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Across the Great Plains, humans have been hunting, trading, and building villages long before European colonization. While today’s South Dakota is perhaps better known for its roadside sculptures and Mount Rushmore, one of the tangible places to encounter its older human history is a roughly 1,000-year-old, preserved Indigenous Plains village site called the Mitchell Indigenous Archaeological Site and Museum. Visitors to the site can see traces of its ancient community being uncovered in real time at the active excavation site, while an adjoining museum showcases some of the region’s artifacts and a full-scale earthen lodge you can walk into. The whole site sits on the grassy shores of Lake Mitchell, with a walking path and immersive outdoor exhibits, less than an hour-and-a-half from Sioux Falls by car.
The site was once a substantial village inhabited by what archaeologists identify as people from the Middle Missouri tradition, who lived sometime around the year 1,000 A.D., reports The Past. The village thrived for 100 to 150 years. Residents lived in large earthen lodges and grew crops like corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. Archaeologists have found charred seeds and a bone grease rendering pit, which offer a glimpse into how the people ate and stored their food. Ditches and other defensive features surrounded parts of the village, per the South Dakota State Historical Society…