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The long search for ancient cultural remains in Nebraska reached a dramatic peak in 1947 with the discovery of three sites containing evidence of human habitations deeply buried in alluvial terraces bordering Medicine and Lime Creeks. A brief review of the history of this search follows the work of Holen (1995b) and Schultz (1983) and will put the 1947 discoveries in context. The ¤rst record of early human occupation in Nebraska occurred in 1874, when Samuel Aughey, the ¤rst professor of science in the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of Nebraska and, later, the ¤rst curator of cabinets, the title for a museum curator in those days, reported the discovery of a spearhead in a railroad cut two and one-half miles southeast of Omaha. According to Aughey, the point “was found twenty feet below the top of the Loess, and at least six inches from the edge of the cut, so that it could not have slid into that place” (1876:254). He goes on to say that “[t]hirteen inches above the point where the last named arrow was found, and within three inches of being on a line with it, in undisturbed Loess, there was a lumbar vertebra of an elephant (Elephas americanus)” (Aughey 1876:254–255). Whether this was a mastodon or mammoth is unknown. Nor do I know whether the specimen was ever identi¤ed in the collections.1 I was not aware of this discovery when I was on campus. Schultz reports that Aughey continued to ¤nd artifacts in loess and that he reported several buried soils above human occupational zones (Schultz 1983:130). In the early 1900s, Omaha journalist and amateur archaeologist Robert Gilder reported to Dr. Erwin H. Barbour, a successor to Aughey as curator of cabinets and later director of the University of Nebraska 2 Discovery at Medicine Creek W. D. Frankforter State Museum, that he had found human remains in and below a mound he was excavating on Long’s Hill, 10 miles north of Omaha. Barbour studied these remains and, in 1907, published in the journal Science a report on what became known as “Nebraska Loess Man” (Barbour 1907). The burials are now thought to have been 1,000 to 3,000 years old, although this has not been demonstrated (Holen 1995b:2). In 1929 C. B. Schultz, a paleontology student under Barbour, was assigned to William Duncan Strong. Strong had recently left his job at the Field Museum in Chicago and “joined the staff of the University to develop an anthropological curriculum and to become Curator of Anthropology in the Museum” (Schultz 1983:131). In addition, Loren Eiseley, who was majoring in anthropology and English, became one of Strong’s undergraduate laboratory and ¤eld assistants, and Waldo Wedel was one of Strong’s graduate assistants. Schultz (1983:132) reports that he and Frank Crabill had found some large bison bones in loess in Custer County. They had not reported an associated artifact because the bones probably wouldn’t be considered “fossils” because, at that time, it was believed that human beings had not lived in North America more than 2,000 years. However, when they showed the point to Strong, he recognized it as similar to those that had been called “Yuma” in the West. In 1931 Schultz and a crew reinvestigated a cutbank southwest of Grand Island, where, in 1923, Professor F. G. Meserve, of Grand Island College, had found a spear point, now known as the Dalton/Meserve type, associated with bison skeletons. In the new dig they found another spear point of similar design (Schultz 1932). The next year (1932) Schultz and Eiseley excavated the Scottsbluff Bison Quarry, near Signal Butte, southwest of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Spear points (named Scottsbluff, now a Cody variant) and cutting tools were found among a mass of deeply buried bison skeletons (Schultz and Eiseley 1935, 1936). Other work followed in New Mexico and Texas. The discoveries at Medicine Creek were the result of the Smithsonian Institution’s Missouri River Basin Survey program, an effort to salvage information about prehistoric humans and animals before reclamation and ®ood control dams destroyed the evidence. The Medicine Creek and Lime Creek areas were slated for inundation in 1949 when a dam located just above Cambridge would be completed. Ironically, the ¤nished dam would have prevented a tragedy that befell our ¤eld party when, without warning, a ®ash ®ood tore down Medicine Creek in June 1947. Also, curiously, ®oodwaters, which were at least...

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