Time's Arrow: Toward a Social History of Crow Biographic Art Using Seriation and Multivariate Statistics

Biographic artworks produced by Historic-period Plains Indian warriors can be viewed as genuine historical documents, detailing important events in their lives. This is especially true because these documents contain a genuinely narrative component, telling their stories as much as depicting them. However, for individual lives to create a broader social history, they must be connected with the lives of others, especially over a temporal span. Here, we begin the task of building a chronological framework for Crow (Apsáalooke) biographic artworks based on multivariate statistical analysis and seriation analysis of their content. Our research not only allows five undated artworks to be better placed in chronological context but also reveals the changing pattern of stylistic features in these artworks during the turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. [biographic art, Plains Indians, cultural traditions, Native American art].