40 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I26 



relatively small numbers. Some of them may be of fair age, but none 

 has yielded convincing evidence of any considerable antiquity. Many 

 of these sites are moderately deeply buried beneath sterile deposits. 



Despite its evident importance, this area had seen no excavation 

 prior to 1950, when the River Basin Surveys and the State Historical 

 Society of North Dakota initiated programs of intensive investigation 

 in significant sites to be destroyed by the reservoir. What previous 

 excavations had been accomplished on the Missouri River in North 

 Dakota were in earlier and more spectacular sites downstream, well 

 outside the Garrison Reservoir (e.g., the Burgois, or Double Ditch, 

 site on the east side above Bismarck, and the Slant, or Fort Abraham 

 Lincoln, village on the west side below Mandan). 



During both years under consideration, small survey teams were 

 detached from the excavation parties in the Garrison area to extend 

 the previous reconnaissance and to re-examine sites recorded in 1947. 

 This work was in every instance headed by George Metcalf, who was 

 assisted at various times by one or two other men. In 1950, a 2-man 

 party spent a period of approximately two months primarily in an 

 examination of the area comprised in the Fort Berthold Reservation, 

 which had been untouched in 1947. During rather brief and intermit- 

 tent surveys in 195 1, the emphasis was again on the land within the 

 confines of the reservation but, as in the previous year, some attention 

 was given to other parts of the area to be flooded which had received 

 at least partial coverage in 1947. The list of 70 sites recorded in 1947 

 has now been expanded to include approximately 130 Indian sites, 

 plus about 15 additional sites of trading posts, Indian agencies, aban- 

 doned nineteenth-century towns, historic trails, and other features 

 more or less intimately related to the White occupation of the region. 

 Two of the latter are of especial significance as far as the Indian 

 history of the region is concerned. They are site 32MN1, believed to 

 be the remains of Kipp's trading post built about 1825, and the site of 

 two trading posts, Fort Berthold and Fort Atkinson, at Like-a-Fish- 

 hook Village, the last home of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara 

 before they scattered to individual allotments on the reservation (the 

 village and associated posts are included in the project's records under 

 a single number, 32ML2). 



Sites relating to the Indian occupancy of the area now on record 

 include winter villages on the river bottoms, earth-lodge villages on 

 terraces or butte tops, small camp sites with and without pottery, stone 

 circles, depressions which are probably the remains of eagle traps, 

 rock cairns, burial mounds, other burial sites, and such recent phe- 

 nomena as the ruin of a late hunting lodge and the remains of the last 



