250 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 93 



and are usually somewhat hell-shaped, with flat or slightly rounded 

 bottoms. The occurrence of stone slabs forming floor areas in both 

 lodges and caches may be a cultural characteristic as well. 



The interments of the Upper Republican culture, so far as known, 

 are in hilltop ossuaries in which previously exposed and rather frag- 

 mentary human bones have been deposited with a variety of broken 

 and unbroken artifacts. Disk shell beads are fairly common in the 

 sites of this type so far excavated. Local report indicates that stone- 

 slab graves were employed by the bearers of this culture along the 

 valley of Medicine Creek, but this awaits scientific confirmation. In all 

 cases where ossuaries have been grouped with other Upper Republican 

 culture sites, this has been done because potsherds of Upper Repub- 

 lican ware were abundant in such ossuaries. On the basis of the 

 present evidence, however, the segregation of the Upper Republican 

 culture as a historical unit seems justified. The relation of the Upper 

 Republican to other historic and prehistoric cultures will be discussed 

 in the next section of this paper. 



The Nebraska Culture 



Compared to the newly distinguished I'pper l\C])ulilican culture a 

 great deal is on record concerning the Nebraska culture. This latter 

 culture was first recognized and named by Gilder, but to date has 

 been most exhaustively studied by Sterns, whose unpublished manu- 

 script is the most complete treatise on the Nebraska culture extant.'" 

 Sterns excavated in 2"] houses of the Nebraska culture type, his re- 

 sults being sinnmed up in the unpublished paper referred to and his 

 collections being preserved in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, 

 Mass. Since in its present form this paper is not available to many 

 students, I have, with the author's permission, included certain of 

 Sterns' summaries in the j^resent report. Gilder has dug in a very 

 large number of sites of this type, but only a small proportion of 

 these results have been written up or printed, and much of his archeo- 

 logical material is scattered. The work of the University of Ne- 

 braska Archeological Survey during 1 929-1 931 included excavation 

 in two villages (fig. i, sites, 20, 21) and two habitation sites, one of 

 which was associated with an ossuary (fig. i, sites 22, 26), all per- 

 taining to this culture. In the following an attempt is made to draw 

 together the main results of Gilder, Sterns, and the writer to form 

 a reasonably complete picture of the Nebraska culture as a whole. 



'"Sterns, 19x5 a. References in the present section to Sterns' work for which 

 no citations are given refer to this manuscript, vol. 2. 



