Appraisal of the Archeological and Paleontological Resources of the Niobrara River Basin, Nebraska

The archeology of the Niobrara River Basin has not been investigated systematically, but during the last twenty years the University of Nebraska Laboratory of Anthropology and the Nebraska State Historical Society have recorded some 46 sites in the area, and in 1946 the Missouri River Basin Survey located a small buried occupational level, site 25DW1, in the Box Butte Reservoir area, Dawes County, Nebraska. Eleven of these sites have been excavated or partly excavated and three have been trenched. The remaining sites have been only superficially examined. Reports on these investigations have not been published to date, but the collections and records of the Laboratory of Anthropology the State Historical Society indicate that several prehistoric pottery traditions occur in the Niobrara River Basin.
Four variants of cord-roughened Woodland pottery, the earliest known ceramics in the central Great Plains, have been found thus far in the Niobrara River Basin.
Forty-one archeological sites were recorded in nine of the ten Niobrara River Basin reservoir sites visited by the Missouri River Basin Survey party in October, 1950, and two other sites, in the Long Pine Reservoir area, were found by a University of Nebraska Laboratory of Anthropology Survey party in 1949. A brief description of these 43 sites is given in the following discussion of the archeological resources of the ten reservoir sites, which will be considered in alphabetical order, and the locations and tentative evaluations of the 41 sites which occur in or adjacent to the reservoir sites are summarized in Table 2,pp. 44-46.