An Archaeological Site at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

You may not realize how long people have been living in Leavenworth County, Kansas. The DB archaeological site (site number 14LV1071), located on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, has evidence of human occupation going back 10,000 years. Most of the artifacts date to two periods: 4000-500 B.C. and A.D. 900-1400. This site reveals a lot about the lifestyle and activities of people who were here long before we were.

Discovery and evaluation of the site

Many archaeological sites are discovered during a survey, in which archaeologists walk through a designated area and examine the ground for artifacts on the surface. If the ground cover is too dense to see the surface, shovel tests are performed. A shovelful of earth is scooped out at constant intervals along the survey route and checked to see if it contains artifacts. While this method can miss some sites, it has revealed the presence of many others.

The DB site was discovered in 1994 during an archaeological survey by the University of Kansas Anthropological Research and Cultural Collections (ARCC) in and around the Quarry Creek drainage, Leavenworth County, Kansas. It was clear from plans of the proposed United States Disciplinary Barracks that construction of this prison would disturb the site. Federal law requires that threatened archaeological sites on federal land be either preserved (by moving construction elsewhere) or excavated to gather as much information as possible before the site is destroyed. There are many state and local laws that protect archaeological sites on these lands as well.

Limited excavations in July and October of 1995 indicated the site was important enough for major excavation. The crew walked over the ridge where the site was located, and dug a number of shovel tests to see where artifacts were distributed. They found that the site covered about 23,000 square meters. To learn more about the deposits in the site, they excavated a small area. Six m2 were excavated in July, and another 34 m2 in October. Clearly, not much of the entire site was dug. Nevertheless, the team of archaeologists found enough to suggest that this site was large and mostly undisturbed, and that it represented the activities of several different groups of people who revisited the site for thousands of years.