120 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuLn. 185 
Another possibility is that the building at Star Village was done 
in haste and that, had the occupation of the site continued, the 
structures would eventually have been rebuilt in conformity to the 
traditional method. A third possibility bearing on the house pattern 
as found here rests on the question of the readily available supply 
of suitable timber. Agent Latta reported that the village was being 
built adjacent to a good stand of timber. However, the post butts 
uncovered during the excavation of the site were small and one 
received the impression at that time that suitable timber was scarce 
and hard to obtain. Star Village and the smaller village immedi- 
ately west of it contained about 100 houses. These would require 
a total of 400 large center posts, and well over a thousand would 
be needed for the outer ring. Assuming an average house diameter 
of 35 feet, 26,000 poles or puncheons with an average diameter of 
6 inches would be required as leaners for the structures, and thou- 
sands more would be required for framing the roofs. This would 
put a heavy strain on the timber resources of an area where suitable 
timber was present only on the flood plain of the Missouri River. 
Moreover, it must be remembered that this site was in close proximity 
to the palisaded Mandan-Hidatsa earthlodge village where two pali- 
saded, log-built. trading posts were present, all having been built 
during the preceding 17 years. It may be that suitable timber was 
not overly abundant and that the Arikara, building hurriedly, made 
shift with what could be most easily obtained, even though lack of 
uniformity in posts resulted in lack of alinement in the house mem- 
bers. Nine years later, in 1871, wood was so scarce in the vicinity 
that we find the traders at Fort Berthold buying an earthlodge and 
wrecking it for wood (Van Ostrand, 1943, p. 84) and at the same 
time mining and hauling 18 loads of coal a distance of 17 miles. 
“Must have it or be cold this winter,” wrote a clerk in his diary 
(ibid., p. 87). 
The limited amount of excavation carried out at the Star Village 
site in 1951 adds one more link to the chain of sites and data reach- 
ing from the documented present into the undocumented prehistoric 
past of the Arikara. A portion of the last village site of this tribe 
has been explored, and it is understood that a study of the data ob- 
tained is now underway. A certain amount of work has been done 
at the Leavenworth site and associated cemeteries, and some part of 
this work has been reported. The first of these sites is, with Star 
Village, now beneath the waters of the Garrison Reservoir; the 
last will soon be lost beneath the surface of the Oahe Reservoir. One 
4Work was resumed at the Leavenworth site in the summer of 1960 by a University 
of Nebraska field party under an agreement with the National Park Service. Two more 
seasons of investigations are planned for the site. Hp. 
