Crow Creek massacre

Crow Creek Site
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
Aerial view of the site
Nearest city	Chamberlain, South Dakota
Coordinates	43°58′48″N 99°19′54″W / 43.98000°N 99.33167°W / 43.98000; -99.33167Coordinates: 43°58′48″N 99°19′54″W / 43.98000°N 99.33167°W / 43.98000; -99.33167
Built	1100
Governing body	U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
NRHP Reference #	66000710
Significant dates
Added to NRHP	October 15, 1966[1]
Designated NHL	July 19, 1964[2]

The Crow Creek massacre occurred around 1325 AD between Indian groups in the South Dakota area. Crow Creek Site, the site of the massacre near Chamberlain, is an archaeological site and a U.S. National Historic Landmark, located at co-ordinates 43°58′48″N 99°19′54″W. The Siouan-speaking Initial Middle Missouri variant peoples, ancestral to the Mandan Nation, first occupied the site sometime after about 900 AD. They built numerous earthlodges on the lower portion of the site. People of the Caddoan-speaking Initial Coalescent variant moved into the area sometime around 1150 AD. Whether they displaced the earlier group or moved onto an abandoned site is unknown. The Initial Coalescent people built at least 55 lodges, mostly on the upper part of the site. There is no direct evidence that there was conflict between the two groups.

There is evidence that the Initial Coalescent villagers knew of the potential for attacks on its village. An earlier dry moat fortification was in the process of being replaced by a new fortification ditch around the expanded village when an attack occurred resulting in the massacre. The attacking group slaughtered the villagers. Archaeologists from the University of South Dakota, directed by project director Larry J. Zimmerman, field director Thomas Emerson, and osteologist P. Willey found the remains of at least 486 people killed during the attack. Many of these remains showed signs of mutilation. These included tongues being removed, scalping, teeth broken, beheading, hands and feet being cut off, and other forms of dismemberment.

Site

The Crow Creek site, designated 39BF11 under the Smithsonian site numbering system, is located along the Missouri River in central South Dakota. The site is located on lands under the control of the US Army Corps of Engineers and is now surrounded by the Crow Creek Indian Reservation. The descendents of the people of both the Middle Missouri and Initial Coalescent cultures now live in North Dakota as the Mandan and Arikara Nations of the Three Affiliated Tribes (with the Hidatsa) during the 14th century. Crow Creek is now a well-preserved archaeological site.^[3] It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places automatically when the Register was started in 1964.^[2][1][4]

In 1978, South Dakota State Archaeologist, Robert Alex, and other members of his office attended a meeting hosted by the South Dakota Archaeological Society. They toured the Crow Creek site and discovered human bones eroding from the end of the fortification ditch.^[5] After permission to excavate the site was received, skeletal remains of at least 486 Crow Creek villagers were uncovered. These estimates were based on the number of right temporal bones present at the scene.^[6] This event, called the Crow Creek Massacre, has raised many questions in the archaeological community, among them being who would have attacked the Crow Creek village and why it was attacked.

Skeletal remains

The remains of the villagers of Crow Creek were discovered in a fortification ditch where they were buried and covered with a small layer of clay from the river bottom during the mid-14th century.^[7] The bodies found in the fortification ditch were piled as deep as four feet in some areas. The bodies showed evidence of having lain out for a period of time, becoming at least partly disarticulated so that a systematic burial might have been impossible due to the state of the remains by the time of later burial.^[8] It is not clear who buried the victims of the massacre, whether it was the attackers, escaped villagers, or members of an affiliated village.^[9] The layer of clay covering the bodies was then coated by a "thin and scattered layer of bones" of which the purpose is unknown, but it is thought that scavengers might have dug up these remains as a food source.^[10] The remains of these villagers not only tell of the gruesome story of their untimely deaths, but the hardships they faced prior to the massacre. The skeletal remains give evidence of nutritional deficiencies and previous warfare as well as events surrounding the attack which were documented by paleopathologist John B. Gregg.^[11]

Nutritional deficiencies

The villager's skeletal remains, as well as the remains of animals buried with the villagers, provide evidence of extensive nutritional deficiencies the Crow Creek villagers suffered. According to Zimmerman’s 1985 book "Peoples of Prehistoric South Dakota" there is evidence in the bones of several ailments suffered by villagers that are indicative of malnutrition.^[7] As stated in Zimmerman’s book, "one of the most common characteristics was a pitting in the top of the eye sockets called cribra orbitalis. Associated with this on several skulls was porotic hyperostosis, a pitting on the back of the skull".^[12] Both of these conditions are caused by a deficiency of iron in the diet. In addition to these ailments, Harris Lines (an indicator of insufficient amounts of protein and other essential minerals as well as truncated episodes of growth) were discovered while examining radiographs of several of the individuals.^[7] The Crow Creek villagers were measured as being shorter than their Arikara descendants with the females being significantly shorter – this could have been another effect of nutritional deficiencies and illness.^[13]

In a journal article entitled "The Crow Creek Massacre: Initial Coalescent Warfare and Speculations about the Genesis of Extended Coalescent", Zimmerman and Bradley propose that the conditions faced by the Crow Creek villagers were not short term and had been prevalent in the population prior to the massacre based on the evidence of "active and organizing subperiostial hematomas along with the other bony alterations" found while examining remains.^[14]

The presence of animal bones within the fortification ditch also points to the desperation of the villagers in obtaining a food source. Willey and Emerson’s article entitled "The Osteology and Archaeology of the Crow Creek Massacre" describes the presence of animal bones, specifically canine, within the fortification ditch. According to this article, it is likely that the remains of canines are representative of meals, and were accidentally included in the burial while collecting the villagers’ remains.^[15] It appears that even domesticated animals such as dogs were used as food sources during this time of famine.

