Menoken Village drew early archeological attention after its rediscovery in 1936 because of its fortification ditch, house depressions, and location away from the Missouri River, and many people then believed it was the place of the first recorded contact between Europeans and Native Americans in what is now North Dakota. After the State of North Dakota purchased the site in 1937, archeologists began excavations focused on the palisade, the west bastion, and the pit house nearby. Their work exposed about 125 feet of palisade, a defensive wall about ten feet inside the ditch and made of 800 to 900 posts, each six to eight inches in diameter, while the ditch had originally been about five feet deep and twenty feet wide. The fortification system, with four loops or bastions, appears unusually large for the small area it enclosed. Only a small number of house or lodge depressions are visible, widely separated and found both inside and outside the ditch, unlike other fortified village sites in North Dakota, which are usually larger and have many closely spaced lodge depressions within the fortified area. The excavated house, left unfilled after work in 1938 and 1939, was an oval, earth-covered structure with an entry ramp leading to a floor about three feet underground, and its unusual shape predates the rectangular and circular lodge forms common at later sites. Menoken Village was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 largely because of its supposed link to some of the earliest European explorations, and although it is now known to be much older than that, it remains a significant cultural landmark.