic sheen acquired by the nomads. There have been innumerable ethnographies of the village tribes but, as this volume testifies, almost nothing has been written about life in, and the construction of, these earth-mantled homes. There have been, of course, pioneer studies. Lewis Henry Morgan stopped at the abandoned Arikara earthlodge village adjoining Fort Clark, in presentday North Dakota, in June 1859 and recorded his observations of the ruined lodges there. These he compared with descriptions left us by George Catlin and Prince Maximilian (Morgan 1965:72-73, 133-139). Though his interpretations of those lodges are of little use to us today (e.g., "It is made reasonably plain ... that they practiced communism in living in the household, and that this principle found expression in their house architecture and predetermined its character" [Morgan 1965:139]), his effort to understand Native American house life stood as a novelty for many decades. In 1902, Washington Matthews published "The Earth Lodge in Art," in xiv Foreword which he complained of the "misrepresentations which art has made of the earthlodge," which he proceeded to correct by photographs of standing examples of thenl (Matthews 1902:2). A constant feature, as he noted, was the "long passage, entry, or storm-door,-the Eskimo doorway, as Morgan designates it" (Matthews 1902:5). This commendable effort to dispel error, however , makes no effort at interpretation. The only real interpretive efforts are those that have been made by archaeologists who contemplated the architectural aspects of the prehistoric antecedents of the historic structures. This shortfall, we pray, may end with the stimulation provided by this volume. The Mandans, Hidatsas, Arikaras, and Pawnees-the peoples I like to call the "Old Settlers" among the Plains villagers-were the standard-bearers of the "classic" historic earthlodge architecture. It seems certain that the Kansas, Missourias, Otoes, Omaha-Poncas, and Yanktonais and Santee Dakota (the Prairie villagers, as Kroeber [1947:84-85] called them) adopted the earthlodge architecture from them. The editors of the present volume show commendable restraint in speculation on the origins of the Plains earthlodge. Given the agricultural base of the Plains village folk, and other parallels with the Southeast , a derivation from that direction is not implausible, though I believe the form is most likely an independent invention based on southeastern wattleand -daub prototypes in the Central Plains, a prototype that was perfected in the bitter winters of the Northern Plains. Here I do not depart in any significant way from either Ralph Linton's (1924) speculations on the origin of the earthlodge or those of our present editors, revealing how little progress has been made in that quest in the past three-quarters of a century. But no satisfactory derivation can be inferred given the nearly continent-wide distribution of the earthlodge itself in the United States-if indeed the "earthlodges " of the Southeast are properly identified. A West Coast origin clearly is out of the question, and deriving them from the pithouses in the Southwest is marginally better but still implausible. Let us hope the present volume stimulates further substantive research into the history and relevance of this architectural form in the study of the cultures and culture history of the Indians of the Great Plains. The...

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