132 BUULETIN 183, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



itive man ever built on this strip, the prospects for recovering his 

 remains are dim indeed. The same considerations that would have 

 attracted him — ^better drainage and safety from overjflow — ^have 

 prompted his white successor to lay out roads, railway grades, and 

 buildings thereon. A short distance south of the railroad bridge 

 over Pearl Branch, where the Parkville road (Missouri 45) branches 

 eastward to leave the Missouri bottoms via a small nameless creek 

 valley, the outwash area is larger but it showed no sign of village 

 debris. Such evidence, in fact, was forthcoming at but one point 

 outside of the Pearl Branch embayment. This was on a low incon- 

 spicuous rise north of the place where the creek issues from the bluffs, 

 east of the highway and about 400 yards west of Babcock Mound A 

 (fig. 12, C). Here, on cultivated rain-washed ground, we found shell- 

 tempered plain and incised sherds, a few others with grit tempering 

 and cord-roughened exteriors, small arrow-points, scrapers, flints, 

 and lumps of burnt grass-impressed clay. Bits of this wattling clay, 

 charcoal, and flint chips occurred below plow sole to a maximum 

 depth of about 12 inches underground. Quite possibly a small earth- 

 lodge settlement once stood here, though the evidence we saw was in- 

 sufficient to warrant large scale excavation. It is interesting to note, 

 however, that the two pottery types represented here are the same 

 ones found by Shippee at sherd area A (map, fig. 12), and by us in 

 the mound (Babcock A) on the ridge to the east and also intrusively 

 in Nolan C. 



THE YOUNG MOUND GROUP 



Four and a half miles northwest of Parkville the attractive Brush 

 Creek Valley opens out onto the flood plain of the Missouri. About 

 a quarter mile up the smaller valley the uplands on the west thrust a 

 narrowing spur southward. To the east is a timbered slope, which 

 falls away sharply to a fine alluvial terrace on the right bank of the 

 creek. On the west is a short canyon beyond which a higher ridge 

 conceals the Missouri River. The stream, about 1,200 yards distant, 

 is visible to one looking southeast from the spur. 



In May 1938 the crest of the spur was almost wholly under culti- 

 vation, with exception of the extreme southerly tip overlooking the 

 farmstead of the owner, W. W. Young. Two mounds, both con- 

 siderably dug in preceding years, were in a field of growing grain 

 and could not be examined ; a third shared with Mr. Young's hog-house 

 a sort of shelf at the end of the ridge. "Wlien first seen this mound 

 appeared as little more than a pile of jumbled stones about 25 feet 

 across by 30 inches high. A small pit in the top, according to the 

 owner, was due to his efforts to quarry rock for building purposes. 

 The stones proved unsuited to his intended use; besides they "stood 

 on edge" and the deeper he dug the more firmly they seemed to be 



