ABSTRACT
American archaeology virtually ground to a halt during World War II. Among the several area offices organized under the Smithsonian Institution (SI) and the Interagency Archaeology Salvage Program (IASP) was a Missouri Basin Project (MBP) office in Lincoln, Nebraska, established to cope with the dams on the drawing boards of the Corps and Reclamation under what was known as the Pick-Sloan Plan. Archaeologists hired for the Lincoln office immediately began surveying the banks of streams slated for inundation. The annual Plains Archaeological Conference then held for the most part in Lincoln, Nebraska, was a forum for distributing new information derived from the salvage work. Theodore E. White introduced the concept of the minimum number of individuals (MNI) represented in a sample of bone. White is today considered one of the founding fathers of zoo archaeology, a lasting legacy of the River Basin Surveys.
