This is the second installment in a series of posts about my research involving historic artifacts from the River Basin Surveys (RBS) curated by the National Museum of Natural History. In\u00a0my first post<\/a>, I reviewed historical archaeology in general. In this post I will discuss historical archaeology in the context of the RBS. My discussion focuses on the Upper Missouri River basin in North and South Dakota, where most of the archaeology of the RBS took place. Please see the blog’s RBS resource page<\/a> for other posts on the history of the River Basin Surveys and research done in the collections. Click here for an\u00a0overview of\u00a0RBS publications on historical archaeology<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n When you think about the archaeology of Native North America, I bet you don’t think about archaeologists finding glass bottles, fine china, gunflints and forks! And yet there they are. Many of the sites we catalog out at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center have both prehistoric and contact-era layers, which we call a multi-component site. So not only do we learn about traditional Middle Missouri Native lifestyles, we also gain insight into the contact period, when Native Americans were dealing regularly with Europeans and trading goods across the cultures. The RBS collections are really an amazing resource for archaeologists, and the depth and breadth of these collections is unparalled<\/strong>. So how did we end up with all of these items? It’s a pretty amazing story. Let’s go back to the 1940’s to see how economic forces shaped the drive to salvage these prehistoric and historic-era Native North American sites, and in so doing, shaped the way archaeology developed as as profession to this day!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The River Basin Surveys (RBS) were part of a large-scale program of archaeological investigations that took place in the United States after the flood control act of 1944. The Act implemented numerous projects for flood control, irrigation, hydroelectric power, and navigation improvements in river basins across the country. Because these projects would destroy many archaeological (and paleontological) sites, there was concern among archaeologists (and paleontologists). As a result, several institutions and organizations banded together to salvage as much as they could. And thus, the Inter-Agency Salvage Project (IASP) came into being\u2014a collaboration between the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, and various State and local universities, historical societies, and museums (Jennings 1985, Lehmer 1971, Snyder et al 2000, Thiessen 1999, Thiessen and Roberts 2009, Wedel 1967).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Smithsonian Institution created the River Basin Surveys unit as part of its Bureau of American Ethnology, and under that banner conducted archaeological research as part of the IASP. The IASP was the largest and most long-lasting salvage program ever implemented in the United States. The Smithsonian\u2019s RBS operated from 1946 to 1969 in various areas across the country, but mainly in the Upper Missouri River Basin. In this area, the \u201cPick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program\u201d called for construction of the Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavin\u2019s Point dams (Figure 2). This construction would create large reservoirs, inundating significant parts of the river valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a survey project of this never-before-seen magnitude, the RBS laid the basis for many of the current practices in salvage archaeology<\/strong>. The survey crews made efforts to standardize their field methods and modes of documentation<\/strong> across the project. One example of this standardization is the development of the so-called \u201ctrinomial system<\/strong>\u201d for assigning a unique site number to each archaeological site in the country. This system is still used across the United States, although some states have made minor modifications. For the first number in each site identifier, each of the 48 states then in the Union was assigned a numeric code (1 for Alabama, through 48 for Wyoming. When Alaska and Hawaii became states, they were assigned the numbers 49 and 50). Each site number further consists of a two-letter county code, and finally a unique site number within that county. For example, Fort Pierre II (a site I will discuss in more detail in a future blog post) was assigned the unique number 39ST217. The number 39 is the code for South Dakota, \u201cST\u201d stands for Stanley County, and 217 means that this site was the 217th<\/sup> site to be recorded in Stanley County, SD. When I talk about specific sites in future posts, I will use their unique site number as well as the site\u2019s common name, to avoid confusion. Using site numbers is important as different sites in the Great Plains sometimes share common names (For example, \u201cFort Union\u201d was used more than once to name a fur trade establishment or military post in the 19th<\/sup> century).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Smithsonian turned the River Basin Surveys unit over to the National Park Service in 1969. The operation was then renamed the \u201cMidwest Archeological Center\u201d (MWAC), and it continued the salvage mission along the Missouri Basin. However, as the dams and reservoirs on the Upper Missouri were completed at this time, this salvage work was of a much smaller scale. The MWAC mostly focused on shoreline sites that were being threatened by wave action and erosion. The organization of archaeological responsibilities across the US changed again after the Historic Preservation Act of 1974, and in 1975 the MWAC changed its focus to National Park archaeology only.