Pony Creek: A Thousand-Year-Old Plains Village
Near Omaha, Iowa
Inside Mills County's Pony Creek Park, beneath the grass near the lake shore, lies one of the best-preserved prehistoric earthlodges in the entire Great Plains. The Davis Oriole Earthlodge Site dates back many centuries, to when Plains Village peoples built semi-permanent communities along river valleys like this one, farming corn and hunting bison from a single settled home base. An amateur archaeologist named D.
D. Davis first identified the site in nineteen ninety-one, and what he found was exceptional: the outline of an earthlodge whose construction details remained largely intact in the soil. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one, and in twenty twelve the earthlodge itself was designated a National Historic Landmark, recognized as one of the finest surviving examples of its type anywhere.
Most earthlodges were plowed under or washed away over the past century and a half. This one survived because it happened to sit on county park land, a lucky accident of local history. The lodge measures about forty feet by twenty-six feet, and its surface lies thirty-five to fifty inches below the modern ground, under one of the park's main trails.
Mapping errors delayed its rediscovery until two thousand eight, and a small excavation in two thousand nine recovered fragments of pottery and showed that the lodge appears to have been burned when it was abandoned, collapsing its roof and charring its walls. Pony Creek Park covers fifty-three acres around an eighty-three acre lake, northwest of Glenwood.
