DISTINCTIONS WITH A DIFFERENCE

Distinctions With

It was once thought that the Plains tribes the Mandan and the Hidatsa were practically indistinguishable. But a series of investigations has revealed considerable evidence to the contrary.

By Sally Bell

All that’s visible today of central North Dakota’s long-abandoned Mandan and Hidatsa villages are earthen mounds and depressions marking circular earthlodges and defensive ditches. But in their prime, several hundred years ago, these villages hugged terraces high above narrow swaths of fertile bottomland on the Missouri River and its Knife and Heart river tributaries. These sites are examples of what archaeologists call the Plains Village tradition, typified by permanent settlements supported by a combination of maize horticulture and bison hunting.

Along the floodplain, women wielding bone hoes and rakes farmed patchwork fields of corn, squashes, sunflowers, and beans. They also made pottery, cooked, and worked animal hides. When they weren’t hunting, the men crafted sharp stone or bone tools and weapons.

According to historical records, the women also built spacious earthlodges, constructed of posts and beams covered with soil, that could span 45 feet. With walls up to three feet thick, their homes were snug during harsh prairie weather, and sturdy enough that

This 1832 painting by the renowned artist George Catlin shows Sakakawea Village,a Hidatsa community of the banks of the Knife River.Sakakawea was destroyed in 1834.Catlin,who was known for his paintings of Indians,considered his work to be a documentary record of a vanishing race.

A Difference

people used the roofs like balconies to relax or get a commanding view of their surroundings.

Traders—Native American, and later Spanish, French, British, and American—frequented the villages. Lewis and Clark, leading the Corps of Discovery in search of the Northwest Passage, stayed with the Mandans and Hidatsas during the winter of 1804–05.

Despite periodic intertribal warfare, it was a good life until repeated smallpox epidemics decimated villages and white encroachment forced an end to the Mandan and Hidatsa lifeways. Their descendants now eke out a living about 100 miles north of their ancestral homeland at Fort Berthold Reservation near New Town, North Dakota.

According to Hidatsa traditions one of the tribe’s three subgroups, the Awatixa, claim creation in the Missouri Valley, while the other two, the Awaxawi and the Hidatsa-Proper, migrated from the east. The five Mandan bands say they came to the Plains from the west, east, and upriver. The creation stories, though, don’t say when they migrated. The two tribes’ villages and lifestyles seemed enough alike that “nearly everyone that had compared their archaeological records before lumped them as indistinguishable,” says archaeologist Stan Ahler of the PaleoCultural Research Group in Flagstaff, Arizona. Ahler has directed a number of investigations at Mandan and Hidatsa sites over the course of nearly 30 years.

Despite the similarities, Tom Thiessen, an archaeologist and ethnohistorian with the National Park Service’s Midwest Archeological Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, notes the two people’s religions and ceremonies are different, and their languages—while having common Siouan roots—were not mutually intelligible. And until smallpox wiped out 90 percent of the Mandans in 1837, they lived mostly in separate communities in different parts of the Missouri River valley. Examining the key differences, Ahler says, “My conclusion is that the two peoples can be distinguished, and have a distinct archaeological record.” His periodic excavations over several decades support that statement. Ahler is also working to establish a chronology of the occupation of the region.

Archaeologists first recorded some of the traditional Mandan and Hidatsa villages in 1883, with the first scientific excavation in 1905. The National Park Service and Ahler, then at the University of North Dakota, tested several Hidatsa villages near the Knife River in 1976 through 1981, with major reports published by 1993. The archaeology of traditional Mandan sites downstream, near Heart River, was “not well understood at all,” according to Ahler, so when, in the late 1990s, the State Historical Society of North Dakota asked him to conduct research to update interpretive information for state-owned Mandan sites, he jumped at the chance.

Double Ditch Village,a large traditional Mandan settlement,is shown in this aerial photograph taken in 1988.The site’s name comes from its two concentric fortification ditches.Several large earthen mounds covered with darker vegetation are visible near the site’s perimeter.

