“I think understanding the past and sharing the place that we live and occupy with the people who came before us is incredibly important,” said Dr. Amanda Watts, head of the Museum Studies program at MSU and professor of archaeology and art history.

“This kind of material comes from rescue archaeology,” Watts said.

Rescue archaeology happens when construction or maintenance is occurring at a given site and an on-site archaeologist and cultural resource manager help collect and excavate materials in advance of construction.

In the case of this particular quarry in Dunn County, a road was being constructed over the quarry remains and so materials were salvaged and preserved for future study.

Audin Rhodes/MDN Minot State University’s ROCKSTOCK team uses three screen boxes near the MSU dome to complete wet screen processing on ancient quarry soil samples Sept. 20.

The road was built in 2022 and now the salvaged materials are being studied by Watts and MSU students and colleagues. The State Historic Preservation Office supplied all of the equipment and the samples

One of the main finds the ROCKSTOCK archaeological processing team is looking for is Knife River flint.

“It’s got this very distinctive sort of root beer brown color and it’s got these little peat inclusions in it,” Watts said about the material.

Watts explained how Knife River flint originated in North Dakota and has been traded all the way down to the southern tip of South America.

“It was an international trade commodity,” she said. “When it’s found all over the continent, it indicates to us that those people were trading with the tribes in North Dakota.”

Audin Rhodes/MDN Audin Rhodes/MDN From left are Minot State University students Trey Christianson and Branson Keeley on Sept. 20 collecting the organic debris foam that floats to the top of the soil sample buckets.

The ROCKSTOCK team is looking for small pieces of Knife River flint to understand more about the ancient peoples who mined it.

“When you’re excavating you’re looking for big stuff, but then you take a percentage of each layer as you’re going and just shovel that soil right into a bag, so it’s everything,” Watts said.

This makes it possible for the ROCKSTOCK team to put the soil through a much finer screen to look for those extremely small pieces of flint and other things.

“We’re not getting the big hot objects. We’re getting the tiny little pieces and they can tell a huge part of the story,” Watts said.

One part of the story the team is trying to uncover is whether skilled craftsmen were on the site of the quarry or if they were somewhere else, shaping the flint after it had been taken out of the quarry.

“We’re starting to see that maybe the skilled craftsmen who knew what they were doing were actually on site at the quarry,” Watts said about the team’s initial observations.

“We’ve got this great evidence here that more sophisticated flint knapping and shaping was actually happening right at the quarry site,” she said. “We’re finding little, sophisticated chips, so that’s the kind of stuff that tells us a story different from what an artifact could tell us.”

There is currently no absolute dating on the material yet.

“Oftentimes, something like a fish bone or bird bone will be found in there, and we can kind of see that was probably their lunch, and now all of a sudden, we have an organic thing to carbon date an absolute day,” Watts said.

Watts explained how many different quarry events are represented in the soil samples due to the different layers of lithic debitage, or stone flakes.

“Students getting that moment of discovery is what’s cool about archaeology. They’re the first people to look at these things since the people who left them behind at least a few hundred years ago, if not a lot more,” Watts said. “They’re sharing something with an ancient North Dakotan.”

ROCKSTOCK was born out of a collaboration and recognition of art, both making art in current times and making art in ancient times, making it a perfect fit with MSU’s NOTSTOCK.

“I liked the idea of students being able to find ancient ceramics and then go make their own pot a block away,” Watts said. “It’s linking North Dakota’s past making and living and culture with our current making and living and culture celebration festival.”

Wet Screening

The student members of the ROCKSTOCK processing team were from a variety of courses at MSU, two of which are taught by Dr. Joseph Collette, associate professor of geoscience.

Collette’s geology and paleontology students were part of the ROCKSTOCK archaeological processing team, helping sift through soil to find chips of Knife River flint and other materials.

“So our first step is, we take those samples that have been sitting for a while, we put them into buckets, and then we add a bunch of water to them,” Collette said. Some samples have more clay in them than others, requiring the addition of anti-flocculant substances to help break the clay up.

“We let it sit for a little while, and then we take it over to one of these wet screening areas, and we take a fresh piece of screen because we want to make sure the stuff doesn’t stick in the screen boxes,” Collette said.

The screen used in the wet screen boxes is a simple window screen material that can be purchased at any hardware store.

“We pour out all of that sample onto the screen inside of the wet box, and then we kind of hose it down, and everybody gets their hands into the mud and kind of moves it around,” Collette said.

“That allows the smaller particles, like the fine sand and the clay, to just go down through the bottom and you retain any objects that are larger than about a little bit less than a millimeter,” he said. “So that’s what we’re interested in. We’re interested in capturing those little pieces.”

Once a soil sample bag has been emptied, the corners of the screen are pulled up to contain everything found inside the sample. The screen bags are fastened and sit out to dry on drying cloth.

The total samples to be processed were between 80 and 100 soil samples, with the ROCKSTOCK team processing around 30 samples a day.

After the screen bags have been dried, each sample will be collected into individual sample containers. The samples are then re-sorted and characterized and any root debris and non-artifact rocks in the sample are discarded.

“Then all of the flint material and any other artifacts we find, we can mount on slides and do analysis on it,” Collette said.

The information about where the sample came from is always retained on a linoleum, waterproof tag. This tag goes into the screen bags and stays with the samples as they’re individually sorted.

“That way we can establish which side of the site and from which depth in the site the sample came from,” Collette said. “The objects themselves are useless if we don’t have the original stratigraphic information.”

There is also mulm, or organic debris, that floats to the top of the soil sample buckets. “We collect that inside of a piece of pantyhose and that will go to people who are specialists in organic microfossils,” Collette said.

These specialists can help determine the time, date and period from which the soil samples were derived.