The East Terrace Site - Introduction

The East Terrace Site
Introduction

A small but rare archaeological site was recently discovered on the east bank of the Mississippi River near St. Cloud, Minnesota. Cultural resource investigations in the late spring and early summer of 1993 found that it had been used as a camp site for thousands of years - and that spear points in the deepest deposits are about 10,000 years old.

The East Terrace site was located by a Minnesota Historical Society cultural resource survey crew in 1984. In 1993 BRW, Inc., a private consulting firm, was hired by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to excavate parts of the site before they were destroyed by bridge construction. This booklet describes the process and results of the geoarchaeological data recovery operations that took place.

The East Terrace site is a significant cultural resource for a number of reasons: it contains evidence of some of the oldest undisturbed settlements in Minnesota; its more recent camp sites supplement information from larger and better known sites at nearby lakes; it contains several separate cultural-temporal units and activity areas that make it possible to trace subtle changes in stone working and tool use throughout its history. Were it not for Minnesota's survey and mitigation process, this important site would never have been identified and excavated. We look forward to continued cooperation between the transportation and development industries and the archaeological community in identifying, evaluating, and preserving our finite cultural resources.

The 'Preserving Minnesota's Cultural Resources' web site is jointly sponsored by the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) of the Minnesota Historical Society, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) under Agreement No. 75077.