Menoken Indian Village Site
North Dakota
About ten miles east of Bismarck, a grass-covered depression and a faint earthen ridge mark one of the oldest fortified villages ever found on the northern plains. People lived here sometime between about eleven hundred and thirteen hundred A.D.
, more than two centuries before the communities we associate with the Mandan or Hidatsa cultures took shape. Perhaps two hundred residents occupied the oval earthlodges protected by a tall wooden palisade and a ditch dug into the earth just outside it. The ditch is still visible.
Archaeologists declared the site a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-four, and recent radiocarbon dating pushed its age back even earlier than previously thought. It is not clear who built it or where they went. The Menoken site is a reminder that the Missouri River corridor held complex, settled communities long before European contact, long before the histories most people know.
