84 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



Other fieldwork in the Missouri Basin during the year included 

 14 parties from State institutions operating under cooperative agree- 

 ments with the National Park Service and in cooperation with the 

 Smithsonian Institution in the Inter- Agency Archeological Salvage 

 Program. 



At the beginning of the year Robert W. Neunian, assisted by John 

 J. Hoffman and a crew of 10, was at work on the excavation of an 

 early village of circular houses known as the Molstad site (39DW234) ,^ 

 about 8 miles south of Mobridge, S. Dak., on the right bank of the 

 Missouri River in Dewey County. This site will be subject to wave 

 cutting at maximum pool level of the Oahe Reservoir. Artifacts 

 and architectural details recovered indicate that the site had been a 

 small, fortified village of the very early period of circular house occu- 

 pation often referred to as the La Roche. There were live houses 

 within an oval stockade and one larger house outside the stockade. 

 The stockade was surrounded by a dry moat 2.6 feet deep and had 

 a single large loop bastion on one side. The entire stockade line and 

 five of the houses were excavated, as well as the bastion and two cross 

 sections of the moat. The people who occupied this site during the 

 15th or 16th centuries were culturally very closely related to those 

 who occupied the Potts Village, some 2 miles upstream, which had 

 been excavated previously by crews from the Missouri Basin Project. 



A second field party in the Oahe Reservoir, also directed by Robert 

 W. Neuman with the assistance of James J. Stanek and a crew of 10, 

 was at work at the beginning of the year excavating the Swift Bird 

 site (39DW233), half a mile downstream from the Molstad site. 

 This site comprised a group of two burial mounds of the Plains 

 Woodland Period and a circular house depression that appears to 

 belong to the La Roche Period. The burial mounds date from a 

 period of some 1,500 or so years ago, w^hile the house dates from 

 about 500 years ago. Mound 1 was a dome-shaped tumulus 75 feet 

 in diameter and 4 feet high. Several articulated bison skeletons lay 

 on the mound floor as did numerous large, charred timbers. Below 

 these was a burial pit containing several secondary human interments. 

 Artifacts were few and largely found within the burial pit. In most 

 respects this mound resembled those excavated at the Boundary 

 Mounds site at the North Dakota-South Dakota State line. Momid 2 

 was slightly smaller and had articulated bison skeletons, secondary 



^ Site designations used by the River Basin Surveys are trinomial in character, consisting 

 of symbols for State, county, and site. The State is indicated by the first number, accord- 

 ing to the numerical position of the State name in an alphabetical list of the United States ; 

 thus, for example, 32 indicates North Dakota, 39 indicates South Dakota. Counties are 

 designated by a two-letter abbreviation ; for example, ME for Mercer County, MN for 

 Mountrail County, etc. The final number refers to the specific site within the indicated 

 State and county. 



