Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District

The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry/Wanhi Yukan (GMC Quarry) is a 175-acre (71 ha) Indigenous archaeological site in Grand Meadow Township, Minnesota, United States that was an open pit mine where chert (or 'flint') was quarried. It is the source site for Grand Meadow Chert (GMC), and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District in 1994. Originally containing well over 1000 pits apparently dug sometime between 950CE and 1400CE, the GMC Quarry/Wanhi Yukan appears to have been the most extensively-utilized Native American site in Minnesota for providing stone for making tools, and the only example in the state where there is visible evidence of chert having been extracted through digging. Nearly 100 of those pits are still visible along the Wanhi Yukan Trail in a 15-acre (6.1 ha) surviving remnant referred to as the Preserve. Grand Meadow Chert has been found at archaeological sites in 52 counties in Minnesota, including at most precontact archaeological sites in the state that are identified as being ancestral to todays Dakota communities. It also appears at sites in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota. The Dakota language name for the site, "Wanhi Yukan," means "There Is Chert Here." It was first documented in a 1994 atlas of Dakota place names.

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).