Prefederal Upper Republican Site Archaeology at Medicine Creek

Description

The story is told of the anthropologist, studying origin traditions, whose informant stated that the world stands on the back of a giant turtle. He asked what the turtle stood on and learned that it stands on the back of another turtle. He then asked what that turtle stands on, to which the informant replied, “Ah, don’t you see—it’s turtles all the way down.” The story is an apt parable for many scientific disciplines, including archaeology, for when we acknowledge our intellectual debt to those before us—the turtle on whose back we stand—we usually found them also acknowledging an intellectual debt to predecessors, that those predecessors in turn had predecessors, and so forth, “all the way down.” This certainly is the case with research on the Upper Republican occupation of the Medicine Creek valley. Even though the results of the extensive River Basin Surveys work of 1947 and 1948 were only recently published (Kivett and Metcalf 1997), a contemporary journal article (Kivett 1949) outlined the essentials of Upper Republican culture, and much other data and information—the radiocarbon age determinations, for example—have been a part of Central Plains archaeologists’ working knowledge for years. We think of this work as formative and influential, and it certainly was extensive; but actually its foundations were laid over a decade earlier, and that work too had acknowledged predecessors. To put the River Basin Surveys work and all subsequent work in context, therefore, we must first understand the status of Upper Republican site archaeology in the valley and, to an extent, beyond it, prior to 1947.