2 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuLu. 185 
The material inventory implies seminomadic communities whose 
economy was based on a combination of horticulture, hunting (includ- 
ing eagle trapping), and collecting. 
The ceramic complex appears to be intimately related to that of the 
Painted Woods Focus. This focus has been tentatively ascribed to the 
Hidatsa, and one or more groups of this seminomadic Northern Plains 
tribe may have been the authors of the Stutsman Focus. The presence 
of a few artifacts of trade metal and of examples of certain presum- 
ably late pottery types in the Hintz assemblage suggests that the Stuts- 
man Focus may be placed in the early Historic Period and may be 
dated circa A.D. 1750 to 1800. 
INTRODUCTION 
In this paper I propose to detail the returns from two partially 
excavated and eight unexcavated aboriginal occupation sites in the 
James River Valley, North Dakota; to combine the findings into a 
new culture complex, which I am calling the Stutsman Focus; and 
to suggest the cultural affinities and temporal placement of the Stuts- 
man Focus, following the broad historical approach. 
The investigations which produced the field data reported herein 
were part of the archeological salvage work undertaken by units of 
the Missouri Basin Project of the Smithsonian Institution River 
Basin Surveys intermittently between 1946 and 1954 in the area of 
the Jamestown Reservoir. The reservoir, a multiple-purpose water- 
control project of the Bureau of Reclamation, was created by a rolled 
earthfill dam built in 1952-1953 across the James River, in NEV, 
sec. 24, T. 140 N., R. 64 W., about 14 mile north of the city limits 
of Jamestown, the county seat of Stutsman County, east-central 
North Dakota. One of the sites, listed as 32SN3 in accordance 
with the River Basin Surveys’ site designation system and later 
christened the Hintz site, was discovered by J. Joe Bauxar and Paul 
L. Cooper in a preliminary survey of the reservoir area conducted 
in August 1946. Another site, the Joos site (82S5N30), was located 
and probed while the nearby Hintz site was under excavation during 
an intensive reconnaissance of the area carried out in 1952. The 
other eight occupation sites treated in this report were brought in 
when final excavations were performed at Hintz in 1954 (fig. 26).? 
The 1952 and 1954 expeditions were led by me. In 1952 I was 
aided at various times during the 4-month’s campaign, between May 
17 and September 26, by H. Thomas Cain and Alan R. Woolworth, 
field assistants; and by Eugene O. Allen, Lloyd R. Armstrong, Lee D. 
Boss, George L. Cowgill, Warren C. Cowgill, Hester A. Davis, David 
2 Burial mounds, the other principal category of archeological remains located, examined, 
and tested (in two instances) in the Jamestown Reservoir area by parties of the Missouri 
Basin Project in 1946, 1952, and 1954, will be reported on by me in a separate article. 
