The meaning of this term is problematic, as it is not consistent with what can confidently be inferred about PWMP culture. However, this term has a wide and scattered distribution which cannot easily be accounted for by a borrowing hypothesis. Presumably it had a somewhat different meaning in PWMP and shifted to the only meaning attested here sometime after the introduction of the horse, possibly at the time of first Indianization, roughly 2,000 years ago.