ABSTRACT
It could be claimed that the institution of war in a strict sense did not exist in the Plains culture area. Plains warfare has often been compared with, or has actually been called, a game. As a matter of fact, war has rarely been carefully defined in anthropological literature. It has not only gone without definition but has often received no treatment, * though it is a habitually recurring factor in culture. In this paper, war will be treated as a type of armed conflict that takes place between societies, meeting in competition for anything that is valued by the groups involved, usually consisting of territory or certain products of this territory, such as good hunting grounds, oil-producing or agricultural lands.
