HARLAN I. SMITH: EXPLORER IN ARCHEOLOGY 



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. II;irl;iii 1. Siiiiili, recently se\ci-e(| liis (•(iiiiieel imi wiili the Mu- 

 seiiiii as Associate ( iii'alur in Ant lii'oixplo^y, to accept I he a|)|i(iint - 

 incnt as odicial urcliu'olo^ist to the ( aiiadiuii (ioxcinnient and 

 Curator of the <li\ision of iirchirology in the \'ictoria Pfo\incial Miiseiini. 

 He has l)een connected with the American Mnxuni >incc his iij)])()intnient 

 us Assistant in Archtvolofjy in 1895. 



Durinj; his long and cfHcient s(M"vices in this Museum. Mr. Smith was 

 identified especially with the .Icsiip Xoith Pacific Expedition for whose 

 archreological work he was mainly resp<tnsil)le. llis first important work 

 was in British ("olumlna in the valley of tlie Thompson River. Here he 

 made extensive excavations at Spences Bridge, Kaniloops and Lytton, 

 discovering numerous remains of previous habitations, some of which were 

 without doubt of considerable antiquity. Almost all his finds at these 

 places antedated the advent of the whites and gave an excellent insight into 

 the culture of the people of that early period. 



Later, he extended his investigations to the shores of Puget Soinid and 

 made a special exploration of the shell-heaps in the Fraser Delta. This 

 work was followed by an extensive exploration of the Columbia River 

 valley especially in the Yakima district. His investigations as a whole, 

 seem to indicate a prehistoric movement of the interior plateau people of 

 British Columbia out to the Pacific coast. The results of this series of 

 investigations have appeared in the Memoirs of the Jcsup North Pacific 

 Expedition as follows: "Cairns of British Columbia and Washington"; 

 " Shell-Heaps of the Lower Fraser, British Columbia"; "Archfeology of the 

 Gulf of Georgia and Puget Sound "; " Archreology of the Thompson River 

 Region"; and the "Archaeology of Lytton, British Columbia"; and also in 

 the Aufhropolof/ical Papers: "The Archaeology of the Yakima Valley." 



While preparing for the press the above publications he became greatly 

 interested in what he has designated as "an unknown field in American 

 archaeology." To use his own words: "Nothing is understood of the life 

 of the prehistoric people, the direction from which they came, or when they 

 arrived, in a portion of the United States and Canada larger than all the 

 rest of those countries. This area stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the 

 Arctic Ocean and occupies most of the country Ijctween the Mississippi 

 Valley and the Coast Range. It includes the Mackenzie basin, the Barren 

 Lands and the Great Plains. In the United States, eastern Washington, 

 Oregon, and California, all of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Xe\ada, 

 northern Utah and Colorado, all of Texas but the eastern edge, most of 

 Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska and the western part of the Dakotas 

 belong to this region which we may popularly term 'darkest archicological 



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