It was replaced by a variant of the Archaic tradition called the Plains Archaic. This Plains Archaic tradition developed locally from the Big-Game Hunting tradition as the latter was modified by environmental pressure and was exposed to diffusion and interchange with the Archaic of the Eastern Woodlands Area.
Considerably later, the Woodland Tradition penetrated the Plains from the east, bringing pottery and some agricultural techniques.
The Plains Woodland was succeeded by the vigorous Plains Village Tradition, a synthesis of Archaic and Woodland elements plus influences from the expanding Mississippian tradition, which occurred along the Missouri River and its tributaries in the eastern Plains. Sedentary village life based on river-valley farming and the more ancient tradition of buffalo hunting characterized the Plains Village Tradition. Some of its influences were felt farther west, but the far-western regions of the Plains remained non-agricultural and, at least in their subsistence pursuits, more akin to the older Plains Archaic mode of life.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the horse was introduced to the Plains tribes with significant modifying results on both the Plains village and the more strictly buffalo-hunting cultures of the west. During the nineteenth century such tribes as Mandan (Siouan) and the Arikara and Pawnee (Caddoan) represented the Plains village tradition in its fullest form, while to the west the Dakotas (Siouan) and the Blackfoot and Cheyenne (Algonquian) were marginal to that tradition.
