NO. 2 SALVAGE PROGRAM, I95O-I95I — COOPER 87 



rims on which the lips are often decorated by impressing or notching. 

 Shoulders are frequently incised. Campbell Creek ware embraces 

 globular vessels with rounded shoulders and simple flaring or collared 

 rims. Surfaces are predominantly cord-marked and decoration, con- 

 fined mainly to the rim, consists of notching or pinching of the lip 

 on flaring rims and incising on collared rims. Talking Crow ware 

 resembles in many respects the ceramics of the Lower Loup complex 

 in Nebraska, while the Campbell Creek pottery suggests rather close 

 affinities to that of the Nebraska and Upper Republican aspects. 

 These two categories include the bulk of the pottery found in the site, 

 but other kinds occur in smaller numbers. These include a few sherds 

 of Stanley ware, predominant in sites farther up the river, and some- 

 what more abundant fragments of vessels with horizontally incised 

 rims and shoulders which are usually decorated by incising and 

 punctating. 



At the end of the 195 1 work Smith felt that, in addition to a late 

 nineteenth-century Dakota occupation, three periods — defined by pot- 

 tery, since other artifacts seemed to be much the same throughout the 

 occupation — could be distinguished in a cultural continuum. Campbell 

 Creek ware predominated in the earliest period, Talking Crow ware 

 in the latest, with pottery of the two represented in approximately 

 equal proportions in the middle period. Small quantities of White 

 trade materials were present in proveniences attributable to all 

 periods. If further excavation and final analysis sustain Smith's im- 

 pression, based on incomplete results, of continuity rather than a 

 series of discrete occupations of the site it will be of considerable 

 interest, since continuous occupation would seem to imply an unex- 

 pected compression of the history of the ceramic types present. 

 Among other things, pottery apparently closely related to the Camp- 

 bell Creek types, and perhaps even assignable to them, occurs in other 

 contexts without evidence of White contact and even the later pot- 

 tery with horizontally incised rims seems elsewhere to be prehistoric. 



Evidences of intensive aboriginal occupation on a level terrace adja- 

 cent to the town of Oacoma, across the Missouri from Chamberlain, 

 were assigned the numbers 39LM26 and 39LM27 by the River Basin 

 Surveys in 1947 and, more recently, the names Sharpe site and Dona- 

 hue site by Marvin F. Kivett, who began their excavation for the 

 Nebraska State Historical Society in 1951, under an agreement with 

 the National Park Service. The sites, if not actually parts of a single 

 village, appear at least to represent a single cultural complex. A 

 party of five worked there for approximately two months that year. 

 Two houses (one in each of the sites) and a part of a third, a refuse 



