16 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY 



recommended for excavation and 2 were written off as meriting no 

 further attention. The 12 comprised either single- or multi-occupa- 

 tion sites, ranging in time from Middle Woodland through the early 

 ceramic periods of rectangular houses to and including the late 

 ceramic periods of circular earth lodges. One suggests a preceramic 

 horizon somewhat similar to that at the Medicine Crow site (39BF2) . 

 Of the sites visited and not tested, nine were recommended for further 

 investigation, and five were written off. One of the latter five, 

 39HU215, was first thought to be an early 19th-century trading post, 

 but tests indicated that it was a late 19th-century homestead allot- 

 ment, probably of Dakota occupancy. On September 3 this party 

 terminated its work in the Big Bend area after 8 weeks in the field, 

 and moved to the Oahe Keservoir area to continue similar survey and 

 testing activities. 



In the Oahe Keservoir area there were four Eiver Basin Survey 

 parties in the field at the beginning of the fiscal year, and a fifth 

 party began work there early in September. Dr. Eobert L. Stephen- 

 son with a crew of 23 was excavating, at the beginning of the year, in 

 the vicinity of Fort Sully on the left bank of the Missouri Eiver in 

 Sully County, S. Dak. That party conducted intensive excavations 

 in the Sully site (39SL4), the remains of the largest of the pre- 

 historic earth-lodge villages known in the Missouri Basin. It also 

 completely excavated a small rock-cairn burial site (39SL38) nearby. 

 The latter consisted of a deep burial beneath a rock pile and produced 

 a skeleton in poor condition, with no associated artifacts. The Sully 

 site excavations included 13 circular earth lodges of the nearly 400 

 presumed to be present in the site, and li/^ of the 4 ceremonial lodges. 

 The house floors ranged in depth, below the surface, from 2 to 4 

 feet; entrances were to the southwest; and two distinct architectural 

 patterns were observed. One was composed of closely set double rows 

 of small outer wall posts, the other was composed of widely spaced 

 single rows of large outer posts with leaner posts outside them. Ap- 

 parently there were two closely related, yet somewhat different, oc- 

 cupational patterns, and the artifact inventory tends to support this 

 distinction. The ceremonial lodges were 12-sided structures of 75- to 

 80-foot diameters and had long entrance passages. The other houses 

 all had very short entrances. The ceramic inventory suggests that 

 there may have been an earlier occupation featuring rectangular 

 houses, but no such houses were found in the areas excavated. Other 

 features excavated include burial areas where 63 burials were re- 

 covered, midden heaps, a large rectangular "plaza" area of unknown 

 usage, a large I-shaped depression of unknown usage, a strata trench 

 across the center of the site, and 91 cache pits. The major occupation 

 of the site appears to have been by the immediate ancestors of the 



