The Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District (21MW8) in Mower County, Minnesota, United States, is an Indigenous historic district that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.[1] The principal site within the District is the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry (GMCQ), originally a sprawling landscape of an estimated 2,000 pits dug over many centuries using handheld tools to reach a layer of high-quality gray chert (or "flint"). Even though the District is now predominantly obscured by plowed farmland and roadways, a pristine 8-acre remnant of the original 170-acre chert quarry still exists in a small woods, alongside 7 acres of restored prairie and grassland. That 15-acre portion of the quarry site, purchased by The Archaeological Conservancy (TAC) in 1994, is separately known as "The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry Archaeological and Cultural Preserve."
This quarry is the only known culturally utilized source for "Grand Meadow Chert (GMC)," a distinctive hard, gray stone used by Native Americans to make many everyday tools including spear points, arrowheads, drills, awls, knives, and hide scrapers. The earliest known use of Grand Meadow Chert is from a bisonkill site (21YM47) near Granite Falls, Minnesota, in a context that was C-14 dated to 7700-8000 B.P.[2] Grand Meadow Chert is now known to have been used at archaeological sites in 52 counties in Minnesota.[3] For thousands of years, the small number of GMC tools found at sites throughout the region can be accounted for by people who collected nodules that were found eroding from the banks of the two creeks that cut through the District. Eventually, increased Native populations and the preference for use of GMC as a tool stone for making hide scrapers may have increased demand and inspired people to dig the first pits to expand access to the buried stone.
Rediscovering the GMCQ
The abandoned chert quarry pits went unrecognized for centuries, and were eventually filled in for farming in the 19th and 20th centuries. There is no known record of this chert source among the oral histories of the Dakota-speaking communities of the region. It was the astute observations by a prominent local stone and artifact collector, Maynard Green, that led to recognizing the significance of the many remnant pits in the small oak woods within the District. Mr. Green wrote to a leading archaeologist, Lloyd Wilford, in 1952, but failed to attract professional interest until 1980. In that year, Green met with a team from the Minnesota Statewide Archaeological Survey led by archaeologist Tom Trow. Green showed the team the pits hidden in the small woods, and the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry was then added to the state site file. Trow first presented the site to the 1981 meeting of the Council for Minnesota Archaeology. Additional efforts by Orrin Shane and Tim Ready at the Science Museum of Minnesota led to the 1994 NRHP nomination and the permanent protection of the Preserve by the TAC. In 2022 an archaeology team from Hamline University did the first research within the District, and returned in 2023 with their field school.
In archaeology, a blade is a type of stone tool created by striking a long narrow flake from a stone core. This process of reducing the stone and producing the blades is called lithic reduction. Archaeologists use this process of flintknapping to analyze blades and observe their technological uses for historical purposes.
The Dutchess Quarry Cave Site is located along NY 17A in the Town of Goshen in Orange County, New York. It is midway between the village of Goshen and Florida, at the junction of Quarry Road, built into the side of a 580-foot hill known as Mount Lookout.
Silver Mound is a sandstone hill in Wisconsin where American Indians quarried quartzite for stone tools. Tools made from Silver Mound's quartzite have been found as far away as Kentucky. The oldest have been dated to around 11,000 years ago, so they provide clues about the first people in Wisconsin. Silver Mound Archeological District was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
The Upper Mississippian cultures were located in the Upper Mississippi basin and Great Lakes region of the American Midwest. They were in existence from approximately A.D. 1000 until the Protohistoric and early Historic periods.
Barton Village Site, also known as the Herman Barton Indian Village Archeological Site, is a large, multi-component archaeological site near Cumberland in Allegany County, Maryland.
Mill Creek chert is a type of chert found in Southern Illinois and heavily exploited by members of the Mississippian culture. Artifacts made from this material are found in archaeological sites throughout the American Midwest and Southeast. It is named for a village and stream near the quarries, Mill Creek, Illinois and Mill Creek, a tributary of the Cache River. The chert was used extensively for the production of utilitarian tools such as hoes and spades, and for polished ceremonial objects such as bifaces, spatulate celts and maces.
