Much of the research conducted by archaeologists at K-State has focused on understanding the lifeways and cultural dynamics of Native farmers in the Central Plains region of North America. Dr. Hodgdon in the 1950s and Dr. Stanislawski in the 1960s each began archaeological investigations into sites associated with these ancestral Native Americans. Dr. O'Brien continued the excavation started by Dr. Stanislawski at the Lonergan site. She and later K-State archaeologists pursued similar research in the Manhattan area by studying the Witt lodge site and, in the 2010s, the Young Buck site. These early farmsteads were occupied at different times between roughly 900 and 600 years ago. Today's archaeologists refer to the evidence of these early sedentary farming communities as the Central Plains tradition.
In the 1970s, Dr. O'Brien studied not only the remnants of these early farmers' homes in and around modern Manhattan and Junction City but also other contemporaneous archaeological sites in the area immediately north of present-day Kansas City.
Archaeological evidence of early Native farming settlements in what is now northwestern Missouri and northeastern Kansas between the late 1100s and 1300s CE is assigned the regionally specific term, the Steed-Kisker phase. This is part of what archaeologists refer to as the more widespread Central Plains tradition.
Dr. O'Brien was drawn to researching Steed-Kisker societies because of her previous work with ceramic artifacts (pottery) from the contemporaneous site of Cahokia in present-day southwestern Illinois near the mouth of the Missouri River. She hypothesized that the Steed-Kisker archaeological remains were produced by people connected or related to those living in and around the ancient city of Cahokia. Her interpretation was that the early farmers in what is now the general Kansas City area migrated there from Cahokia roughly 1,000 years ago.
Although an interesting idea, Dr. O'Brien's evidence for this migration was weak, and her ideas were critiqued by other archaeologists. Nonetheless, the archaeological data she and her students recovered from sites in today's Kansas City area are useful for continuing research into the original farming communities of this region during this period.
Those data are also relevant for comparison with similar finds made closer to K-State's home, for example, from the Lonergan site. Other relevant information was recovered during an excavation led by Dr. O'Brien and her students in 1973 and 1974 at the Witt lodge site along the Smoky Hill River near present-day Junction City.
Their work resulted in a rich assemblage of archaeological remains. Dr. O'Brien proposed interpretations of cosmology, ideology, and gender roles of the past occupants of this house. She suggested that the Witt lodge was built in a manner aligning with certain astronomical phenomena. Her inferences were not widely accepted in the archaeological community due to flaws in her reasoning process (for example, circular reasoning employing historic analogies). However, as in the case with her Steed-Kisker data, the archaeological assemblage of materials recovered from this site are valuable as a source of information for future studies.
Dr. O'Brien's ideas about Steed-Kisker and the Witt lodge exemplify how accurate interpretations of past societies are difficult to develop. Detailed archaeological data (artifacts and precise contextual information) are needed. These must be analyzed and assigned meaning using critical thinking skills. Hypothesized inferences are subject to review and change based on additional analyses. Even when proposed interpretations are not found to be credible, the archaeological evidence recovered is invaluable as a source of information for alternative or expanded interpretations. It provides the data by which other hypotheses can be tested. Present and future archaeologists continue to develop new insights and fine-tune our understanding of earlier societies based in part on the data collected by earlier generations of archaeologists.
Back Through the Decades: 1970s
