20 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 97 



neglected in this connection is physical anthropology. Skeletal re- 

 mains either supposedly or certainly attributable to the Pawnee are 

 by no means plentiful, as the early cemeteries remain undiscovered, 

 and the later ones have suffered woefully at the hands of vandals. 

 There is a disturbing possibility that scaffold burial and subsequent 

 dismemberment may have been practised in the early period. Still, 

 careful examination of the material thus far recovered might further 

 illuminate the issue. For obvious reasons, it will probably never be 

 possible to prove empirically that the inhabitants of any one of the 

 Lower Loup Focus sites spoke a Pawnee dialect, since the individual 

 sites cannot be linked with recorded towns. Thus the identification 

 made on other grounds must remain a probability — a very high one, 

 it is true, but still a probability. To maintain from this that the sites 

 are not Pawnee, however, seems a captious argument, particularly 

 in face of the very strong circumstantial evidence in every other 

 respect. On the whole, it may be soundest and perhaps least confusing 

 to retain a nonlinguistic designation for these protohistoric remains, 

 at any rate for the present. For this purpose the term suggested by 

 Dunlevy and used in this paper is as appropriate as any. 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 



In the foregoing pages the relationships between one historic and 

 two protohistoric archeological complexes in Nebraska have been 

 briefly discussed. These are respectively the Pawnee of the nineteenth 

 century, the Lower Loup Focus, and the Oneota Aspect. From the 

 evidence of archeology, history, tradition, mythology, and ethnography, 

 as outHned herein, the following major facts emerge : 



(i) Village sites assignable to the Lower Loup Focus, 10 or more 

 in number, occur only in the very heart of the historic Pawnee region 

 about the confluence of the Loup and Platte Rivers. 



(2) These sites nearly all yield limited amounts of historical ma- 

 terials, indicating their occupancy at least into very early contact 

 times. 



(3) Historic maps and documents show that the Pawnee villages 

 since virtually the earliest contact times were localized in and about 

 this region. 



(4) On the basis of available archeological evidence alone, sites 

 of the Lower Loup Focus show a much closer relationship to the 

 later historic Pawnee culture than they do to the contemporaneous 

 Oneota sites. 



(5) Pawnee traditions link that tribe directly with several of the 

 protohistoric Lower Loup Focus sites. 