Artist Karl Bodmer painted this interior of a Mandan earthlodge.Bodmer,who was born in Switzerland,was the artist for the German Prince Maximilian's expedition across the American West.Bodmer began this watercolor in December of 1833 and completed it over the course of several months.Mandan and Hidatsa earthlodges were quite similar.Each had a large fireplace in the center surrounded by four massive posts that supported horizontal beams and sloping rafters layered with willow samplings,bundled grass,and earth.

Menoken Village, a site Ahler and other

archaeologists investigated in the late 1990s at the behest of the Historical Society, demonstrates that the settled, Plains Village lifeway was taking shape in what is now North Dakota in the A.D.1200s. One of the most important sites Ahler examined, Menoken helped establish a base from which to understand events in the region. Ahler thinks the people of Menoken were ancestral to some subgroups of either the Mandans or the Hidatsas.

Work began at Menoken in 1997 with remote-sensing studies by Ken Kvamme, an archaeologist at the University of Arkansas, followed by excavations and more geophysics in 1998 and 1999. Ahler’s company joined the team in 1998 at the invitation of Ray Wood, Ahler’s graduate school mentor at the University of Missouri, who conducted a field school at the site that summer. The findings sparked reappraisal of a previous interpretation that Menoken was the specific Mandan village where Europeans first made face-to-face contact in 1738. Radiocarbon dating of twigs found in its fortification ditch pinned the site to about A.D.1200, indicating that the village is 500 years older than previously thought.

Menoken is a Late Woodland site at the “very cusp of change to the Plains Village lifeway,” Ahler says; its inhabitants were “among the last of the pre-farming peoples.” There’s no evidence of food storage pits or gardening tools, and small bits of charred corn suggest only minor use of maize, perhaps obtained through trade. However, S-rimmed pottery, like that made by early Plains Village people to the south, indicates that transformation to the Plains Village lifeway—as exemplified by the later Mandans and Hidatsas—was underway. Menoken’s defensive ditch and evidence of a palisade with bastions also is a Plains Village, rather than Woodland, characteristic, he explains.

Over the next century or so, early Plains Village peoples settled in small, scattered communities extending as far as 50 miles above the Knife River. By the 1400s, villages began consolidating near the Knife and Heart rivers. Huff Village is one such large, fortified ancestral Mandan site, dating to the mid-1400s. The Mandans were heavily concentrated near Heart River by about 1500. Lower Hidatsa Village, home to the local Awatixa Hidatsa subgroup and radiocarbon dated to roughly 1525, was among the first large Hidatsa communities built close to Knife River. Ahler thinks the two eastern Hidatsa subgroups (Awaxawis and Hidatsas-Proper) settled first among the Mandans near Heart River in the 1500s, then began moving upstream to traditional Hidatsa territory around 1600.

This map shows traditional Mandan settlements (represented by triangles) near the Heart River and some of the traditional Hidatsa settlements (represented by circles) near the Knife River. A landmark called Square Buttes marked the boundary of respective tribal territories before the two groups came together at Knife River after 1790 for purposes of mutual defense. After a major smallpox epidemic in 1837, all of the surviving Mandans and Hidatsas eventually resettled at Like-a-Fishhook Village, where they were joined by the remaining Arikaras,another Plains tribe.Today,they are the Three Affiliated Tribes or the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara Nation of Fort Berthold Reservation.

The greater number of Mandan villages and the predominance of their pottery styles indicate that the Mandans were the more numerous and dominant people in the 1500s and early 1600s. But as smallpox took its toll, particularly among the Mandans, an increase of Hidatsa pottery styles reflected their growing cultural prominence, Ahler says. After European contact, historical documents tell of repeated village contraction and abandonment, often as a result of smallpox, and establishment of new settlements. It was a sad litany, culminating in a final, devastating smallpox epidemic in 1837. The surviving Mandans and Hidatsas moved to Like-a-Fishhook village in 1845, where they were joined by the remaining Arikaras, another Plains Village tribe from South Dakota, in 1862.

