Howard] THE PONCA TRIBE 11 



sity of Nebraska sponsored summer field parties in northeastern Ne- 

 braska in an eil'ort to delineate the culture of the Ponca as it appears 

 in archeological remains. By doing so, it was thought their claims 

 could be disproved or verified. 



One of the prime objectives of this work was the excavation of the 

 famous Ponca Fort site, 25KX1, which is located near the mouth of 

 Ponca Creek in Knox County, Nebr. This site, famous in Ponca tribal 

 lore, was considered the most logical point from which to begin. It 

 was definitely known to be Ponca by reason of its having been men- 

 tioned by a number of early explorers. Therefore, by excavating it 

 and determining what Ponca pottery and other artifacts were like, 

 it was believed that other sites in the area, by comparison, could be 

 identified as Ponca or the remains of some other group or groups. 

 Unfortunately, however, the work at 25KX1 has thus far raised more 

 questions about Ponca archeology than it has answered. 



The Ponca Fort site may be characterized as the remains of a forti- 

 fied earth-lodge village. It is located in sec. 29, T. 33 N., E. 7 W., 

 Knox County, Nebr. It is roughly 8 miles northwest of the town of 

 Niobrara and 1 mile east of Verdel. The site is on the south side of 

 the Missouri, and Ponca Creek, a tributary of the Missouri, is 2,000 feet 

 north of the site, emptying into the Missouri a mile and a half to the 

 east. The fort was well situated from a defensive point of view, being 

 located on a prominence, one of the bluffs of the Missouri, some 50 or 

 60 feet above the floor of the valley of Ponca Creek. 



The fort has an oval defensive ditch with an interior earthen em- 

 bankment. This embankment supported, at the time the fort was 

 occupied, a post palisade. The long axis of the ditch or moat is 

 oriented east and west. The fort covers an area of 3 acres, and meas- 

 ures 380 feet east and west and 320 feet north and south. On at least 

 one side of the fortification, protuberances or bastions were built from 

 which the village inhabitants could rake attacking forces with a mur- 

 derous crossfire. These bastions, still visible in an aerial photograph 

 of the site (Wood, 1959, pi. 1), may have functioned primarily to 

 protect the entrance to the fort which, according to J. O. Dorsey's 

 map (1884 a, fig. 30, orientation corrected by Wood, 1959, map 1), 

 was at the northwest end of the village. 



Between 1953 and 1955 Raymond Wood, then a graduate student 

 at the University of Nebraska, made an analysis of the material recov- 

 ered from the Ponca Fort as well as from other purported Ponca sites 

 in the area excavated by the Nebraska field parties in the thirties. 

 Recently Wood has published on the Ponca Fort site (1959; 1960). 

 He notes that the stockade surrounding the village was composed of 

 posts that were quite widely spaced. Perhaps, in order to provide 

 more adequate defense, logs or branches were interwoven between 

 these uprights (Wood, 1960, p. 26) . 



