Worked from 11,000 BC to AD 1600, and its flint travelled a continent
The Lynch Quarry Site, also called the Lynch Knife River Flint Quarry and catalogued as 32DU526, lies just east of Dunn Center in western North Dakota, off Highway 200, on the banks of Spring Creek, a tributary of the Knife River. It covers at least 690 acres and holds an estimated 20,000 pits, 3 to 10 feet deep and each with its spoil pile, where people dug out cobbles of Knife River flint. The whole site is scattered with chipped and flaked stone. It has survived remarkably well, despite farming over parts of it and old coal shafts in places, and on 13 July 2011 it became a National Historic Landmark, dedicated the following June.
Knife River flint is a fine-grained, glassy chert the colour of root beer or coffee, usually deep dark brown and sometimes translucent, and under ultraviolet light it glows orange or yellowish grey, which sets it apart from other brown flints. It chips cleanly into projectile points, knives and scrapers, and the Knife River deposits may be among the largest and most used flint sources in North America. Paleoindians were working them as far back as 11,000 BCE, and the tribes of the area still were in 1885; the flint takes its name from more than 13,000 years of use for knives.
It travelled. Knife River flint turns up at prehistoric sites in northern Canada, New York and New Mexico, traded for shell, obsidian, cloth and, after European contact, metal weapons. In Hopewell burial mounds in Ohio, almost 1,000 miles away, archaeologists find large blades of it beside other ceremonial goods, seemingly made elsewhere and passed hand to hand between communities, objects for ritual rather than daily use.
Closer to home, the quarries were the wealth behind the Native villages on the Knife River, now Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site near Stanton. Its superintendent, Wendy Ross, called the quarries one of the most important resources used by Native peoples, the reason the villages became a hub of trade and a crossroads of culture.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
