LJWorld.com

Salina — Long before the first Europeans walked on Kansas soil, American Indians celebrated the prairie and its December night skies.

In some cases, these native people of more than a thousand years ago dug intaglios, or animal figures, into trenches along hillsides across the state and built council circles for dancing and sacred ceremonies.

The winter solstice, Dec. 21, held tremendous significance to these prehistoric Kansans, said Sue Cowdery, registrar at the Holmes Museum of Anthropology at Wichita State University.

While Kansans today may celebrate the winter holidays with religious traditions, prehistoric Kansas tribes such as the Quivira honored this time in their own way.

Out on the Kansas plains this may have been how life was:

"All would know the daylight is becoming less and less and it is like the earth is dying," Cowdery said. "It would be a time to have renewal of the earth ceremonies and prayers for good things to come."

As days became shorter and nights longer, winter was a time when the Plains Indian people would break into smaller family units and the hunters would go on the winter hunts for bison, leaving the rest of the family at home.

"It was a time when the grandparents would be telling stories that would teach about the ways of world and entertain the children left in their care," Cowdery said.

The sky would take on great significance, said Donald Blakeslee, professor of archaeology at Wichita State.

The positions of the stars and planets in the winter sky may have become part of the stories early Indians passed from one generation to the next.

Prehistoric Kansans may have celebrated the winter solstice, Dec. 21, by building intaglios, or animal figures, into hillsides across the Kansas prairie. Very few remain today. This one, photographed in 1982 near Lyons, features a 160-foot serpent with a ball in its mouth. Archeologists believe it may have been dug out by Quivira or Wichita Indians more than a thousand years ago.

We say "may," Blakeslee said, because many of those ceremonies and stories were lost as European settlement changed the prairie. Tribes were pushed onto reservations and disease and starvation took their toll.

"We don't have information on the Wichitas because nobody asked the right questions at the right time before they went through the hell they did and lost a lot of their own traditions," Blakeslee said.

And, the intaglios -- such as the serpent near Lyons holding a ball in its mouth, another serpent near Waconda Lake, and four in Sedgwick County depicting a turtle, a duck and two caterpillars -- were all symbolic.

Although remnants of the intaglios can still be seen on the Kansas landscape today, Blakeslee said, they are located on private land. There may have been more, but as the prairie sod was broken and crops were planted, the intaglios disappeared.

Still, they may show connections with other cultures around the world.

Blakeslee draws comparisons between the Kansas council circles and Stonehenge in England. The intaglios may be sacred calendars the sun hits at certain points during the winter and summer solstices.

"The native people in Mexico connect the caterpillars with meteors and meteor showers -- they have a celestial connection," Blakeslee said.

Early Quivira and Pawnee Indians in Kansas may have shared similar stories of creation.

Janel Cook, director of the Coronado-Quivira Museum in Lyons, says for many cultures the snake symbolized death and rebirth.

"We think of serpents as hibernating in the wintertime but not too long ago, some cultures thought it died and came back to life in the spring," she said.