This book combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region.

Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasising hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, the book explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies. The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present.

Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme--that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature.

Contributors: Paul Burnett; Oskar Burger; Minette C Church; Philip Duke; Kevin Gilmore; Eileen Johnson; Mark D Mitchell; Michael R Peterson; Lawrence Todd.