Ethnohistory is the use of historic accounts about a group, usually written by outsiders, to give information about that group. Explorers, soldiers, traders and missionaries drew maps, described cultural practices and provided a range of information. This information can be useful for tracing the movements of a group through a region. Sometimes archaeologists combine it with a people's oral traditions to give a more complete picture of the group's lifeways or movements . Oneota Taxonomy Taxonomy is a way of organizing or classifying information of similar types.
Taxonomy can be very confusing and is debated by archaeologists.
But, it is important to remember that taxonomy is just a way of organizing information, and not necessarily an accurate history of people moving from area to area or how they might have changed through time. Before radiocarbon dating, just the form of artifacts was used to organize information, but with better dates, the time and space have been included in these organizational schemes. Depending on when the taxonomy was devised, archaeologists applied different terms to Oneota. Sometimes Oneota has been called Upper Mississippian . Sometimes it is just called the Oneota complex , Oneota culture or Oneota tradition .