Corn, Beans and Bison: Cultivated Plants and Changing Economies of the Late Prehistoric Villagers on the Plains of Oklahoma and Northwest Texas

Abstract

The economies of past Native American societies on the southern Plains are often viewed as bison dependent based on historical descriptions of mobile, horse-based hunters and early excavations that recovered abundant bison bones but few plant remains. Very little historical description is available for the plants used by these people and little attention has been given to the time depth of this adaptation. Over the past 25 years, research on Plains Village and early contact sites in western Oklahoma and northwestern Texas has revealed evidence of a mixed economy with cultivated plants and bison as important elements. This paper reviews the paleobotanical data from sites covering the past 1,000 years and examines the role of cultivated and wild plants in these southern Plains societies. The importance of various cultivated plants for villagers in the wetter, eastern tall grass prairies is compared to the use of these plants by villagers in the dryer settings of the western mixed and short grass prairies. Some variations in the use of some cultivated plants are also documented through time, especially in the period after European contact.