THE DEMERY SITE (39C01), OAHE RESERVOIR 

 AREA, SOUTH DAKOTA ' 



By Alan R. Woolworth and W. Raymond Wood 



INTRODUCTION 



In the summer of 1956 an archeological field party from the State 

 Historical Society of North Dakota carried out excavations at the 

 Demery site, in the upper part of the Oahe Reservoir, in Corson 

 County, South Dakota. Funds for the project were provided under a 

 cooperative agreement with the National Park Service, Department 

 of the Interior, and through appropriations by the North Dakota 

 State Legislature. The excavations were conducted between June 

 18 and August 31, 1956, under the supervision of Alan R. Woolworth 

 and W. Raymond Wood, then staff archeologists with the State His- 

 torical Society, with Frederic Hadleigh-West serving as assistant 

 archeologist. 



The major reason for selecting Demery for excavation in 1956 was 

 that the site is the northernmost manifestation of the "Category B" 

 complex on the mainstem of the Missouri River. In 1949, Paul L. 

 Cooper had described the Category B pottery complex from sites 

 along the Missouri River in South Dakota (1949, pp. 303-306). The 

 Category B rim design consists of a solid band of horizontally incised 

 or trailed lines on rim exteriors. Cooper demonstrated the wide 

 spatial distribution of this form of pottery rim decoration, and pre- 

 dicted that the delimitation of the temporal and spatial scope of this 

 archeological complex would provide one of the more important 

 chapters in Plains prehistory. The Demery site is only one of the 

 many sites bearing pottery of this character in the Central Plains and 

 Middle Missouri areas. Because of its extreme northern geographic 

 setting, it was anticipated that Demery would provide data on a peri- 

 pheral variant of the complex as it was known from work in sites in 

 central and southeastern South Dakota. ( See map 6. ) 



Much of the credit for the successful completion of the work at 

 Demery is due Russell Reid, Superintendent of the State Historical 



1 Submitted February 1962. 



71 



