NO. 2 MISSOURI VALLEY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM — WEDEL I9 



Missouri above Pierre, and the Central Plains area of Nebraska and 

 Kansas to the south. Migration legends link with the Fort Randall 

 district not only the early Arikara and Mandan, prior to their move- 

 ments upstream, but also the Iowa, Omaha, and Ponca, who later 

 migrated downstream, and the Teton and Yankton Dakota on their 

 movements from east to west across the Missouri. In historic times — 

 that is, during the latter decades of the eighteenth and early half of 

 the nineteenth centuries — there were no permanent Indian towns in the 

 area, then dominated by the Teton on the west and the Yankton on 

 the east. 



The present reconnaissance, by bringing to light a large number of 

 sites previously unrecorded, demonstrates that it is only lack of 

 sustained search and not actual lack of aboriginal remains that has 

 made the section largely a blank on archeological maps of tiie Great 

 Plains. The River Basin Surveys party located and recorded 93 sites ; 

 and since considerable sections of the river banks were not accessible 

 in the available time, it is highly probable that a number of additional 

 localities of archeological significance remain to be located and in- 

 ventoried. Among those now known are both fortified and unforti- 

 fied earth-lodge villages, stratified and unstratified occupational areas 

 with dwellings of unknown character, mounds, burial grounds, tipi- 

 ring sites, and other antiquities of undetermined nature. In time, 

 they range from those probably or certainly attributable to the recent 

 Yankton Dakota to others, far more numerous, of the prehistoric 

 period — a time span of perhaps 10 centuries or more. In some, there 

 are multiple occupation levels separated by culturally sterile strata 

 possibly indicative of climatic fluctuations, such as droughts. Arti- 

 facts, though often scanty, indicate relationships on several time levels 

 with other peoples and cultures to the north, east, and south. 



As with reconnaissance work generally, where little more than 

 surface survey and collecting are done, so here at Fort Randall the 

 artifacts recovered in the 1947 operations are quite limited in quantity. 

 Furthermore, there is no established framework of human prehistory 

 in the district, based on careful analysis of data gathered through con- 

 trolled excavation and laboratory work, into which the new findings 

 may be fitted. Thus, assignment of remains and interpretations as to 

 culture history are not yet possible. Certain clues may be found in 

 the presently available data, however, and it may be worth while, 

 therefore, to note their nature briefly. 



Particularly noteworthy are the results of test excavations in two 

 mounds (39CH4) located a short distance below Wheeler Bridge on 

 the left bank of the Missouri. This is near the western limit of 



