The Lavon Dam and Reservoir, under construction by the Corps of Engineers, Department of the Army, is one of the many projects throughout the country which will soon obliterate information relating to the prehistory of North America. This particular project is located on the East Fork of the Trinity River in Collin County, Texas, 21 miles northeast of Dallas. It was scheduled for completion in January, 1952.

The Trinity River is one of several major rivers flowing in a southeasterly direction across the state of Texas. It heads in four branches north and northwest of the city of Dallas and flows into Galveston Bay and thence into the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 40 miles due east of the city of Houston. The East Fork (and its principal tributary, Pilot Grove Creek) is the easternmost of the headwater branches. It rises in Grayson County and enters the main stream in southwestern Kaufman County.

Despite the general lack of detailed reports on individual sites, the broad framework of the prehistory of eastern Oklahoma has been fairly well outlined in recent years. Orr (1946) presented a summary of the situation at the Spiro site. In the same year Krieger (1946) set up two aspects with a number of component foci which include the Spiro materials together with a majority of the other cultural manifestations in the area and in 1949 he amplified and partially revised sections of his earlier discussion (Newell and Krieger, 1949). Baerreis (1951) presents a significant body of data on preceramic horizons in the northeastern part of the state, and the recent paper by Bell and Baerreis (1951) summarizes most of the existing information on Oklahoma in general.

The corps of engineers is currently building a power and flood control dam near the little town of Buford on the upper Chattahoochee River in northern Georgia. This is one of several such dams under way in the State, and in accordance with the usual procedure the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys made a routine archaeological reconnaissance of the impoundment area from November 15, 1950 to April 7, 1951. During the survey the writers came upon a large prehistoric mound (9HL64) not previously reported.

We spent three weeks investigating the structure to determine if its eventual flooding in the Buford impoundment would constitute an important loss of archaeological data. The conclusion reached was that a full scale excavation should be made before the site is inundated sometime in 1954 or 1955.

During the 1950 and 1951 seasons, field parties of the Missouri River Basin Survey carried on a series of excavations in the vicinity of the Oahe dam near Pierre, South Dakota. Most of the work was done at two earth lodge villages, the Dodd site (39ST30) and the Phillips Ranch site (39ST14). On the basis of the archaeological material from the Dodd and Phillips Ranch sites, and from a series of previously excavated sites located within a thirty-mile radius of the Dodd site, it seems possible to set up a sequence of cultural complexes for the area, complexes which follow one another in time and which appear to represent a series of modifications in and accretions to the earliest one known for the area.

The Dodd site, located on the west bank of the Missouri River about six miles upstream from Pierre, provides the basis for the chronological seriation of the material.

During the identification of the osteological material from two archaeological sites (39FA23 and 39FA83) in the Angostura Reservoir basin, South Dakota, the distribution of the various elements began to assume a pattern which invited closer examination on the chance that inferences might be drawn concerning the method of preparing the carcass for food.

Although the numerical count of the elements is subject to the accidents of preservation and the size of the excavation, the distribution of the various elements from an excavation which meets the archaeological requirements is probably a reasonably accurate reflection of the parts brought into camp, since one element has as good a chance of being preserved as another.

Slick rock village (4Tul 10) was excavated by a Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys field party under the direction of the writer between June 20 and July 30, 1950. It is one of nine very similar sites which will be covered by the reservoir pool to be created by the construction of the Terminus Dam on the Kaweah River. This particular site was chosen for excavation because it showed less evidence of modification by recent cultural activity than any other of the threatened sites. Intensive excavation at a single site (rather than test excavation at several) was chosen as the preferable approach to the archaeology of the Terminus Reservoir area because we had hoped that concentrated excavation at a single site would yield an integrated account of at least one ancient community in this region. Such an account would be particularly interesting in the light of the extraordinarily full ethnographic literature on this area (Gayton, A. H., 1948 a, b; Latta, F. F., 1949).

The river Basin Surveys' program, particularly in the Columbia River Basin, has had a peculiar role in American archaeology. Generally speaking, archaeological research programs should be oriented toward a specific problem such as the study of a certain culture sequence or an inquiry into a particular time horizon. In contrast River Basin Surveys' problem has been to examine in detail almost every phase of every culture that is represented over a vast area. True, the field of research has been limited to those portions of river basins that are scheduled to be inundated upon the completion of a number of dams, but because of the aridity of the Columbia Basin a vast majority of the aboriginal population was concentrated along the major streams. Thus the reservoirs planned for those streams will flood a large portion of the cultural material existing in the region.

Though the number of recovered cultural remains are few, the authors believe that the brief description and analysis of these artifacts are important, as site 45GR2 is the first dry shelter to be excavated in the Columbia Plateau.

The area itself falls into the Upper Sonoran life zone. The plateau above the coulee is generally treeless and is more or less well covered with bunch grass. Lupines and sunflowers are important parts of the flora. In the coulee, ground water is more available, and better stands and more species of grasses are present. Successful wheat farms and a few orchards indicate that the area must, at least during certain seasons, have had an extensive floral cover. Aspen, willow, alder, and cottonwoods are found near the springs. The draws support heavy stands of brushy growth, with sage being outstanding. Juniper (cedar) trees are found both on the plateau and in the coulee. The bottom of the coulee, at least during and after the spring and early summer rains, is swampy, and standing water was probably present in earliest times in some places throughout most of the year. Rodents, small carnivore, and bird populations are large. The mule deer was no doubt the largest game animal of importance.

Chief Joseph Reservoir is located along the Columbia River in southern Okanogan County,Washington (Fig. 108). The general area is a rugged highland, underlain chiefly by pre-Tertiary resistant rocks, and marked by welldefined north-south mountain ranges separated by broad troughs, now well dissected, into which the present main tributary streams, such as the Okanogan and the Sanpoil, have cut deep narrow trenches to the Columbia. The highland, whose summits reach 7000 and even 8000 feet at the international boundary, slopes rather uniformly south and passes beneath the broad expanse of the Columbia Plateau, where flat-lying mid-Tertiary basalt flows conceal the older rocks (Flint, 1935, p. 171). Along the river the country is rather barren of flora and fauna, except for sagebrush and an occasional clump of pine trees (Fig. 109, a). Several miles north of the river the pine forests begin and extend north into Canada.

During the summer field seasons of 1948 and 1950, excavations were conducted at several village sites located on the shores of Moses Lake, Washington, which lies within the reservoir area of the O'Sullivan Dam (Fig. 111). The 1948 field project was jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys and the University of Washington. The excavation undertaken in 1950 was a cooperative project between the River Basin Surveys and the State College of Washington. Both projects were under the field direction of the writer.

Based on the results of an archaeological survey of O'Sullivan Reservoir by Francis A. Riddell and the writer in July of 1947, several sites were selected for further investigation. A large village site, designated 45GR27, received the full attention of the 1948 party, while a similar site, 45GR30, located approximately one mile north of the former, was partially excavated in 1950.