The new book, "Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend," has been published by The Digital Press at University of North Dakota. The book describes key episodes in the 9,000-plus-year history of human habitation in what's now eastern North Dakota.
Residents of eastern North Dakota know that there is more to the history of this region than meets the eye. Mike Michlovic and George Holley pulled together more than 30 years of archaeological field experience in southeastern North Dakota to write an accessible new history of the pre-European cultures on the Sheyenne Bend region.
"The Sheyenne Bend region is the southernmost portion of the Sheyenne Valley, and is almost entirely within Ransom County," as the authors describe.
"The history of this region stretches back in time thousands of years. ... (T)he Missouri River peoples -- the Mandan, the Hidatsa and their southern neighbors, the Arikara, now known as the Three Affiliated Tribes -- had by the time of the first European explorers a very deep past that extended back hundreds of years. And besides the peoples of the Missouri River, there were the many other cultures on the Northern Plains; Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Blackfoot, Cree, Crow, Yanktonai, Yankton and Sisseton, Assiniboine, and Plains Ojibwa.
"Here, we hope to make a contribution to understanding the ancestors of at least some of these people."
Both Michlovic and Holley are Emeritus Professors of Anthropology at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where Michlovic served as chair of the Department of Anthropology and Earth Science and president of the Council for Minnesota Archaeology.
Holley excavated across the United States in the Southeast, Midwest, Plains, and Southwest, and in Mesoamerica, where prehistoric ceramics became his specialty.
Their new book, "Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend," published by The Digital Press at UND, is "an effort to make our work more accessible to a larger audience, and to put all of the sites we worked into a single story," Michlovic remarks.
Describing a timeline that stretches back more than 10,000 years, Michlovic and Holley welcome us into the world of the communities that lived by what is now the Sheyenne River in North Dakota. Retreating glaciers, the disappearance of Lake Agassiz, and the river's changing course provide a vivid backdrop to the thousands of years of activity in this region that predate the arrival of Europeans.
For Michlovic and Holley, the story of these societies remains important to this day: "We were both educated as anthropologists, and as such were taught that there are no people in the world who are unimportant, and who, through understanding, don't have something to teach the rest of us.
"We feel it is the same with the study of the past. There is something to learn from everyone's past, not just from the history of presently dominant societies."
Michlovic and Holley explain how the Sheyenne Bend's archaeological sites only gave up their history of the area when considered on a regional scale. For example, the Shea and Sprunk sites -- which mark the locations of what had been small villages or hamlets on the Maple River Bend, about 10 miles north of the Sheyenne Bend -- showed the features of a previously unknown cultural entity in the Sheyenne region.
A fascinating location is the Rustad site, by far the oldest in the Sheyenne Bend. At the site, "radiocarbon dates an occupation of Plano peoples around 9,400 years ago," the authors write.
"They were using bison, probably an extinct species of bison called Bison occidentalis, and small game as well."
Another location that the authors describe in detail is the Biesterfeldt site, the site of the only known earth lodge village in eastern North Dakota. Believed to be the site of a Cheyenne village in the mid-1700s, the site is now a National Historic Landmark, and its size and scope have made it an object of archaeological study for more than 100 years.
Author Mike Michlovic stands in an archaeological trench. Photo courtesy of the author.
Taken together, these sites remind us "every people and every place have a past worth knowing, and it is vital that we learn this past before it is lost," the authors note.
William Caraher, director of The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota and himself a field archaeologist, said, "Working on this book was particularly rewarding because it combined the Press' interests in archaeology and North Dakota into a book that is both accessible and one of the very few book-length studies of North Dakota archaeology published this century."
Like all books from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, "Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend" is available at the Press' website as a free download or a low-cost paperback.
Categories: North Dakota, Education, General