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Burial Mounds in the Baldhill Area, North Dakota

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Gordon W. Hewes
Gordon W. Hewes*
Affiliation:
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota
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Extract

Two burial mounds on the east bluff overlooking the left bank of the Sheyenne River, east-central North Dakota, were excavated between June 25 and August 1, 1948, by a field party of the University of North Dakota, working in cooperation with the North Dakota State Historical Society. The archaeological resources of the area of the Baldhill Reservoir had been appraised in 1947 by a party of four, headed by M. F. Kivett, for the Missouri Valley Project of the River Basin Surveys. This survey resulted in the mapping of ten sites, three of them mounds or moundgroups, and the partial excavation of one mound to salvage skeletal material already partly exposed.

Construction of Baldhill Dam, about 9 miles north of Valley City, was already far advanced in 1948, and several occupational sites in the Sheyenne River bottomland were in danger of flooding within a few years (see Fig. 81, a and b).

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. 322 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1949

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References

1 Personnel included Lucile Hoyme, Loren Johnson, Arthur Parker, Mary P. O’Donnell, Luella Watkins, and the writer. The Valley City State Teacher’s College kindly provided a laboratory room and other facilities. Mr. Vernon Gale of Valley City, a local collector, was also very helpful.

2 Logs may not have been the only roofing or covering. Bark, matting, or even hides may once have been present, though no macroscopic traces remained. See Voegelin (1944, pp. 339-72) for ethnographic descriptions of burial procedures in regions to the east and south.