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the salvage efforts, RBS archaeologists mostly investigated prehistoric sites, but they did not ignore historic sites. The RBS ushered in a transitional period for historical archaeology in the Great Plains. It was during the RBS that archaeologists first investigated non-Native sites in this area. (Lees 2001, Scott 1998).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The historical archaeology of the Great Plains prior to the RBS used the so-called \u201cdirect historic approach\u201d to study Native American sites. This approach works backwards from documented periods (historic Native American sites) to find out things about the proto- or prehistoric Native American sites. This method was employed in order to answer specific questions, and this type of archaeology was decidedly anthropological in nature. The historical archaeology of the RBS, on the other hand, was based on history rather than anthropology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the pressure of time and budget concerns, RBS archaeologists had to prioritize their efforts. They could not excavate every site in the construction area. Even before budgets were allocated for the excavation of historical sites, historians conducted detailed document searches, and made lists of \u201chistoric places\u201d within the reservoir areas behind each dam that was planned along the Upper Missouri (Figure 3, Mattes 1947, 1949; Mattison 1954, 1955, 1962). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Historic sites from the list were prioritized for excavation, based on three criteria: The degree of historical significance, the extent of available documentation, and whether or not the documented site could be located in the field<\/strong>. These decisions were made approximately half a century ago, at a time when historical archaeology was still developing as a field, and when some of the sites under investigation had been abandoned for less time than has passed since then (meaning that some of the artifacts in the collection have been in storage longer than they ever were in the ground!). It is to be expected that the RBS staff made different decisions than a historical archaeologist in the 21st<\/sup> century would make. The result of this prioritization was that almost all historic sites investigated during the RBS fall into three categories<\/strong>: Fur trade posts, military forts, and Indian Agencies<\/strong>. I will talk more about all three types of sites in future blog posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In studying the RBS artifact collection, I use various historical sources. Some of the most useful documents are those produced by the RBS staff. RBS archaeologists published their work in a number of places. For the researcher, I created an overview of<\/strong>RBS publications that focus on historical archaeology here<\/strong><\/a>, which will be updated over time. In addition to published works, I also attempt to review primary materials produced by the RBS. Because of the large scale of the project and the eventual transfer to the NPS, records and artifact collections have become somewhat dispersed across and within agencies (see Thiessen and Roberts 2009). As a result, the full cohort of RBS materials related to a given site is not always available in the NMNH collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The end of the RBS came at a time when historical archaeology was establishing itself as an independent discipline with its own theoretical framework. The Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) was formed in the late 1960s. In some of their early publications (available online<\/a>) members discuss the nature of the discipline, its theory, and the direction they felt the organization should take. While the framework of Historical Archaeology in the United States evolved predominantly around the archaeology of early Euro-American sites on the east coast, certainly the historical archaeology of the River Basin Surveys had its own influence. Several of the RBS\u2019 researchers were among the founding members of the Society for Historical Archaeology: Merrill J. Mattes, Carlyle S. Smith, G. Hubert Smith, and Alan R. Woolworth (Scott 1998, p. 484). This early and evolving framework of historical archaeology is reflected in the nature and design of the RBS and the resulting collections. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The NMNH\u2019s collection of RBS artifacts from historic sites is a unique and invaluable resource created from salvage archaeology efforts decades ago. The sites are now long gone; I can\u2019t go back and excavate more in order to answer questions of interest to a 21st<\/sup> historical archaeologist. What I can do is re-examine the documentation produced by the archaeologists who did the work all those years ago, and analyze the collected artifacts. How can artifacts collected by researchers of a different era answer questions I have today? Stay tuned as I explore this subject in future postings on this blog.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Four-photo](\"https:\/\/lottegovaerts.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/2-Fig1-757x1024.png\")
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