The Fifth Mound

Between 300 and 1000 A.D., stone-age people of the Late Woodland culture lived nearby as some of the first permanent residents of Sioux Falls, and their presence is evidenced by a line of five burial mounds built here. T.H. Lewis sketched these mounds in his 1884 survey map, and together with the Eminija Mounds near Brandon, these Sherman Park mounds and several other scattered mounds are the earliest evidence of past human occupation in Minnehaha County. Very few of these mounds were excavated by archeologists. Some were constructed as the final resting place of only one person, presumed to be someone of high rank, while others contained the remains of several humans, perhaps village elders or persons of stature. In the 1940s amateurs excavated and destroyed the fifth mound; after removing burial goods and some skeletal remains, they reburied smaller bones and left a quartzite slab to mark the mound's former site. In 2001, as a gesture of reconciliation and goodwill to area Native Americans, the fifth mound was rebuilt.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota · United States