528 - Double Dutch Village
Welcome to Double Ditch Village, which was occupied by the Mandan Indians from roughly 1490 to 1785. Plains winters are long and bitterly cold. Rainfall fickle, and summer temperatures fluctuate wildly. Yet for the Mandan people this landscape is home. There was once a bustling town, with domed earth lodges, raised drying scaffolds, and barking dogs. You might picture a woman in a hide-covered bull boat on the river below, bringing firewood from the trees on the far bank of the Missouri. You can imagine how full of life this place once was with 10,000 or more inhabitants, compared to how quiet you find it here today.
The shallower basins mark places built for their daily life--pits filled with thousands of bushels of corn. The larger depressions were the earth lodges, now silent homes of ancient Americans. The State Historical Society of North Dakota has coordinated and orchestrated archaeological investigations at this site for decades. Elizabeth Fenn, in her book titled, Encounters at the Heart of the World, distilled the technical reports from these investigations. Double Ditch takes its name from two distinctive trenches that once served as fortifications for the Mandan settlement here. In 2002 and 2003, through geophysical investigations, archaeologists discovered two additional fortification ditches. The "mounds" are midden mounds, or what we'd call trash mounds. Sedentary cultures produce a ton of trash. These mounds are gold mines for archaeologists.
The challenges facing the Mandans were great: drought, climate change, competition with others for the coveted buffalo. But it was a massive smallpox epidemic that swept the interior of North America about 1781-1782 that caused the Mandans to move to new villages further upriver. This catastrophe was apparently responsible for the abandonment of Double Ditch and all the other Mandan villages near the Heart River. People of Mandan Indian ancestry live today throughout much of the Northern Great Plains. As one of the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Mandan tribal headquarters are at Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota.