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Investigations in Western South Dakota and Northeastern Wyoming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Jack T. Hughes
Jack T. Hughes*
Affiliation:
River Basin Surveys, Burnett Hall, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska
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Extract

The field work on which this report is based was carried out during the summer of 1948 by a field unit of the Missouri Valley Project, River Basin Surveys, Smithsonian Institution. The unit consisted of Mr. J. M. Shippee and myself; we were assisted during part of the time by Messrs. H. F. Wilson, S. J. Phelps, and R. F. Worden of Hot Springs, South Dakota. Investigations covered the four-month period from June 1 through September 29.

Five proposed reservoir sites in the Cheyenne Basin were investigated more or less intensively. All are Bureau of Reclamation projects, in various stages of development, located in or near the Black Hills of western South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. Angostura Reservoir received much more thorough exploration than the others; work at this site forms the basis for the present report. Edgemont and Keyhole reservoirs are omitted because the data from them have not yet been evaluated. Pactola and Johnson Siding reservoirs, alternate projects, were unproductive and require no discussion.

Type
Archaeological Researches in the Missouri Basin by the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys and Cooperating Agencies
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 14 , Issue 4Part1 , April 1949 , pp. 266 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1949

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References

1 The words “focus” and “component” are used here in a rather special sense. Focus means an association of traits found at site after site, or found at one site and presumably present at others; component means the manifestation of a particular focus at a single site. A focus is visualized as the approximate archaeological equivalent of a tribe, a component as the occupation by a particular tribe of a single site.

2 The only other manifestation referable to the Hot Springs Focus at Angostura is a projectile point found at a superficial, mixed, multi-component site.

3 Quartzite is a common material not only in the Hot Springs Focus, but in most other Angostura foci as well. Most of this material appears to have been obtained from extensive quarries on Flint Hill, in the mountains some six miles (airline) northwest of the head of the reservoir site, or from smaller workings elsewhere in the mountains to the north, where outcrops of Dakota sandstone contain an abundance of gray, purple, red, brown, and yellow quartzite. The Flint Hill quarry is especially interesting. Scores of large crater-like pits and great quantities of rough workshop debris litter nearly a half section of land. Tipi rings and numerous other occupational remains are abundant in the vicinity. The magnitude of the site, together with the great number and variety of artifacts found there by its owner, Mr. Neal Conboy, indicates much use of the quarry by various groups from earliest times. Components of most foci found at Angostura probably are present, and others as well. Flint Hill seems to be fully as important a quarry as the better known Spanish Diggings of eastern Wyoming.

4 Archaeological reconnaissance and survey of 10 reservoir sites in Wyoming and Montana during 1946 and 1947 is reported by Bliss and/or Hughes in 15 preliminary and supplementary appraisals prepared by Missouri Valley Project, River Basin Surveys, Smithsonian Institution for Missouri River Basin Recreation Survey, Region Two, National Park Service, and in other manuscripts on file at field headquarters of the Missouri Valley Project, Burnett Hall, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (excluding titles listed in the bibliography).

5 Bone is more plentiful in silt than in sand deposits at Angostura, suggesting more rapid decomposition in the latter; both components of the Cheyenne Falls Focus are in sand deposits.

6 On the basis of a recent test, made in a different part of the site from that investigated by Strong, Bliss recognizes three levels in Signal Butte I, designated, from bottom to top, I-A, I-B, and I-C, and assigns lanceolate points to I-A, “fish-tailed” points to I-C.

7 Barn Butte is a rich lithic site, extensively tested in 1939 by the late Perry Newell for the Nebraska State Historical Society Archaeological Survey, under the direction of Mr. A. T. Hill, who has kindly placed specimens and records at my disposal for purposes of a report which is currently being prepared for publication.

8 A similar observation has been made by Buker (1937) regarding temper of sherds in Red Canyon.

9 Unless the cord-marked pottery mentioned by Buker (1937) represents Upper Republican components.