Indian Burial Mounds

These mounds hold the physical remains of Indians who lived in eastern South Dakota sixteen hundred years ago. Radiocarbon testing established the time of the burials. Archaeologists know them as the Woodland Indians, who moved westward from the eastern forests and changed from deer hunting to the pursuit of buffalo on the Dakota grasslands. As hunters they lived in temporary shelters but left these mounds as permanent monuments to their dead. Later, Dacotah and other Indians also roamed this area and buried their dead in the same mounds. In 1962, the University of South Dakota excavated the second mound from the east and found the skeletons of four Woodland Indians, a later adult burial, and the skeleton of a horse, probably buried within the last 100 years. Fragments of cooking pots were scattered among the remains of the Woodland Indians. Only the skulls and large bones of the Woodland Indians were buried, reflecting a custom followed by many Plains Indians in which the dead were first laid on scaffolds and the largest bones were buried later in the earth.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota · United States