The Blaine Site - South Dakota State Historical Society

3.2. PREVIOUS INVESTIGATIONS 23
from about 1946 to 1969, was a period of continued exploration and description
under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, culminating in attempts
to develop new classification systems for the information collected or to apply
classification systems that had been developed for other regions of the Great
Plains. The third period of archaeological study of the Black Hills, beginning
about 1971 and continuing to the present, comprised a large number of small
projects conducted to satisfy the requirements of newly enacted federal and state
cultural resource management regulations. The fourth and final period began
around 1978 and also continues to the present. This was a period in which more
problem-oriented approaches, as opposed to description and classification, were
employed in archaeology projects in the area. This final period also saw the
development of several studies that attempted to draw together the large bodies
of information available about Black Hills archaeology into comprehensive
statements about the prehistory of the area.
The first archaeological explorations of the Black Hills were undertaken incidental
to expeditions sponsored by the federal government and natural history
museums to gather information about this relatively unexplored portion of the
West. The Black Hills Expedition of 1874, led by George A. Custer, was purportedly
undertaken to assess the natural resource potential of the Black Hills,
which was Indian land at the time. In fact, the real purpose was to investigate
rumors of rich gold deposits. In his report, the expedition naturalist, William
Ludlow, mentions the presence of old campsites and trails in the vicinity of Red
Canyon in the southern sector (Ludlow 1875). At the time, the government was
mainly interested in these in reference to finding a militarily defensible trail into
the interior Black Hills, and Ludlow made no attempt to establish when or by
whom the remains were made.
The next published mention of archaeological sites in the Black Hills is in a
report on an archaeological reconnaissance of Wyoming undertaken by Harlan I.
Smith in 1907–8 for the American Museum of Natural History (H. Smith 1908).
Smith discovered a few sites on the western periphery of the Black Hills and
concluded that the area probably had not been settled prior to the introduction
of the horse. In this conclusion, Smith was following the conventional wisdom
of the day which held that the Great Plains were uninhabitable until the horse
was introduced to the region—a view that was to persist well into the present
century (Wedel 1961).
William H. Over, self-educated naturalist and director of the University of
South Dakota (USD) Museum, conducted the first formal archaeological explorations
into the interior Black Hills. Relying on the help and observations of
local informants, Over identified prehistoric lithic quarries, rock art, and a possible
village in the Black Hills (Over 1924, 1934, 1941, 1948). Also relying on
local reports, E.B. Renaud of the University of Denver made brief mention of
southern Black Hills sites in his reports on archaeological reconnaissance of the
western plains (Renaud 1936). The following year, Renaud’s principal Black
Hills informant published a short description of archaeological remains in the
southern sector (Buker 1937).