NO. lO NEBRASKA ARCHEOLOGY STRONG 263 



Museum from 1912 to 1914 Sterns excavated in 27 of these lodge 

 sites in eastern Nebraska, many being completely excavated and others 

 sampled."' He states that [Nebraska culture] lodge sites extend along 

 the Missouri for a distance of at least 175 miles, from Thurston 

 County, Nebr., to Doniphan County, Kans., being very numerous in 

 northeastern Douglas County and in Sarpy County, Nebr., and scat- 

 tered elsewhere in this region. Such sites are usually near the flood 

 plain of the Missouri River on the first or second bluffs, exceptional 

 locations being ridges along the Papillion and Weeping Water Creeks. 

 To these exceptions, on the basis of the Survey work, we may add 

 that similar sites occur on ridges along the lower Platte and Elkhorn 

 Rivers. Sterns also notes that the majority of such sites are either near 

 springs or else close to glacial outcrops where springs may formerly 

 have occurred. He points out that these sites do not occur in village 

 groups but are always strung out in a line, even when located on a flat 

 river bottom, as though adapted to location on ridges. Here again we 

 may add that villages, such as those at the Rock Bluffs and the Gates 

 site, are known but that the line formation is usually maintained. Iso- 

 lated houses, sometimes half a mile apart, also occur, and close village 

 formation is apparently not characteristic of the culture as a whole. 

 Such a straggling and unorganized alignment of houses combined 

 with their occasional location in sites poorly chosen for either obser- 

 vation or defense suggests, as Gilder has already pointed out, that 

 the Nebraska culture flourished in times of comparative peace and 

 security. 



The surface indications of such sites, .according to Sterns, are 

 round depressions from a few inches to 4 or 5 feet deep, averaging 45 

 feet in diameter with a range in the sites he examined of 12 to over 

 60 feet in diameter. The deepest surface depressions are in the north. 

 Occasionally such house pits are marked by a low embankment and 

 often contain trees as large and as old as any in the region. On exca- 

 vation the great majority of the houses investigated by Sterns proved 

 to be rectangular in outline, although three were rounded. Sterns' 

 method of excavation was very similar to the trenching methods em- 

 ployed by the Survey previously discussed in the present paper; 

 hence our results are strictly comparable. In vertical section Sterns 

 notes three layers, a dark stratum of recently accumulated soil averag- 

 ing 15 inches in thickness with a range, including all sites, from 11 

 to 20 inches. He notes that the northern sites average nearly 5 inches 



"'This summary of house types is from Sterns, 1915 a, II. On pp. I94-I95 

 Sterns gives the exact locations of these sites and refers to maps on which they 

 are located. 



