Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village

Around the year 1000 a farming people built a village on a bluff above Firesteel Creek, where the north side of Mitchell is now. At its height some six hundred people lived there in seventy or eighty earth lodges, long timber-framed houses banked with sod, with a ditch and palisade around the town. They raised corn on the bottomland, fished and hunted, and processed bison on a scale that archaeologists describe as industrial, boiling crushed bone to extract the grease used to make pemmican. Their pottery and tools tie them to the great Mississippian city of Cahokia far to the southeast, and they are counted among the ancestors of the Mandan, who later lived upriver in North Dakota. The village was lived in for about a century and a half.

A student from Dakota Wesleyan University noticed the site in 1910, and it was made a National Historic Landmark in 1964. In 1928 Firesteel Creek was dammed to make Lake Mitchell, and part of the old village now lies under water at the foot of the bluff. A local society formed in 1975 to protect the rest.

It is the only working archaeological dig in South Dakota open to the public. Over the outlines of two lodges stands the Thomsen Center Archeodome, a building that keeps the excavation dry, and in summer students from the University of Exeter in England and Augustana University in Sioux Falls work its floor while visitors watch. The museum beside it holds a reconstructed earth lodge and some of the more than a million artifacts the site has given up.