Excavations at the Mandan site

of Double Ditch Village from 2001 through 2004 yielded evidence of the differences between the two cultures as well as surprises that dramatically altered ar-

Excavators work in Mound B at Double Ditch Village.Mound B is one of the large earthen features along the perimeter of the village that’s thought to have been part of the village defense system.It is about six feet high and 60 feet across.Built around 1700,Mound B was one of the last large mounds built in the village.

chaeologist’s interpretation of the site. Recent studies have shown it’s much larger and older than previously thought, and that it had a very complex history of settlement change.

According to Fern Swenson, director of the Historic Preservation Division of the State Historical Society, archaeologists in the 1940s speculated that Double Ditch was founded around 1675. Using a magnetometer, Kvamme identified disturbances in the ground’s magnetic field that marked two previously unknown fortification ditches, well outside the two concentric ditches visible on the surface. The discoveries greatly expanded the size of the village. The archaeologists were even more surprised to find that, according to radiocarbon dates of maize and comparative dates of pottery found within the ditches and in storage pits, the outer ditches may be 200 years older than the two inner ditches—harking back to the late 1400s or early 1500s. Though dating of the ditches isn’t complete, Ahler remarks that “we’ve clearly established that the village was founded in the 1400s.”

About 20 oblong mounds from four to 14 feet high ring the site. The oldest mounds are believed to have been built before 1600 because no European trade artifacts, which began to trickle into the region at that time, were found within them. The “jumbled mess of dirt and artifacts” indicates that several mounds were constructed “extremely rapidly. That says they are not trash piles. I think they were defensive features on the village perimeter,” Ahler says.

The new picture that emerges is of an early, “giant village” of perhaps 2,000 people at its peak, says Kvamme. Through time, the village began to contract, and mounds rather than ditches served to mark the defensive perimeter. Eventually the village receded inside Ditch 2, which is associated with mounds, and finally, inside Ditch 1, which lacked mounds but had several tiny bastions. Ditch 1, used in the 1700s, protected only 32 houses and a population likely no more than 400.

Village contraction at Double Ditch partially reflects epidemics caused by the transmission of European diseases to the Mandans, believes Thiessen, who analyzed European and American historical documents to develop a sharper picture of the two tribes. The final debacle for Double Ditch was a documented smallpox epidemic in 1781 followed by an attack from the Sioux. The site was abandoned by 1785.

By contrast, Ahler’s earlier work at Hidatsa sites indicates that mounds there played less of a defensive role. Hidatsa villages simply were “less frequently fortified and less intensively fortified” than Mandan settlements, he says. Big Hidatsa Village has a minor ditch system, but no mounds. Investigations of mounds at other sites, such as Lower Hidatsa, revealed that they were merely “little trash piles.”

So who gave the Mandans reason to build their fortifications? The Hidatsas are a logical candidate, but if so, they weren’t outwardly concerned about reciprocal raids. If the enemy were other Mandans, Ahler wonders why they built their villages as close as one mile apart. He thinks the concentration of Mandan villages was for mutual defense, but he admits there’s no hard evidence of this. Thiessen’s theory is the Mandans’ relative affluence led to hostile nomadic tribes raiding their villages, as the Sioux were known to do in historic times. Yet there is little confirmation of warfare, such as skeletons and numerous burned homes. To which Swenson remarks, “maybe we just haven’t identified it.”

Ahler points to other differences between the Mandans and Hidatsas. Mandan villages typically had a central plaza and adjacent lodge that, historical records show, was used for dances and ceremonies. Hidatsa villages had neither plazas nor ceremonial lodges. According to historical records, they conducted village ceremonies at temporary locations outside settlements.

