Under the direction of Dr. Douglas Bamforth, Mark D. Mitchell will use data on the organization of craft production to study the effects of indirect contact with European fur traders on Mandan economic practices during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When Europeans first visited the Mandans in middle of the eighteenth century, they were major players in a vast exchange network that distributed European trade goods, Native crafts, and food throughout interior North America, from the Rio Grande to Hudson's Bay. Most scholars have argued that it was the availability of European commodities, especially horses and guns, which created and subsequently expanded this network. In this view, the fur trade produced a period of unprecedented prosperity that, for the Mandans, lasted until the devastating smallpox epidemic of the early 1780s dramatically reconfigured the political landscape of the northern Plains. However, these ideas are based largely on the study of narratives written by European traders and explorers 150 to 200 years after the Mandans first became involved in the exchange of European goods. As a result, little is known about the origins of this trade network. This project will fill that gap by using archaeological data to investigate social and economic change during the centuries immediately before and after the Mandans first began to participate in the colonial fur trade.
Located at the confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers in present-day central North Dakota, the Mandan villages are an ideal context for this research. They were occupied for as long as 300 years, both before and after the introduction of European trade goods, and they contain abundant evidence of various forms of craft production. Recent state-of-the-art excavations conducted at four settlements in the Heart region provide, for the first time, the fine-grained temporal control necessary for a project of this type. This study will examine changes in the ways pottery, stone tools, and other crafts were produced over time, focusing especially on the scale and specialization of production. The results of these analyses will then be integrated with existing data on Mandan demography, settlement patterns, and subsistence practices to develop an overall picture of economic and social change from precolonial to early colonial times.
This project will contribute to research currently being conducted by historians, geographers, economists, cultural anthropologists, and other scholars interested in the worldwide affects of European colonial expansion during the last five centuries. By assessing the impact of the fur trade on the Mandans, it will enable broader regional and temporal comparisons of the effects of indirect colonial contact across North America. In doing so, it will join a growing body of archaeological research on the ways in which the varied political and economic processes of European colonialism were integrated, accommodated, and transformed by Native peoples. By highlighting both continuity and change in indigenous economic and social systems, this study contributes to a broader understanding of the multidimensional character of colonial interaction.
