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The discovery of the Lime Creek sites in the Medicine Creek valley is an example of the often-dramatic character of the search for the earliest local people in many parts of the world. In the mid-twentieth century in the Medicine Creek valley, the University of Nebraska State Museum shared in that search and got a taste of the drama. But the museum’s many years of work in the related ¤elds of paleontology and geology provided little warning of the special problems of dating that might arise if archaeological evidences came to light. In matters of dating, immediately before and after World War II, before the introduction of the radiocarbon technique, C. Bertrand Schultz, the director of the museum, and his associates had been applying their studies in Quaternary geology to constructing a sequence of late Pleistocene deposits in Nebraska river valleys. Such a sequence might permit the dating of fossil discoveries, especially where the valley deposits took the form of terraces and ¤lls created by stream action varying in response to widespread shifts in climate (May, this volume). The valley of the Republican River and its tributaries, of which Medicine Creek is one, was, in effect, one of Dr. Schultz’s ¤eld laboratories in these studies. So when the Bureau of Reclamation began to build the Medicine Creek Dam and was arranging for scienti¤c salvage in the area to be ®ooded, the museum was the logical institution to take on the paleontological and geological aspects of the salvage. In a different phase of the salvage the Smithsonian Institution and the Nebraska State Historical Society undertook archaeological salvage in the recent Native American sites for which the valley had long been well known to archaeologists and to which much of this celebratory volume is dedicated . 3 The Lime Creek Sites How Long Ago Did People First Live in the Medicine Creek Valley? E. Mott Davis Thus, while archaeological work was progressing in Upper Republican and Woodland sites no more than 2,000 years old, up on the surfaces of the alluvial terraces, the museum ¤eld party, working separately , was down below, walking the stream bottoms, examining the deeper terrace-¤lls and other exposures that were thousands, and even hundreds of thousands, of years old. The museum’s ¤eld party began its intensive Medicine Creek work in the spring of 1947. Aided by the results of the catastrophic Medicine Creek ®ood of June 22 of that year, which tore away at the stream banks and produced freshly exposed faces, the ¤eld party not only discovered a series of fossil quarries but also found three unusual sites now called the “Lime Creek Sites,” which were archaeological, not paleontological, and proved to be far older than any other archaeological¤nds that had ever been made in the Medicine Creek valley or, for that matter, in much of North America. Individually these sites are named the Lime Creek site (25FT41), the Red Smoke site (25FT42), and the Herb Allen site (25FT50). They were camping places of very early hunting folk, containing burned ¤replace areas, concentrations of jasper ®akes, ®aked stone tools in various stages of manufacture, broken and burned animal bones, and other signs of human activity. Furthermore, there was evidence suggesting that the sites were very old; they were exposed in the stream banks as much as 18 m (about 60 ft) below the surface, in the lower part of Terrace 2A in Schultz’s alluvial terrace sequence (Schultz et al. 1948). In terms of his chronology, the sites had been the scene of Paleoindian activity late in an interstadial in the very late Wisconsinan Glacial Age. In the archaeological jargon of the time, “Early Man” had come to Medicine Creek. The excitement and contention aroused by the discovery of archaeological sites this old cannot easily be appreciated today, half a century later. Paleoindian studies were at that time hardly beginning, and exceedingly few ¤nds had been made in which cultural materials had been found demonstrably in late Ice Age contexts. Because of the antiquity claimed for them in museum publicity, the Lime Creek sites achieved headline status in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and other major lay periodicals. However, among archaeologists skepticism about their great age was not long in appearing, fueled by a history in the Americas of ill-advised and overenthusiastic claims of “Early Man”¤nds and also because paleontologists, not archaeologists, had made the Lime Creek discoveries and often did not know how to present...

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