Science in Practice Portal

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), as a federal agency, is responsible for evaluating and managing cultural
resource properties on lands under their stewardship. This responsibility is mandated by the National Historic
Preservation Act of 1966 and the Archeological Resource Protection Act of 1980. In order to fulfill these
obligations, the BLM planning system requires that a Class I Inventory be completed for each District. This report
constitutes a Class I Inventory of the prehistoric resources of the Butte District in western Montana.
The purposes of a Class I Inventory are: (1) to review and synthesize regional prehistory, (2) to provide an
overview of area resources, and (3) to provide a framework from which to evaluate, compare, and understand the
cultural properties of an area. The basic strategy for fulfilling these aims involved the review and synthesis of
library, archival, and documentary evidence about District prehistory. In this case, the BLM contracted with
Ethnoscience to review site files, published and unpublished literature, and artifact collections from sites on BLM
land in the Butte District. The following report summarizes this review.