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The Indian Village is a prehistoric archeological site that also includes a museum and archeodome. Prehistoric means prehistory: human history in the period before recorded events, known mainly through archaeological discoveries, study, and research. The village was built 1,000 years ago out of wood and earth. The lodges had large upright posts and wattle and daub walls supporting a roof likely covered with turf. There was a timber palisade inside a deep, wide ditch that surrounded a large portion of the site. These structures have decayed and left an uneven surface with shallow depressions where the lodges and larger storage pits once were, and shallow linear depressions that mark old ditches, not silted up. A deep midden or trash deposit with bone, shell, carbonized seeds and corn cobs reflecting the food consumed by the villagers, and fragments of their pottery, stone and bone tools extends across the site reaching depths of over ten feet in places. As you tour the site these features will become apparent and inside the archeodome you will learn how archeologists are reconstructing this village from the remains that have survived for over 1,000 years.
The Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village is a very special center as you will not only get to explore a 1,000-year-old settlement, but also see how archeologists go about reconstructing the past when there are no written records. In the Boehnen Museum and Patton Gallery there is a model of how the village might have looked 1,000 years ago. As you make your way from the museum to the archeodome, look over the landscape and see if you can see the depressions marking the location of lodges, or the outlines of the two ditches that surrounded part of the site. The museum also houses a reconstructed life-sized lodge and many displays relating to village life.
On your way to the Thomsen Center Archeodome, you will be in the village itself. Rock art incised stones from which you can make rubbings line the pathway, while other rock art adorn the walls and interior of the Archeodome. Make sure to look for these. There are displays of native garden crops near the walkway shelters. Inside the Archeodome you enter the world of the archaeologist. Here, when funding permits, archaeologists work at excavation and analysis of the materials they recover. When the archaeologists are not working, your guide will point out the features exposed on the excavation floor and the types of activities undertaken in the laboratory. Sometimes there are opportunities for visitors to undertake some hands-on work themselves. Also in the Archeodome are exhibits and displays explaining some of the work the archaeologists do and a major display on the origins and spread of maize (corn) horticulture—which is of such importance to this region today.
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Copyright 2013 Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village. All rights reserved. Phone: 605.996.5473 or. Inquire. |
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