l6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. IO7 



to encourage the participation of State and local organizations in the 

 survey program and to utilize their advice and assistance wherever 

 competent personnel and facilities are available. Consultations for 

 this purpose have already been held; more are in prospect. It is a 

 heartening sign of growing public interest when an overcrowded 

 State university places office, laboratory, and storage space at the dis- 

 posal of the Survey ; when other universities and historical societies 

 undertake to raise funds, or to re-allocate present funds, to partici- 

 pate in the work ; when responsibility for investigation of particular 

 units of the developmental program is assumed by qualified State 

 agencies so that the Federal efforts may be concentrated on other de- 

 serving projects ; and when national scientific organizations such as 

 the Society for American Archeology, the American Anthropological 

 Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies jointly 

 establish a cooperating Committee for the Recovery of Archeological 

 Remains. There can be no thought that the Federal Government 

 should do the whole Basin-wide job unaided. At the same time, be- 

 cause the scientific problems — like the over-all plan of river valley de- 

 velopment — transcend State boundaries, it is essential, in order to 

 assure the fullest coordination of effort on a regional scale, that cen- 

 tral direction of the recovery program be established and retained in a 

 single agency of the Government — a responsibility that now rests 

 by agreement with the Smithsonian Institution. 



The archeological, historical, and other scientific materials in the 

 Missouri River Basin are of far more than merely local or State in- 

 terest. In many sites there is evidence of a succession of prehistoric 

 floods, of silting and soil erosion, of recurrent droughts and climatic 

 fluctuations, and these should throw light on modern problems arising 

 from similar phenomena. The archeological record of land utiliza- 

 tion, of the specialization of corn and other domestic food crops, and 

 of shifting population distributions under varying environmental 

 and economic conditions may add basic information to our compre- 

 hension of modern settlement problems. The human skeletal material 

 taken from archeological sites may be expected to contribute to medi- 

 cal science added records, as evidenced in bone pathology, of prehis- 

 toric diseases that ran their course untreated. The archeological ma- 

 terials, no less than the historical and paleontological resources of the 

 Basin, in short, are national assets. 



Within the far-flung boundaries of the Missouri Biver Basin occurs 

 a wide variety of climatic and topographic conditions; cultural re- 

 mains already found range from some as early as anything yet re- 

 ported in the Americas to the Indians who were finally dispossessed 



