River Basin Surveys Papers, No. 30: Stutsman Focus: An Aboriginal Culture Complex In the Jamestown Reservoir Area, North Dakota

In this paper I propose to detail the returns from two partially excavated and eight unexcavated aboriginal occupation sites in the James River Valley, North Dakota; to combine the findings into a new culture complex, which I am calling the Stutsman Focus; and to suggest the cultural affinities and temporal placement of the Stutsman Focus, following the broad historical approach. The investigations which produced the field data reported herein were part of the archeological salvage work undertaken by units of the Missouri Basin Project of the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys intermittently between 1946 and 1954 in the area of the Jamestown Reservoir. The reservoir, a multiple-purpose watercontrol project of the Bureau of Reclamation, was created by a rolled earthfill dam built in 1952-1953 across the James River, in NE 1,4" sec. 24, T. 140 N., R. 64 W., about 1/5 mile north of the city limits of Jamestown, the county seat of Stutsman County, east-central North Dakota. One of the sites, listed as 32SN3 in accordance
with the River Basin Surveys' site designation system and later christened the Hintz site, was discovered by J. Joe Bauxar and Paul L. Cooper in a preliminary survey of the reservoir area conducted in August 1946. Another site, the Joos site (32SN30), was located and probed while the nearby Hintz site was under excavation during an intensive reconnaissance of the area carried out in 1952. The other eight occupation sites treated in this report were brought in when final excavations were performed at Hintz in 1954.