From Folsom to the Fur Trade: Harnessing the Research Potential of the State Historical Society of North Dakota's Archaeology Collections

Summary

The State Historical Society of North Dakota curates collections covering 13,000 years of human history in North Dakota. The development of a more comprehensive archaeology collections program in the last five years has been geared toward increasing public access to these collections and communicating the collections’ research potential to an academic audience. The spectacular Lake Ilo Paleoindian collection documents thousands of years of continuous land use in North Dakota. Future research could investigate the northern periphery of Folsom technology, the role of Knife River flint in the Northern Plains economy, and other questions relating to Paleoindian adaptations in marginal environments. For researchers interested in the Late Prehistoric and Historic periods, the SHSND curates an entire storage room dedicated to Plains Village collections. Further analysis of these extensive collections will elucidate the establishment and trajectory of ancestral Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara farming communities situated along the Missouri River and its tributaries between the 13th and 18th centuries, and their participation in the 19th century fur trade. These collections shed light on lithic technology, craft specialization, social and ritual life, and the versatile subsistence strategies that allowed these communities to become flourishing trade centers in a vast intertribal trade network.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Museum Meet and Greet

Keywords

Spatial Coverage