Culture Chronology in the Central Great Plains

Abstract

Archaeology in the central and northern Great Plains stands today on the threshold of what may be its outstanding opportunity for sustained achievement. The intensive field investigations so auspiciously launched in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas in the decade before the war, have been at a virtual standstill since 1940; and with the rapid expansion of the nation's armed forces and defense industries, the number of students and laboratory workers available for study of the accumulated data and collections, dwindled nearly or quite to the vanishing point. Here and there, a few individuals found it possible, intermittently and subsidiary to war-connected activities, to carry on limited researches.