The Cardy Site in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin is a Paleo-Indian campsite, and the oldest known archaeology site on the Door Peninsula. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
The Ellerbusch site (12-W-56) is a small but significant archaeological site in the southwestern part of the U.S. state of Indiana. Unlike many sites created by people of the same culture, it occupies an upland site near a major river floodplain. Its existence appears to have been the result of the coincidence of periods of peace and growth in the related Angel site, which led some townspeople to leave their homes for new villages that were more convenient for resource gathering. Researched partly because of its small size, Ellerbusch has produced information that greatly increases present awareness of other small sites and of its culture's overall patterns of settlement in the region. Because of its archaeological value, the site was declared a historic site in the late twentieth century.
Culverwell Mesolithic Site is a Mesolithic settlement, located on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, England. It is found in the local area known as Culverwell, along the Portland Bill Road. It is within an area of unspoiled countryside, with no past quarrying. The site is maintained by the Association for Portland Archaeology – a small group dedicated to researching, investigating and excavating on Portland.
The Lake Catherine Quarry is a prehistoric stone quarry in Hot Spring County, Arkansas. The site was used as a source of black novaculite, a relatively rare form of chert. Evidence of Native American quarrying activity at the site includes quarry pits, spoil piles, and a scattered talus slope of rejected materials. The site is untainted by historic quarrying, providing a potentially significant window into prehistoric quarrying methods.
The Schilling Archeological District is a prehistoric Native American archaeological site on private property on Lower Grey Cloud Island in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, United States. It consists of a habitation site and mound group with artifacts that date from the Early Woodland Period to the Late Prehistoric Period. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 for having state-level significance in the theme of archaeology. It was nominated for its rare Early Woodland component, Middle Mississippian cultural influences, and potential to show climatic adaptations over time.
Archeological Site No. 39.1 is a prehistoric archaeological site in Searsmont, Maine. Located on the floodplain of a waterway, it is one of the state's largest Paleo-Indian habitation sites, estimated by the surveying archaeologists to be about 18,000 square metres. The unstratified (single-layer) site is expected to contribute significantly to what is known about prehistoric human habitation patterns in the area, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 for this reason.
Humans have been present in the Canadian Maritime provinces for 10,600 years. In spite of being the first part of Canada to be settled by Europeans, research into the prehistory of the Maritimes did not become extensive until 1969. By the early 1980s, several full-time archaeologists focused on the region.
The prehistory of New England is an important topic of research for New England archaeologists. Humans reached the current-day New England region by at least 10,500 years ago and likely earlier, occupying a recently de-glaciated environment. Pre-contact Native American groups in New England did not have full-fledged market economies and physical artifacts tended to change very slowly. However, technological shifts brought agriculture and ceramics to the region prior to the arrival of European settlers in the 17th century.
The Welling site is an archaeological site of the Paleo-Indian period, meaning the time of the earliest humans. Located in Coshocton County, Ohio, it was a site for quarrying stone in the Upper Mercer chert source area. Based upon the microwear analysis of stone tools, it is believed to be a base camp where people learned and shared Clovis tool-making techniques, ate, exchanged information, and perhaps found mates from others groups.
Upper Mercer flint or Upper Mercer chert is a type of flint, or a pure form of chert, found in Coshocton, Hocking, and Perry counties of Ohio. Made of forms of silica and quartz, the hard and brittle stone was used by prehistoric people to make tools and weapons. To create stone tools, flint was heated to make chipping away at the stone easier, and then the flint was chipped to form razor-sharp edges. Resulting tools included spearheads, scrapers, knives, and arrows.
The Fifield Site (Pr-55) is located on Damon Run Creek in Porter County, north-western Indiana. It is classified as a late prehistoric, single-component Upper Mississippian Fisher village.
The Palos site (Ck-26) is located on the Cal-Sag Canal in Cook County, Illinois, United States, near the city of Chicago. It is classified as a Protohistoric to early Historic site with Upper Mississippian affiliation.
The Gentleman Farm site is an archaeological site located in LaSalle County, Illinois, on the Illinois River. It is a multi-component site with the main occupation being a Langford tradition component of Upper Mississippian affiliation.
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