Pike-Pawnee Village Site - Investigation History

Investigation History

Hill continued work at the site through 1930. In that year, he was joined by William Duncan Strong, who the previous year had been named a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, and by Strong's research assistant Waldo Wedel. The collaboration of these three was crucial to the new science of Central Plains archaeology, and to Pawnee studies in particular: up to this time, the conventional wisdom among anthropologists was that there was no useful archaeological work to be done on the Plains. In 1936, Wedel published his 1930 master's thesis as the seminal An Introduction to Pawnee Archaeology.

In the summer of 1941, a WPA crew excavated a number of lodges, cache pits, and graves at the site. Some testing and surface collecting were conducted in 1943. More recently, a magnetic survey was conducted over a portion of the village in 1982, and some testing was carried out in 1987.

Hill plotted the remains of 102 lodges. Pike reported finding 44 lodges at the village; the difference is probably due to the abandonment or destruction of lodges and the building of new ones on different sites. At least 90 graves have been investigated by archaeologists; an estimated 75–100 additional graves are thought to have been opened by relic hunters.