Who Built It, and When

No one knows who made the wheel or when, and the atlas records that as an open question rather than choosing among the answers. The structure offers nothing to date directly: stone laid on the surface carries no stratigraphy, and the cairns have been added to and rebuilt by users over an unknown period. Dates recovered from material at the site have returned a wide spread, and estimates in the literature run from a few centuries to several thousand years. The question of builders is harder still, because the Plains nations now associated with the site did not all occupy the Bighorn country at the same time, and the region changed hands more than once before written records begin.

Crow tradition connects the wheel to Crow history; Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone and Lakota accounts connect it to theirs. These are not competing claims for an outsider to adjudicate. A site in continuous ceremonial use by several nations can be genuinely theirs in several traditions at once, and the atlas homes it at the level of Plains practice for that reason rather than assigning it to one nation and calling the others secondary. What would settle the construction date is a securely associated context, a buried feature or a datable deposit beneath an undisturbed part of the structure, excavated with tribal consent. That is an archaeological question and it has not been answered.