542 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1960 



centuries earlier than most people have believed. The wood samples 

 from the ossuary show that the environmental setting at that time was 

 essentially the same as now. Except for probable wet and dry cycles, 

 the Indians of a thousand years ago in that area apparently lived in 

 surroundings quite comparable to those of today. 



A series of burials in plank-lined cysts was excavated on the 

 Columbia River in the McNary Reservoir basin. In one cemetery 

 adjacent to a village site 50 such graves were found. Funerary offer- 

 ings accompanying the skeletons consisted of both native artifacts and 

 trade goods. Colonial uniform buttons made as early as 1715 came 

 from a number of the graves, and since there was no evidence of fire- 

 arms, the use of which began in 1811 in the area, it seems likely that 

 the planked cysts belong in a period slightly after 1750 and prior to 

 1810. The skeletal material recovered there is significant because it 

 represents the best available series for the study of the physical char- 

 acteristics of the people living in that district. Because it also repre- 

 sents a single closely dated sample, it is particularly useful. Of the 

 remains of 57 individuals recovered, 37 were adults, the remainder 

 children and infants. 



Farther up the Columbia River in tlie various reservoir areas 

 studied by River Basin Surveys parties, it was found that the main 

 form of burial was in rock cairns. Little information could be ob- 

 tained from such sites, however, because most of them had been 

 disturbed by curio hunters who had taken all the funerary offerings 

 and scattered and broken the bones so that they were of no value for 

 physical anthropological studies. Rock caim burials also were found 

 in several localities in the Missouri Basin. 



HISTORIC SITES 



Work in historic sites has not been as extensive as that in aboriginal 

 remains. However, a number of interesting excavations carried on in 

 various parts of the country have yielded considerable information 

 concerning certain periods. The most extensive investigations of that 

 nature have been in the Missouri Basin. In the Garrison Reservoir 

 in North Dakota digging has been done at the location of one military 

 post, which subsequently became an Indian school; at a site which 

 combined both trading and military occupations, and subsequently 

 an Indian agency; and at three trading-post sites. The military post 

 was Fort Stevenson which was located some distance up the ISfissouri 

 River from the present city of Bismarck. It was a typical frontier 

 post and was built to keep the river open for navigation and to pro- 

 tect the Fort Berthold Indians from the Sioux. It also was one of 

 the main points on the overland mail route from St. Paul to Mon- 

 tana. Although the actual antiquity of the fort is relatively slight, 



