The Kiowa Odyssey: Evidence of historical relationships among Pueblo, Fremont, and Northwest Plains peoples

Abstract

A detail of North American prehistory that has long puzzled anthropologists is how the Kiowa speech community ended up on the Southern Plains, given that Kiowa is closely related to the Tanoan Pueblo languages of the US Southwest. In this paper, we present a variety of linguistic, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence which suggest: (1) Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan was spoken in Late Archaic and Eastern Basketmaker II sites on the Colorado Plateau; (2) Kiowan diverged from Proto-Tanoan prior to the Basketmaker III period; (3) Kiowa was among the languages spoken in Eastern Fremont sites; (4) Kiowa-speaking peoples migrated from the Fremont area to the Northwest Plains around 1300 CE; and (5) Kiowa people moved from the Yellowstone area to the Southern Plains by the early nineteenth century. This hypothesis suggests that Pueblo and Fremont peoples share threads of common heritage and that contemporary Kiowa people may have affiliations with certain Fremont and Northwest Plains sites.