Mark D. Mitchell

Archaeological research is uniquely positioned to show how native history and native culture affected the course of colonial interaction, but to do so it must transcend colonialist ideas about Native American technological and social change. This book applies that insight to five hundred years of native history. Using data from a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and cultural settings, the contributors examine economic, social, and political stability and transformation in indigenous societies before and after the advent of Europeans and document the diversity of native colonial experiences. The book’s case studies range widely, from sixteenth-century Florida, to the Great Plains, to nineteenth-century coastal Alaska.

In Crafting History in the Northern Plains Mark D. Mitchell shows the crucial role archaeological methods and archaeological data can play in producing trans-Columbian histories. Mitchell provides a regional synthesis of communities located at the confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers, home to the Mandan people for more than five centuries.