Evidence of previous warfare

The skeletal remains of the Crow Creek villagers also provided evidence that the massacre was not their first encounter with violence and that they had been involved in previous attacks. According to the 1982 dissertation entitled Osteology of the Crow Creek Massacre by P. Willey, evidence of involvement in previous attacks is present in the skeletal remains of victims found in the mass burial. Two individuals had survived previous scalping incidents, and were in the process of healing which was indicated by the bony re-growth of their skulls, and a third individual had survived a head injury as indicated by "a healed depressed fracture in the frontal".^[16] There was also evidence of others being wounded by arrows, the points of which remained in the legs and were overgrown by bone.^[7]

The massacre

Many of the bodies are missing limbs which can be explained as the attackers taking them as trophies, scavengers carrying them away, or the limbs being left in the Crow Creek village unburied.^[17] Authors Willey and Emerson state that "they had been killed, mutilated, and scavenged before being buried".^[18] "Tongue removal, decapitation, and dismemberment of the Crow Creek victims may have been based on standard aboriginal butchering practices developed on large game animals".^[19] These are among a few of the mutilations that have been discovered at the Crow Creek site. In addition to these, scalping was performed, bodies were burned, and there is evidence of the removal of limbs through various means. As stated in the Willey’s dissertation, many of the mutilations suffered by the victims of the Crow Creek massacre could have been traumatic enough to result in death.^[20]

A conservative estimate of villagers who suffered scalping is 90%, but the actual amount could be as high as 100%. This is based on skeletal remains that exhibit cuts on their skulls indicative of scalping.^[21] Men, women, and children were scalped with the only difference being that younger children were cut higher on the skull than other groups.^[22]

Hypotheses

The events leading to this massacre are unknown, but there are many hypotheses that exist to explain such a horrific event. The most plausible of these explanations is that "overpopulation, land-use patterns, and an unstable climate caused the people to compete for available farmland".^[23] The malnutrition suffered by the Crow Creek villagers was most likely not uncommon for people in that region during this time period. Because of this, there is a strong chance that another Initial Coalescent group or several groups in the region attacked the Crow Creek village for the arable land and resources.^[24]

Reburial and further study

Before the excavations could proceed, the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation Tribal Council, the Corps of Engineers, and the University of South Dakota Archaeology Laboratory agreed that the remains could not leave South Dakota for study and that after study the remains should be reburied on the Crow Creek site itself, the place where the families had lived and died. At the request of the Arikara, the remains were placed in five burial vaults and so as not to disturb the site, the vaults were buried in areas where earlier excavations had taken place in the 1950s. The study took three years, and the reburial took place in late summer 1981. Several Christian ceremonies, a traditional Lakota ceremony, and a private Arikara ceremony were offered. The reburial was controversial^[25] and one of the largest ever to have occurred in the United States. So much skeletal evidence was gathered that more than 30 years after the excavations studies are still occurring based on measurements, photographs, and radiographs. New analyses of the dates on the massacre and the occupational history of the site are also occurring, which may change some interpretations.^[26]

See also

• List of conflicts in the United States
• List of massacres in South Dakota

References

Sources

• Bamforth, Douglas and Curtis Nepstad-Thornberry, 2007. Reconsidering the Occupational History of the Crow Creek Site (39BF11). Plains Anthropologist 52(202:153-173.
• Gregg, John B. and Pauline Gregg, 1987. Dry Bones:Dakota Territory Reflected. University of South Dakota Press: Vermillion.
• Pauketat, Timothy R. (2005). North American Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing
• Willey, P. 1982 Osteology of the Crow Creek Massacre. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
• Willey, P. and Emerson, Thomas E., 1993 The Osteology and Archaeology of the Crow Creek Massacre. Plains Anthropologist 38(145):227-269
• Willey, P., Galloway, Alison, and Snyder, Lynn, 1997 Bone Mineral Density and Survival of Elements and Element Portions in the Bones of the Crow Creek Massacre Victims. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 104:513-528
• Zimmerman, Larry J., 1985 Peoples of Prehistoric South Dakota. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London.
• Zimmerman, Larry J. and Robert Alex, 1981. How the Crow Creek Archaeologists View the Question of Reburial. Early Man 3(3):25-26.
• Zimmerman, Larry J. and Bradley, Lawrence E., 1993 The Crow Creek Massacre: Initial Coalescent Warfare and Speculations About the Genesis of Extended Coalescent. Plains Anthropologist 38(145):215-226
• Zimmerman, Larry J. and Richard Whitten, 1980. Mass Grave at Crow Creek in South Dakota Reveals How Indians Massacred Indians in 14th Century Attack. Smithsonian 11(6):100-109.

External links

• The Crow Creek Massacre