The Murray County Historical Society invites the public to attend its January Dinehart Lunchbox Lecture on Thursday, January 13th in the 4-H building on the Murray County Fairgrounds in Slayton starting at noon. The cost of the talk is $3.00 per person or Historical Society members get in free. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch and beverages and light snacks are provided.
This month’s lecture will be presented by retired Minnesota Historical Society Archaeologist Thomas Sanders and his twenty-three years of research on the Jeffers Petroglyphs and Southwest Minnesota’s Red Rock Ridge.
The cultural landscape of Southwest Minnesota’s Red Rock Ridge is the greatest concentration of rock art in the Midwest. Sixteen miles of the Ridge contains 27 petroglyph sites on its 311 Sioux quartzite outcrops, six petroform sites, one pictograph site, rock cairns, sacred springs, sacred waterfalls, and countless lithic scatters. Most of the Ridge’s carvings are found at Jeffers Petroglyphs Historic Site on an irregularly shaped, 300-yardlong by 50-yard-wide exposed Sioux quartzite rockface.
Their creators made them over an estimated 11,500 years ago, with the earliest dating to 9,500 BCE and the most recent to the 1600s or 1700s CE. This presentation will show exam ples of the Ridge’s rock art and discuss ongoing 23 year-long Indigenous-based research by the Red Rock Ridge Research Group made of Dakota elders and archaeologists.
Sanders worked at historic sites for 35 years. From 1998 until 2016, he was the Site Manager at the Minnesota Historical Society’s (MNHS) Jeffers Petroglyph Historic Site. Sanders has worked with Dakota Elders to record and preserve cultural histories, traditional parables and interpretations of the carvings and culture sites along the Red Rock Ridge. He retired after 28-years with the MNHS but is still engaged in the preservation and archaeology of the Red Rock Ridge. Since 2011, He has been a principal investigator along with Hamline University’s Brian Hoffman on archaeological surveys for over 1400 acres along the Red Rock Ridge.
Prefer not to or can’t attend in-person? The presentation will be live streamed on the Murray County Historical Museum’s Facebook page. If you can’t watch it live, the live streamed video will also be recorded and available on our Facebook page to watch at your leisure. Visit the Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/ murraycountymuseum.
For more information about this and other museum events, call 507-836-6533 or email museum@co.murray.mn.us.
