Organization of the great mass of data accumulated during the salvage archaeology program in the Missouri River Basin poses a number of problems. One of the most fundamental is the choice of a satisfactory taxonomic system. The version of the Midwestern taxonomic system which has been used so far in the area has a number of shortcomings. In order to avoid some of them, data from the Missouri Valley in the Dakotas are organized here in terms of the Willey and Phillips system of "archaeological unit concepts." The classification which has emerged seems to have considerable merit; the application of the system itself to a particular archaeological situation has also suggested some modification of the categories which Willey and Phillips proposed.
Despite a firm conviction that statistical analyses have a definite place in archaeological interpretations, I want to register a protest against the Coefficient of Agreement proposed by W. S. Robinson (American Antiquity, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 293-301, 1951). Robinson's coefficient is offered as a measure of the degree of similarity between two collections of sherd material. It is arrived at by adding the differences between the percentages of each type of sherd in the two collections and subtracting this sum from 200.
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