Article Cutbank Geophysics: A New Method for Expanding Magnetic Investigations to the Subsurface Using Magnetic Susceptibility Testing at an Awatixa Hidatsa Village, North Dakota Rinita Dalan 1,*, Jay Sturdevant 2, Rebecca Wallace 3, Blair Schneider 4 and Steven De Vore 2 1 Department of Anthropology and Earth Science, Minnesota State University Moorhead, 1104 7th Avenue South, Moorhead, MN 56563, USA 2 National Park Service, Midwest Archeological Center, 100 Centennial Mall, North, Room 474, Lincoln, NE 68508, USA;
[email protected] (J.S.);
[email protected] (S.D.V.) 3 Metcalf Archaeological Consultants, PO Box 2154, Bismarck, ND 58502, USA;
[email protected] 4 Department of Geology, University of Kansas, 1475 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +1‐218‐477‐5900 Academic Editors: Kenneth L. Kvamme, Xiaofeng Li, Richard Müller, Richard Gloaguen and Prasad S. Thenkabail Received: 30 September 2016; Accepted: 20 January 2017; Published: 28 January 2017 Abstract: Magnetic susceptibility investigations were conducted at an Awatixa Hidatsa village (32ME11, also known as Sakakawea Village) along a cutbank at the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site (KNRI) in central North Dakota, USA. This extensive exposure provided a superb opportunity to correlate magnetic susceptibility measurements with a variety of subsurface features. These features were visible in the cutbank, and also recorded in cutbank profiles completed in the late 1970s in work supervised by Robert Nickel and Stanley Ahler. The susceptibility studies are part of a larger program of geophysics at KNRI that commenced with pioneering surveys of John Weymouth and Robert Nickel, also in the 1970s, and continued with extensive surface‐based magnetic surveys over the interior portion of the site in 2012 by the National Park Service.