People invariably want to know what happens to the things that are collected by archaeologists. Do archaeologists add artifacts to their private collections, for example? Among professional archaeologists, keeping of private collections is actively discouraged. The reason for this is that archaeological remains are considered a scientific and public resource that should not be held for personal reasons. As scientists, archaeologists are interested in artifacts as sources of information rather than as objects with intrinsic value. All artifacts collected in the Reservoir, as is the case with all conservation archaeology projects, will be stored in permanent institutional repositories, where they can be studied by future generations of scientists. Also, plans are underway to return some of this material to the local area in the form of a museum display, for the benefit of the public. [Illustration: Fig. 3. A test pit being excavated in a site within the Richland Project. Note the square pit walls, and screening for artifacts. Many kinds of records are kept during digging.] THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE RICHLAND-CHAMBERS RESERVOIR _PREHISTORIC PAST_ Recent studies suggest that humans have occupied North America for at least 20,000 years. These prehistoric Indians were the first people to live in North America, probably entering the New World first by way of a great land bridge between what is now Siberia and Alaska. True pioneers, they entered a vast land that had never before contained humans. Once in the New World, their culture developed over thousands of years into several successive stages and spread over the whole of North America and into South America. In the United States the development of prehistoric American Indian cultures is a fascinating story of a people’s increasingly complex culture and adaptations to the wealth of natural resources offered by our continent. Since this development occurred before these people developed systems of writing, their history is available to us only through archaeology and other sciences. Without an effort to understand this story, the history of a whole people will disappear without record. The peopling of the New World represents a kind of huge laboratory for understanding how human societies develop over long periods of time. Since the first people in North America entered a new land that did not contain human competitors except themselves, we can study the development of their culture over thousands of years in a relatively simple frame of analysis. Archaeologists currently recognize four basic culture stages of prehistoric Indian development in North America. These stages are represented, in varying ways and degrees, by the archaeology of the Richland-Chambers project. _The Paleo-Indian Stage_ (_18,000 to 8000 B.C._)