ARCHEOLO'GICAL INVESTIGATIONS IN JMISSOXJRI 143 



scaled and the specimen has been mended and restored, but undoubt- 

 edly with complete accuracy. There is no ornamentation. 



Additional artifacts included about a dozen chipped flints, a piece 

 of red sandstone evidently used for rubbing, a piece of hematite, and 

 a cube-shaped lump of galena. The best of the chipped material were 

 the two blades in plate 40. The larger, /, is of cream-colored chert, 

 very light in weight and fragile. The edges, in addition to being 

 retouched, have been worn or ground down. It measures 13.8 by 5.1 

 by 0.7 cm. The smaller, e, is of gray chert, thicker and less skillfully 

 retouched. It is 10.2 by 3.3 cm. The remaining objects, which do 

 not merit detailed description, include two snub-nosed end scrapers, 

 the basal parts of two stemmed arrowpoints, and several broken 

 knives perhaps from specimens similar to the two illustrated. There 

 is no obvious reason for questioning the occurrence of any of these in 

 the mound, but we did not collect any fragments in situ as we did of 

 the pottery. 



We were repeatedly told that everything came out of the mound, 

 as perhaps it did. As any field worker will bear witness out of his 

 own experience, however, there is always a certain reluctance to ac- 

 cept blanket statements where significant inferences are likely to be 

 based on material collected as the present series was. With the un- 

 trained amateur, the arrowhead found on the field across the fence 

 all too often goes into the shoebox containing sherds and flint work 

 from a razed mound, house site, or other localized spot, when the 

 two actually should have been carefully segregated. Wliile there 

 must always be a residual element of uncertainty in the present situ- 

 ation, I am of the opinion that the pottery at least can safely be 

 ascribed to the mound, the flints perhaps with rather less sureness. 

 Whether peoples other than those who deposited this pottery also 

 left their remains on the hilltop, so that some of the artifacts and 

 graves are actually earlier, contemporary but of alien origin, or 

 perchance intrusive from a later time, are questions of absorbing in- 

 terest but, regrettably, without an answer. 



RENNER MOUND 



Westward from the terrace occupied b}^ the Renner village site 

 the ground rises rapidly to a timber-clad ridge. Wliere this culmi- 

 nates in a promontory overlooking the Missouri bottoms to the south 

 and the Line Creek Valley to the east, about 450 or 500 yards from the 

 village site, is a large mound about 6 feet high and 60 feet in diameter. 

 This was opened in 1920, and again in 1934, by Shippee and Henne- 

 man. Shippee states (letter of March 30, 1940) that "repeated ef- 

 forts to determine the level at which the mound fill was begun failed, 

 for after digging through the topsoil there was no apparent change 



