Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 479 



analysis had to be developed in the field in conjunction with their 

 researches. 



By 1946, Mr. Will had been able to introduce time-depth into his 

 field researches, employing tree-ring analysis techniques to old posts 

 found in agricultural village sites near Bismarck. Based on observed 

 cultural changes and differences existing within the same village and 

 between villages, in 1939 I set a minimum date of A.D. 1300 for the 

 small, unfortified, rectangular, lodge sites situated along the Missouri 

 River from the Big Bend to the Clarks Creek regions, after which 

 time this earlier native population began building the larger fortified 

 sites with bastions. 



However, recent carbon-14 tests on wood from these ancient rec- 

 tangular lodge sites, now recognized as preceding the circular earth 

 lodges, have established A.D. 700 as the earhest date for this agri- 

 cultural tradition. And this date does not take into consideration 

 still earlier Woodlands cultures in the Plains which bear evidence of 

 limited agriculture. 



Based on the survival of numerous items of the material culture of 

 this rectangular-lodge tradition of the Missouri River Aspect after 

 the transition to the historic circular lodges of the Mandan and 

 Hidatsa, the architectural features of the ceremonial lodge of the 

 Mandan, and their well-founded traditions of former employment of 

 rectangular lodges, the history of the Mandan is now seen as a con- 

 tinuous cultural development on the Middle Missouri extending over 

 a period of nearly 1,000 years. Beginning with the original Mandan 

 researches by Will and Spinden, and employing all the techniques of 

 the archeologist and ethnologist, we see emerging the image of the 

 continuous valley residence of a single people — the Mandan of Lewis 

 and Clark's era — which can be matched in few places in the United 

 States. 



Simultaneously with the abandonment of the small unfortified 

 communities and the reorganization of this original population into 

 larger fortified communities (the Oak Creek site in South Dakota; 

 Huff, Ward, and Shermer sites in North Dakota), there was a general 

 and large-scale invasion by a people with Central Plains Upper 

 Republican cultural ties. These people quickly took over most of the 

 valley upstream nearly to the North Dakota border. Locally, they 

 united with the indigneous and other peoples from the east at the 

 Arzberger site. There, one tradition in pottery (check-stamping 

 and cord-roughened bodies), which is widely represented in the Lake 

 Traverse, lower loop of the Sheyenne River, and the Red River Valley 

 of eastern North Dakota, is well represented. These distinctive 

 combinations of body types in association with crosshatched rims, 

 dark color, and other diagnostic traits, characteristic of the some- 



