The Impact of the River Basins Surveys Program in Historical Archaeology

The River Basin Projects of the Post World War III era created an unprecedented threat to archaeological resources of the historic period on the Great Plains. Funding was provided to address this threat through the River Basin Survey, and an ambitious program of excavation on historic sites ensued. The impact of this work on the direction of historical archaeology on the Great Plains was significant in that it broadened the types of sites being investigated. The way the sites were selected, however, may have diminished the anthropological importance of the historic sites program in general. Origins: The Direct-Historical Approach Historical archaeology made its first appearance on the Great Plains shortly after the turn of the 19th century with a methodology that was to become known as the "direct-historical approach." The direct-historical approach sought to address questions of the origins of the prehistoric Plains populations by working from the historic known to the unknown of the protohistoric and prehistoric periods. This approach was developed to address a specific archeological problem, and was firmly seated in anthropology. The direct-historical approach was one of the fundamental approaches used in the archaeology of the Great Plains, and primarily the central and northern Great Plains, prior to World War II, and continues to be important to this day. Significant discussions of this approach are found in now classic works such as Strong's "Introduction to Nebraska Archeology" and Wedel's "Introduction to Pawnee Archeology," published in 1935 and 1936 respectively. Wedel, in 1938, and Strong, in 1940, published articles which served to substantially formalize this approach following work on the Central Plains Pawnee and in the northern Great Plains (Wedel 1938; Strong 1940). It was in Wedel's 1938 article that the term direct-historical approach was first formally presented (Willey and Phillips 1980: 108). The direct-historical approach focused on the establishment of a baseline from which cultural and chronological sequences could be developed for the protohistoric and prehistoric past. According to Wedel: It was believed that by isolating and clearly defining the archeological characteristics of the historic peoples a whole series of sites could soon be removed from the category of unknowns; and furthermore, that a comparison of materials so identified with earlier remains in the region might open lines of attack which would permit the establishing of a time sequence extending "from the known historic into the unknown prehistoric" [Wedel 1938:1].