Red pigment in the Central Plains: A Pawnee case at Kitkahahki Town

Abstract

James Murie, early twentieth century ethnographer and member of the Pawnee Nation, once wrote that the “things that are most acceptable to the Pawnee gods are smoke, fat, paint, and flesh” (Murie 1981:466). Here we describe red paint at Kitkahahki Town, a late eighteenth–early nineteenth-century Kitkahahki Pawnee village in north-central Kansas. Using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy, we compare archaeological paint and pigment samples to three pigment materials – pipestone powder, vermilion, and ochre – all documented in the Great Plains after European colonization. We ultimately find no evidence of pipestone powder or vermilion as pigment at Kitkahahki Town and conclude that ochre (some of which may be from the Lower Cretaceous Dakota formation) is the most likely pigment material at the site. Ochre may have been especially significant because of links between this earth pigment and Pawnee sacred geography.

KEYWORDS:

• Pawnee
• paint
• ochre
• pipestone
• vermilion

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant NSF-1912776 awarded to the Archaeometry Lab at MURR and by funding from the Arts and Humanities Initiative at the University of Iowa to Margaret Beck. We thank Whitney Goodwin, April Oga, and Hannah Sears for their contributions, which include assistance with LA-ICP-MS sample preparation and data acquisition. We also appreciate feedback from Plains Anthropologist editor Bill Billeck and from two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00320447.2022.2108601.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation: [Grant Number 1912776]; University of Iowa Arts and Humanities Initiative.

Notes on contributors

Margaret E. Beck

Margaret E. Beck is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include households, cooking technologies, and raw materials for craft production. She has conducted ethnoarchaeological research in the Philippines, United States, and India. Her archaeological work includes studies of ceramic manufacture and use in the U.S. Great Plains and Southwest.

Brandi L. MacDonald

Brandi L. MacDonald is an archaeological scientist at the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri Research Reactor. She specializes in provenance and materials characterization of pigments, glazes, pottery, and stone tools using various techniques in chemistry and physics.

Jeffrey R. Ferguson

Jeffrey R. Ferguson (University of Missouri, Department of Anthropology and the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri Research Reactor) is an archaeologist focused on compositional analysis of archaeological materials to investigate many forms of social interaction and movement. Much of his current work focuses on large-scale exchange of ceramics and lithics in the American Southwest, particularly western New Mexico.

Mary J. Adair

Mary J. Adair, PhD is Curator Emerita of Archaeology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Her research foci include reconstructing diet from analyses of archaeological plant remains, documenting the rise and importance of agriculture, chronology and variations within Middle Woodland complexes of the central Plains, and early historic Pawnee occupations and response to European contact. She is active in the Plains Anthropological Society.