CHASKA, Minn. – Archaeologists expected to find something but didn’t know how much when they started excavating in 2012 around what would become the new County Road 101 bridge spanning between Chanhassen and Shakopee.
"It’s one of the most significant sites I've worked on, certainly. Yeah," Kent Bakken says.
Bakken is an archaeologist with Florin Cultural Resource Services and started working on the project shortly after it began.
The $54 million bridge project was funded mostly at a federal level which means the archaeological dig was mandated. The dig unearthed 4,000 different artifacts such as stone tools, fragments of buffalo bones and stone tip projectiles used for spears or as arrowheads.
"It's unusual to find stuff of this time period. It's not well represented, we don't have that many sites," Bakken says.
Some of the artifacts date back more than 7,000 years and give researchers evidence that points to a traveling plains people who hunted buffalo.
Some the artifacts reveal the ancient people were either well-traveled or traded frequently with people who passed though Bakken says.
"These people were connected, maybe they were just going out and visiting or maybe they just knew people who knew people who knew people and that stuff is passed on hand to hand over those hundreds of miles," he said.
Some of the tools and stone chips originated from other areas around the Midwest such as Wisconsin and North Dakota. The artifacts will go to the Minnesota Historical Society for preservation.