72 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1951 



work, which had been started in the previous year, continued until 

 July 19, when the Wheeler party moved to the Boysen Reservoir area 

 in Wyoming. The Long site is of particular interest because it repre- 

 sents one of the early hunting-culture occupations in the Plains area. 

 The material from it is limited in quantity, but the blades, scrapers, 

 and projectile points probably can be correlated with some of the types 

 from other hunting cultures and will aid materially in filling in the 

 gaps in present knowledge about the prehistory of the western Plains. 

 Charcoal obtained from unprepared hearths has been dated by Dr. 

 W. F. Libby by the carbon-14 method and shows that the occupation 

 at the Long site was in the interval from 7,073 ± 300 to 7,715 ± 740 years 

 before the present. 



Tlie Wheeler party began work in the Boysen Reservoir area on the 

 Big Horn River near Shoshoni, Wyo., on July 20 and continued oper- 

 ations until September 20. During that period a number of sites were 

 tested, and fairly extensive excavations were carried out at three loca- 

 tions. Most of the sites were in the open and proved to be the remains 

 of camps rather than of villages. One small rock shelter was found to 

 contain considerable refuse material as well as various types of arti- 

 facts and broken animal bones. One crevice burial, discovered on a 

 butte top overlooking the reservoir area, presumably belonged to the 

 historic period as a number of porcelain beads and a short coil of iron 

 were sifted from the sand that lay directly below the crevice. Two of 

 the sites examined probably are late prehistoric, while the others are 

 older, perhaps considerably older. In addition to the excavating 

 work, the Wheeler party photographed and sketched many petro- 

 glyphs and made extensive surface collections from numerous occupa- 

 tional sites, several of which were newly discovered while the digging 

 was going on. 



On June 21 Wlieeler and his field assistant, J. M. Shippee, returned 

 to Wyoming and started excavations at the only known pottery site 

 in the Keyhole Reservoir area on the Belle Fourche River near Moor- 

 croft. By the end of the fiscal year they had dug three shallow test 

 areas across the site and recovered a series of artifacts consisting of 

 stone and bone implements and a variety of potsherds. The apparent 

 absence of dwellings of any kind, the shallowness of the middenlike 

 deposits, and the character of the material found there suggest that 

 the site, which covers approximately 30 acres, was a late prehistoric 

 or protohistoric hunting camp. The work there had not yet progressed 

 sufficiently to make possible the correlation of the remains with one of 

 the historic tribes known to have inhabited that part of Wyoming. 



The largest excavation operations in the Missouri Basin during 

 the year were those in the Oahe Reservoir area on the main stem of 

 the Missouri River near Pierre, S. Dak. A party under the super- 

 vision of Donald J. Lehmer was digging in the remains of a large 



