At the New Washakie Museum, 2200 Big Horn Avenue, Worland
Douglas D. Scott, will be the final speaker for the Indian Wars Discussion group. Scott is most notable for his work at the Little Bighorn Battlefield and will be discussing his work to sketch out a field methodology that has enabled archaeologists to systematically investigate battlefields.
At the Little Bighorn, the fieldwork produced an interpretation of the battle that for the first time gave a clear understanding of the way the battle developed and pointed out some of the glaring inaccuracies of the historiography of the event. The fieldwork also helped determine which of the 242 headstones to the 210 U.S. soldiers lost at the Little Bighorn were erroneous, and recovered skeletal elements allowed one of the soldiers to be positively identified. The fieldwork was not as successful in recovering the remains of 24 men lost in Deep Ravine and whose whereabouts are unknown to this day.
Scott has led similar work at other Indian Wars battlefields, including Fort Washita and the site of the Sand Creek Massacre. In the early 2000s, he led fieldwork at Pea Ridge and Wilson's Creek, two Civil War battlefields in Arkansas and Missouri, respectively. For this work, Scott has been honored with awards from the National Park Service.
