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Michael G. Michlovic, An Archaeology of the Red River of the North. 2025

An Archaeology of the Red River of the North offers an expansive survey of the indigenous cultures and peoples in the region of the Red River from the recession of Lake Agassiz around 9000 years ago to the intrusion of the Europeans. Beginning with an overview of the practice of regional archaeology and a justification for its pursuit, Michael Michlovic uses a traditional culture-historical sequence as a framework to incorporate archaeological studies from the late nineteenth century to the present time. Relevant research in fields such as ethnohistory, ethnography, radiometric dating, paleoecology, and geomorphology are used throughout the presentation. Dozens of individual sites and survey projects are summarized and take their place in an overview of the characteristic features of past times, from the earliest hunting and gathering cultures to later farming societies.

Michael Michlovic is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he taught from 1975 to 2015. His field studies focused on the Red and Sheyenne River Valleys of northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. He served previously as president of the Council for Minnesota Archaeology, and as a member of the Minnesota state review board for the National Register of Historic Places. He is a past editor of The Minnesota Archaeologist, and currently is on the board of the Minnesota Archaeological Society. He is co-author with G.R. Holley of the The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota volume, Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend.

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This book is a companion volume to Michael G. Michlovic and George R. Holley, Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend. 2022. For more on that volume go here.

This volume presents the results of several decades of archaeological research in the Sheyenne Bend region of southeastern North Dakota. Piecing together evidence from disparate field projects, along with the work done by previous researchers, Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend offers a status report on the pre-European era cultures of southeastern North Dakota. Presented in ordinary language, this book constitutes the essential details to make sense of the regional archaeological record.

Also check out the David Haeselin’s edited volume: Haunted By Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997. 2017. For more on that volume go here.

This twentieth anniversary of the Red River Flood of 1997, which devastated the town of Grand Forks, North Dakota and surrounding areas, gives a new generation of Grand Forksers and Red River valley citizens the occasion to look backward so that they can look forward. Taking stock of how the city and its people have changed in these last twenty years offers us a new chance to envision the future of Grand Forks and the Red River Valley. What’s more, we hope that this book can extend the lessons learned through the recovery to others coping with their own unique disasters.