SUMMER TRAVEL SPECIAL
An Archaeological Tour in the Upper Midwest
By Jack El-Hai
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and sparsely populated land dotted with rocky hills. After about 60 miles, turn east on County Road 10 and south on County Road 2. A gravel drive leads you to the visitor center of Jeffers Petroglyphs, a property managed by the Minnesota Historical Society. For thousands of years, native people from a wide area have been visiting this site on spiritual pilgrimages and to make carvings on portions of a 23-mile-long outcropping of red quartzite, a bedrock deposit more than 1.6 billion years old. The visitors center is worth seeing first. An almost wordless multimedia presentation offers scenes of the petroglyphs site in centuries past, showing the activities of native visitors during night and day. Small exhibits cover prairie ecology, the cultural significance of the bison, and the original uses of Indian artifacts. To view the petroglyphs, you first follow a trail through a restoration of native prairie, converted from farmland 30 years ago. It includes the prairie bush clover and many other examples of endangered grasses and
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
he Upper Midwest is not well known for its archaeological treasures, and it’s easy to see why. The region has been utterly transformed in the past 200 years by the loss of 99 percent of its tall grass prairie, the felling of most of its original forests, and the harnessing of much of the land for agriculture. What civilization has accomplished at ground level often makes you ignore the surprises just inches or feet beneath the surface. This tour departs from Minneapolis straight into the fields of southwestern Minnesota on U.S. Highway 212. You quickly descend into the valley of the Minnesota River, a tributary of the Mississippi, with its short trees and boggy ground. Once you cross the river and leave the valley, the land settles into a gentle roll. After about an hour and a half, you reach the town of Olivia and the junction with U.S. Highway 71. This area was once a hunting ground disputed by the Dakota and Ojibwe Indians. Head south from Olivia on Highway 71. This is quiet
Thirty-one of the 195 mounds in Effigy Mounds National Monument are effigies. These mounds are called the Marching Bear Group. These and thousands of other mounds in the region were built by the Woodland Indians between A.D. 600 and 1300.
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summer • 2003
