NO. 2 SALVAGE PROGRAM, I95O-I95I — COOPER 39 



NORTH DAKOTA 



Field work in North Dakota included excavation in three sites, two 

 of Indian and one of White provenience, and additional reconnais- 

 sance in the Garrison Reservoir and in the Sheyenne Reservoir area, 

 briefly visited by the Surveys in 1946. The Jamestown Reservoir was 

 also on the reconnaissance schedule, but protracted bad weather pre- 

 vented examination of any appreciable part of the area; no sites were 

 found, but this may be largely owing to the unsatisfactory conditions 

 for survey, since significant sites were recorded during the earlier 

 investigation. 



Garrison Rerservoir site. — Archeological excavation by the River 

 Basin Surveys in North Dakota was confined in both 1950 and 1951 

 to the Garrison Reservoir, one of the largest water-control projects 

 in the Missouri Basin. The lake to be created by the huge earthen 

 dam, under construction since 1946 and now closed, will occupy the 

 immediate valley of the Missouri River and the lower reaches of its 

 tributaries from the dam in McLean and Mercer Counties to a point 

 above Williston, a distance of almost 200 miles. Previous investiga- 

 tions by this organization had consisted of inspection of the dam site 

 in 1946 and a reconnaissance of parts of the reservoir area during a 

 period of approximately two months in 1947. Despite the shortage of 

 time available for the achievement of an adequate sampling of this 

 little-known area, limited resources and imminent destruction dates 

 elsewhere in the Missouri Basin prevented further work in 1948 and 

 1949. While the reservoir lies outside the region intensively occupied 

 by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara before the beginning of the 

 breakdown of their aboriginal cultures, it contains the remains of the 

 latest earth-lodge villages of those three tribes and thus a large part 

 of the archeological record of the impact of industrial culture on the 

 village tribes of the northern Plains. Such village remains range from 

 a few in which the objects of material culture are predominantly of 

 native manufacture, but include moderate quantities of White trade 

 materials, to others in which the artifacts are almost exclusively of 

 White origin. Earlier sites in the area appear to represent less inten- 

 sive occupation. Some of them are apparently temporary camps of 

 the Mandan or Hidatsa during the time their main villages were situ- 

 ated farther downstream, or of closely related groups, while others 

 represent quite distinct cultural traditions. Among the latter are a 

 number that yield heavy, cord-marked pottery of Woodland affilia- 

 tions. Pottery of this sort occasionally is found stratigraphically 

 beneath materials attributable to groups of the Mandan-Hidatsa tra- 

 dition. Still other sites yield only nonceramic artifacts, usually in 



