OBJECTS OF CHANGE: The Archaeology and History of Arikara Contact with Europeans (Smithsonian Series in Archeological Inquiry)

Dust jacket notes: "The Arikaras, a North American Indian tribe of the Northern Plains, experienced a complex reaction to contact with Europeans, a response whose evolution can be traced through two hundred years of material culture. Rather than view the two cultures in contact purely from the advancing Europeans' point of view, J. Daniel Rogers demonstrates that for more than a century the Arikaras largely controlled the interaction through their perception of exchange (e.g., the fur trade) as a social process and through their cultural incorporation of the Europeans. The author compares changes in Arikara artifact assemblages with known events and strategic social shifts. This allows a series of artifact processes to be identified, crating a linkage that may have wide application to the basic archaeological problem of interpreting material culture."