7/27/2011:
Around this date in 1965, archeologists in near Menoken and Fort Yates were carefully sifting through the North Dakota dirt. The State Historical Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Interior Department’s National Park Service were cooperating to excavate two ancient Indian villages before the sites were destroyed by the rising water of new reservoirs. The villages would have been occupied in the early 1400s by ancestors of the Mandan. Archeologists believe they marked the earliest village culture in North Dakota. Discoveries like this make you wonder what life would have been like for the people who were here before the earliest European settlers.
These natives were part of a village culture that had taken thousands of years to emerge. First, people had to migrate over shifting landmasses to get to America in the first place. Archeologists, linguists, and anthropologists disagree about the exact route and the exact time, but most agree the migration happened at least sixteen thousand years ago, and some say it was over forty thousand years ago. The people gradually scattered across the continent, forming different cultures based on the natural resources near them.
Around the time of our pre-Mandan villages in the 1400s, there were millions of people living across what is now the United States. And although the evolution of culture saw similar patterns of emerging villages, each area was pretty isolated. The Plains culture then was much different than the common images of Native Americans hundreds of years later, and after the Europeans had introduced culture-changing elements like horses. Prior to the horse, bison had to be hunted on foot, and dogs would have been used to carry heavy burdens. Villagers did journey away from the stationary agricultural center to go bison hunting, but since this was more difficult without horses, they would not object to fishing a drowned animal out of a river. And of course, they used all parts of the bison.
It’s fun to think about how different and isolated parts the world were just hundreds of years ago, but it’s also important to remember that in all of earth’s existence, human beings have been around for an astonishingly short time. It’s like it was just yesterday that America’s first people were blissfully unaware that Europeans would ever disturb their way of life.
Dakota Datebook written by Leewana Thomas
Sources:
The Fargo Forum July 25, 1965: “Two Ancient Indian Village Sites Being Excavated in N.D.”
The Human Past,edited by Chris Scarre, 2nd Edition: Chapter 18, “Complex Societies of North America” by George R. Milner and W.H. Wills Chapter 4, “The Rise of Modern Humans” by Paul Pettitt