Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District

The Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District (21MW8) in Mower County, Minnesota, United States, is an Indigenous historic district that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. The principal site within the District is the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry (GMCQ), originally a sprawling landscape of an estimated 2,000 pits dug over many centuries using handheld tools to reach a layer of high-quality gray chert (or "flint"). Even though the District is now predominantly obscured by plowed farmland and roadways, a pristine 8-acre remnant of the original 170-acre chert quarry still exists in a small woods, alongside 7 acres of restored prairie and grassland. That 15-acre portion of the quarry site, purchased by The Archaeological Conservancy (TAC) in 1994, is separately known as "The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry Archaeological and Cultural Preserve." This quarry is the only known culturally utilized source for "Grand Meadow Chert (GMC)," a distinctive hard, gray stone used by Native Americans to make many everyday tools including spear points, arrowheads, drills, awls, knives, and hide scrapers. The earliest known use of Grand Meadow Chert is from a bison kill site (21YM47) near Granite Falls, Minnesota, in a context that was C-14 dated to 7700-8000 B.P. Grand Meadow Chert is now known to have been used at archaeological sites in 52 counties in Minnesota. For thousands of years, the small number of GMC tools found at sites throughout the region can be accounted for by people who collected nodules that were found eroding from the banks of the two creeks that cut through the District. Eventually, increased Native populations and the preference for use of GMC as a tool stone for making hide scrapers may have increased demand and inspired people to dig the first pits to expand access to the buried stone.