In Hidatsa villages occupied over a long period of time, the people built new residential lodges on top of the old, resulting in a great buildup of deposits. Conversely, the Mandans at Double Ditch repeatedly dug up

The leader of the Mandan Buffalo Bull Society is shown in this Bodmer painting.The Buffalo Bull Society was a group that honored the most prominent Mandan warriors.The leader’s headdress was made from the head,mane,and horns of a bull bison.It was worn by only the bravest warriors who had never fled from an enemy.Buffalo Bull Society dances were performed in the plazas of Mandan villages.

This watercolor by Karl Bodmer depicts a buffalo robe painted by Máto-Tópe,a prominent Mandan leader.The images on the robe represent several military victories by Máto-Tópe against the Cheyennes and Assiniboines. Warfare,usually involving nomadic tribes east and west of the Missouri River,was a major element of life for Mandan and Hidatsa men.The archaeological evidence of these conflicts is most apparent in the elaborate defensive systems involving ditches,wooden palisades,and mounds that surrounded most of the large communities.

and transported all of the old lodge remains and debris out of the residential area. “The final houses inside Ditch 1 were set on planed-off, sterile soil,” he says. “I’m not sure what this clean sweep means. One speculation is they might have been seeking a community rebirth, following an epidemic.” He adds the caveat that Double Ditch is the only investigated Mandan village that offers this particular contrast.

Ahler’s analysis of museum pottery collections from the two tribes, especially pottery made in the period 1300 to 1500, also reveals distinctions. Early Hidatsa wares had quite varied lip shapes and decorative techniques and often bore a check-stamped pattern on the body. Checkstamping was created by use of a wooden paddle for vessel shaping that had a cross-grooved surface, much like a waffle iron. Early Mandan pottery, on the other hand, was more standardized with little use of check-stamping. By the 1500s, S-rimmed pottery featuring a band of diagonal or horizontal lines around the vessel rim, known as cordimpressed decorations, comprised 90 percent of the ceramics in both Mandan and Hidatsa sites. This pottery developed directly out of earlier Mandan wares, attesting to the dominant influence of the Mandans at that time.

Data from Ahler’s Hidatsa work is easier

to understand than the Mandan data. The sequence of cultural development is more obvious along the Knife River, for one thing. “There are lots of continuities, and we can watch an ebb and flow of stylistic change in pottery that occurs in several villages. We’ve put together a model that makes sense, especially in regard to Hidatsa oral traditions about migration and change. We don’t see anything so straightforward along the Heart River,” he says. In the Mandan region, “We’re left with these puzzle pieces that tell us how complicated it is, but we can’t yet put all the pieces together. At Heart River, there are many more large, contemporaneous sites that each appear to have a somewhat distinct archaeological story. Many key sites are probably as complicated as Double Ditch, but have not yet been studied in detail.”

Pending the approval of funding by the state, more excavations are planned at Menoken Village this summer to examine two very different housing styles that radiocarbon dating shows were contemporary. One, an oval structure built not in a pit but on the surface, is of particular interest to Ahler, who wants to see how it relates to the rectangular houses common in early Plains Village sites, before these, in turn, were replaced by circular earthlodges.

He also seeks a grant for minimal testing and a geophysical survey of a Mandan site two miles upriver from Double Ditch, dubbed Larson Village, which visitors 100 years ago wrote may also have more than one ditch. “My hypothesis is that Larson may mimic Double Ditch, so (Double Ditch) may not be unique,” he says.

Ahler feels he still only partially understands the Mandan homeland, but he’s pleased with the team’s accomplishments. “Before we started with the Hidatsas, they were seen as kind of secondary to, but indistinguishable from, the Mandans. We’ve shown each can be studied in its own right. I think we’ll see that, though there are some shared features, each has its own distinctive cultural picture.”

SALLY BELL is a freelance writer who lives in Boulder,Colorado.