North American Database of Archaeological Geophysics
North American Database of Archaeological Geophysics
Abstract/Summary:
Project Name: Huff Village State Historic Site, ND (32MO11);
Reference: Ahler, S.A. and K.L. Kvamme (2000). New Geophysical and Archaeological Investigations at Huff Village State Historic Site (32MO11), Morton County, North Dakota. PaleoCultural Research Group, Flagstaff, Arizona. Report submitted to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck.
Huff village is a spectacular fortified village located on the Missouri River in south-central North Dakota. The site covers about 3.4 ha, exhibits at least 103 depressions on the surface indicating the locations of rectangular houses, a fortification system with ditch, palisade, and 10 bastion loops, and a large ceremonial lodge near the central village plaza. Huff is know for its spatial organization where orderly rows of houses parallel each other across the site. Salvage work was conducted at Huff in the 1960s by W.R. Wood who recognized it as ancestral Mandan.
The magnetic survey of Huff has provided a new perspective on fortified village sites on the Missouri River. About 85 percent of the more than 400 magnetic anomalies represent storage features (as indicated by an excavation and coring program), an unexpectedly high number. Even more noteworthy is their distribution, for the most part outside of the known houses (as indicated by their surface depressions), a fact not previously realized owing to a concentration of archaeological work within houses. With a typical depth of 1.5 m and a diameter of 1.0 m a considerable storage capacity is suggested when projected to the entire village, testifying to the volume of horticultural production. The magnetic signatures of these storage features are due to their in-filling with more magnetic A-horizon and anthropogenic soils. The magnetic data also shown an absence of ground-disturbing activity of any kind within the central village plaza area, pointing to another aspect of village organization. A comparison of houses excavated by Wood with the magnetic data reveals commonalities in size, orientation, and in feature distributions, with indications of centrally placed hearths, laterally placed auxiliary hearths, interior storage features, and entranceways.
A resistance survey, at a prospecting depth of 1.5 m, clearly revealed four rectangular houses as high resistance features. Interior house features were not indicated at this prospecting depth, however. Many of the point anomalies merely reflected rodent burrows.
A multi-depth survey centered about the House 19 surface depression acquired a 40 x 40 matrix of resistance measurements at 6 depths (0.25-1.5 m, in 0.25 m intervals), yielding a data volume. Computer processing techniques were employed to literally "slice" the data cube along various axes allowing use of resistivity tomography methods. At shallow depths the data indicate low resistivity within House 19, which is surrounded by high resistivity measurements. The house floors (about 30-40 cm below surface) at Huff are known to be compacted, probably serving as effective moisture barriers. With the basin-shaped microtopography above them serving to concentrate rainfall, the result is a concentration of moisture above the floor that lowers the apparent resistivity. The surrounding berm of elevated ground surrounding each house depression causes the reverse to occur by decreasing ground moisture and raising apparent resistivity. At the same time the compacted floors also serve to inhibit moisture penetration below the floors causing a marked increase in resistivity at larger depths, and an interesting resistivity reversal.