Here’s a conference opportunity for those interested in Historical Archaeology in the Midwest. The Mill City Museum in Minneapolis is a great venue for this!

Ancient campsite discovered along Minnesota River in Chanhassen

Eight thousand years ago, Minnesota looked like another world.

Prairie grasses covered the land, with trees sparse except in the extreme northeast. The landscape was extremely dry, with lakes reduced to waterholes and rivers withered to streams. Small groups of native people roamed the wild, hunting bison that were 50 percent larger than the species we know today. They camped in the river bottoms, close to water, fish and game.

Now archaeologists are getting a priceless peek at that ancient past, known as the Archaic Period, because of a rare campsite discovered along the Minnesota River in Chanhassen during a routine survey in preparation for bridge work. Read more.

Rialto Theater, Minneapolis, 1973 (by Gary Settle)

On January 18, 1973, Minneapolis police confiscated a copy of Deep Throat, from the Rialto Theater in South Minneapolis. They immediately delivered it to a judge who declared that the film was illegal, hard-core pornography. The raid on the Rialto triggered a game of legal cat-and-mouse that the city eventually lost. The Rialto’s owner, local pornography don Ferris Alexander, had obtained several prints of the film, and each time the city confiscated a copy, the Rialto bounced back with a new one. After three tries, the city finally gave up. Alexander had established himself as a successful, if unsavory, protector of the First Amendment.

Photo via Old Minneapolis

Urban Philosopher, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1978 (by Robert Holmgren)

I’m not certain, but I think this is Lawrence “Larry” F. Johnson, a familiar Twin Cities counter-culture figure during the 1970s. Between 1969 and 1996, Johnson—writing under the pseudonym Ernest Mann—published 138 issues of the Little Free Press, a mini newspaper decrying the evils of “wage slavery.” He apparently also had a unique fashion sensibility. You can read more about him here.

Photo via Flickr: Menlo’s Photostream

January 12, 1888 began as such a warm day that many children on the American prairie left for school without their hats, mittens, and sometimes even coats.  That afternoon a massive blizzard bore down on the Midwest without warning.  Many children were still in school and their teachers, often teenagers themselves, had to decide whether to chance losing their way home in the storm or risk freezing to death in a poorly insulated schoolhouses.  

I picked this book up because I’m a big fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. Although that book focuses on a dreadful winter eight years before the events of The Children’s Blizzard, both explore the challenges of a rough winter on the prairie in the days before reliable weather forecasts and gasoline powered snowplows.  This books fills the reader in on the meteorological causes of blizzards and the history of weather forecasting alongside real life stories of survival.  The Children’s Blizzard is worth picking up for anyone interested in extreme weather or the homesteading of the Great Plains.  

The Children’s Blizzard on Amazon

One Year After Wildfire, Archeologists Unearth Indian Artifacts

Duluth, MN (Northlands Newscenter) — It will be one year ago tomorrow that lightning ignited one of Minnesota’s largest wildfires.

The Pagami Creek Fire covered 93,000 acres in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wildness. Now, scientists are finding a goldmine of clues to the region’s past unearthed by the fire.

“This is what folks used to make stone tools out of in what’s now known as the boundary waters.”

Thanks to the Pagami Creek Fire, Archeologist Lee Johnson’s job is a lot easier.

“A landscape that is usually covered in vegetation is open,” said Johnson.

Johnson, and his team are finding stone tools that could be nine-thousand years old from the Palo Indian Era. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

Knife Lake: Rewriting prehistory

Recent archaeological finds near northern Minnesota’s Knife Lake may rewrite the current theories on how long human beings have lived not only in Minnesota, but much of North America.

Knife Lake straddles the border between Canada and Minnesota, with Quetoco Provincial Park to the north, and the famous Boundary Waters on the U.S. side. Professor Mark Muniz of St. Cloud State and fellow researches have been digging around there, and what they have found is fairly amazing if their dating holds up.

The Ojibwe name for what the glaciers carved from the earth is Mookomaan Zaaga’igan, while the French fur traders called it Lac des Couteaux, or Lake of Knives. Read more.