ARCHEOLOGICAL LNYESfTIGATT'ONS IN" MISSOURI 215 



position of cultures was nowhere encountered, and there is nothing in 

 the relative degrees of preservation or patination of remains to throw 

 any light on cultural succession. 



In the immediately preceding section of this report it was pointed 

 out that the cultural inventory from the Steed-Kisker site parallels 

 in a number of particulars the Nebraska Culture characteristic of the 

 Missouri River bluffs in eastern Nebraska and southwestern Iowa. 

 My own excavations at a Nebraska Culture site near Doniphan, Kans., 

 less than 30 miles northwest of Farley, Mo., netted a small percentage 

 of exotic but inclusive smooth shell-tempered sherds identical in all 

 respects with the ware typical of Steed-Kisker. From this and the 

 evidence adduced above, the general contemporaneity of Nebraska 

 Culture and Middle Mississippi peoples in this section of the Missouri 

 Valley can be accepted. The Nebraska Culture sites, so far as is 

 known today, are everywhere prehistoric and antedate by an interval 

 of unknown length the protohistoric Oneota remains believed to be 

 S'iouan. The Nebraska Culture was contemporaneous with the Upper 

 Republican aspect farther west, which is also prehistoric and precedes 

 the protohistoric and historic Pawnee materials of east-central 

 Nebraska. 



The Renner site was probably occupied at an earlier period, when 

 the Missouri River bluffs to the north and the plains to the west were 

 the habitat of small widely scattered groups of people with Woodland 

 affiliations. As was pointed out in a previous section, the Woodland 

 occupation of the trans-Missouri region is still very imperfectly known, 

 but preliminary sherd studies and a few limited excavations indicate 

 the existence of several variants. Hill and Kivett (1941, p. 240) have 

 pointed out that the commonest Woodland pottery type in the Nebraska 

 area appears to be a heavy, coarsely gravel-tempered ware, with all- 

 over cord-roughening and perhaps with large pointed-base jars; rims 

 are unthickencd, often with punched bosses, and less commonly with 

 cord-wrapped stick impressions. Associated with these sherds are 

 heavy stemmed projectile points. This ware is very close to, if not 

 identical with, a few sherds found at Renner. It is probably signifi- 

 cant, therefore, that at the Leahy site in Nemaha County, Nebr., cross- 

 hatched and punctate rims and rocker-roughened body sherds of Ren- 

 ner type were found deeply buried with cord-roughened sherds and 

 embossed rims (Hill and Kivett, 1941, p. 196 and pi. 11). The same 

 association is strongly hinted by excavations at a stratified site on Salt 

 Creek in Lane County, Kans., where rocker-roughened sherds occurred 

 in a Woodland layer along with heavy cord-roughened pottery and 

 stemmed arrowpoints (Wedel, 1940b, p. 86). 



As I have stated elsewhere (Wedel, 1938, p. 105), the exact rela- 

 tionship between the small Woodland sites, with cord-roughened 

 pottery found repeatedly throughout the plains, and the Renner 



