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During a time of growing cooperation between anthropologists and Native Americans, this Native author uses his anthropological training to shed light on the history and prehistory of his tribe. Family history, ethnohistory, linguistics, archaeology, and inferences are woven together to demonstrate that, despite some two hundred fifty years of contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans and forced assimilation policies by the United States government, Ponca families have preserved some key features of aboriginal culture. Some of these features derive from practices that took place before the Ponca and their Dhegihan cognate tribes left their Woodland homes to live on the eastern fringes of the Great Plains.

A number of Plains archaeological studies address the idea that Dhegihan origins are from archaeological complexes found in the four state area comprised of southeast Kansas, southwest Missouri, northwest Arkansas, and northeast Oklahoma. This study first assesses those arguments using both the archaeological and historical records. The last part of the study discusses the implications of such arguments for Dhegihan material and nonmaterial culture. It is concluded that Dhegihan societies have proven hard to trace archaeologically because they were likely very late in arriving on the Plains. Dhegihan origins are more likely to lie in Oneota or the disintegration of Mississippian tradition societies.

Most American anthropologists believe that culture is traditional. Most American archaeologists believe that traditional elements of a culture's material culture should be easily defined when closely related groups are compared Thus, shared traditional elements should be apparent through analysis of the archaeological remains of the closely related Quapaw, Osage, Kansa, Omaha, and Ponca villages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, when data from these early contact period villages are compared, significantly different technological traditions are represented in each tribe while the linguistic, religious, and social elements are very similar. Locational information, temporal data, migration legends, linguistic data, intercultural relationships, and some explanatory hypotheses are presented and discussed.