Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 3 



by archeologists, surface features of these sites are still clearly dis- 

 tinguishable, and river cutting frequently exposes large sections of 

 some of these sites and their associated artifacts. Extensive digging 

 by local artifact hunters at the old village of the Awatixa north of 

 Stanton, N. Dak., has opened up deep cross sections of stratified 

 refuse with the lower levels, producing many pottery types identical 

 to those found at the oldest traditional sites of the Hidatsa in the 

 Sanger area but not characteristic of the contemporaneous modern 

 sites. Perhaps the strongest evidence in the archeology of the region 

 indicative that the Hidatsa groups when first reaching the Missouri 

 were culturally more unlike the Mandan than in later years, as men- 

 tioned in both Mandan and Hidatsa traditions, is the fact that the 

 late prehistoric and historic archeological inventories of the two tribes 

 are essentially identical. Researches in Hidatsa social organization 

 and ceremonialism point to similar intertribal cultural borrowing even 

 within the memory of informants or of their parents. 



Rarely does the researcher in an Indian tribe have available so 

 rich a source of archeological, historical, and anthropological infor- 

 mation when undertaking a detailed analysis of a small segment of 

 the total culture of a people as was the case with the Hidatsa. We 

 can trace their group movements through the earliest historic accounts 

 and the statements of qualified informants from data they secured 

 from grandparents who saw the first White traders to reach their 

 villages. We can compare their prehistoric culture, as revealed by 

 their traditional village sites, with that of their immediate neighbors, 

 the Mandan, and even with their more remote neighbors, the Arikara. 



The literature on the Hidatsa is extensive, even though the early 

 fur traders, explorers, and others tended to view them as the "poor 

 relatives" of the Mandan, giving us rather extensive accounts of 

 the life of the latter and sketchy accounts of the former. Among 

 the first contributors to our knowledge of the Hidatsa were Boiler, 

 Kurz, Lewis and Clark, Charles Mackenzie, Maximilian, Palliser, 

 Thompson, and others (see Bibliography). In the middle of the 

 past century, studies by Hayden, Matthews, Morgan, and School- 

 craft appeared. During the first quarter of this century, various 

 aspects of Hidatsa culture were studied by a generation of trained 

 researchers, among whom were Beclrwith, Curtis, Densmore, Hyde, 

 Lowie, Pepper, Will, and Wilson, All of them contributed important 

 information on some aspect of Hidatsa culture and provided back- 

 ground data for this study. 



The primary purpose of the present study was to reconstruct the 

 aboriginal culture of the Hidatsa as it would have been observed 

 about 1836, prior to the last major smallpox epidemic. It would 

 have employed the synchronic approach to the understanding of the 



