Ideally, we should now be in a position, after summarizing 12,000 years of Indiana prehistory, to relate all of this to the historic American Indian occupants in the state. Certainly, one of the goals of archaeology is to identify specific ethnic groups and reconstruct their evolution and development through past time. And one of the questions prehistorians are most often asked is whether specific artifacts represent the work of the Miami, Potawatami, etc. Actually, at least at this time, no answers can be provided. The explanation for this inability is simple.
Various bands of the Miami and Potawatami, all Algonquian speakers, are historically recorded to have lived in a major portion of what is now Indiana. Other residents included groups of Shawnee, Delaware, and members of other ethnic groups. All of these without exception were late migrants into the area. For example, it was not until the late seventeenth century that the Miami apparently moved southeast from Wisconsin and Illinois into northwestern Indiana. The Potawatami were somewhat mobile and were gradually pushed westward from the Lake Huron area by European incursions and did not seem to have settled in Indiana until early in the eighteenth century. The Delaware were not a force in our area until the middle of the same century. And at least some of the Shawnee seemed to have moved over much of the eastern United States during the early historic period before returning to what may have been their earlier Ohio Valley homeland. On occasion the Fort Ancient culture briefly described above has been proposed as being derived from Shawnee ancestors.
It becomes obvious that the known American Indian occupants came into the state from other areas at a very late time and even though some of them might have lived here earlier, there is no present way to relate a fully prehistoric site or culture to a specific ethnic group given these circumstances.
One potential solution to the dilemma is obvious: locate an historic site whose ethnic occupants are identified and once this is accomplished, excavate and study the resultant collections with the aim of tracing the styles represented back in time. This has been attempted, and the excavations at Ouiatanon, an eighteenth-century French trading post located on the Wabash River near Lafayette and which served the Wea and others, were partially predicated on that basis (Keller 1970). Two seasons of work produced five triangular points and a handful of cord marked pottery sherds. In contrast, there were literally thousands of glass beads, brass arrow points, pipes of European manufacture, and French gun flints, duplicates of which were distributed over most of North America as a result of trade with American Indians. Those items of aboriginal manufacture that might have been stylistically unique to a specific ethnic group had long since been replaced by artifacts made from glass, brass, iron, flint, silver, and stone, all European imports specifically made for exchange and which soon replaced items of aboriginal manufacture.
In sum, to relate prehistory to history requires that American Indian ethnic groups be identifiable through unique house styles, pottery, tools, or other material objects accessible to /pg. 62/ archaeologists. However, in Indiana, no such body of data exists, or is it likely to be recovered, since the historically documented groups were late migrants into the region. And by the time they had entered the state the native material culture had been all but replaced by items of European manufacture. The archaeologist/historian is faced with an impossible task in the quest for ethnic identifications in Indiana.