From
Blognomicon we are alerted to a conspiracy of Academic Silence (nahh, not really) regarding the mysterious question of
Oklahoma's Norsemen. Since I wrote a long comment to his post, I thought I'd dig it up and replay it here regardless of where Norse remains have been found. So:
Following graduation at Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp I drove east to study Archaeological Field Methods in Mitchell, South Dakota, where we excavated a sit about 1,000 years +/- old that had been a village on a creek-bluff that overlooked what would have been cultivation fields.
(I blew up the engine of my 1960 Karmann-Ghia crossing the Continental Divide, and in Rawlins Wyoming at Aajax Automotive with the direction and help of Mel installed a rebuilt engine.)
The given theory is that they were predecessors of the Mandan, simply because the later Mandan conveniently generally inhabited the same range.
Basically they/we didn't know much of anything about the site's inhabitants except some obvious things and some geo-historical data. We did find a lot of material stuff in different layers. One guy found an upsidown skull in a pit, with a stone blade beneath it - was it a ceremonial thang??
On the obvious side they had built a stockaded village with houses of similar post-and-wattle construction within it. They cultivated beans and squash. Judging from the quantity of remains they ate a lot of deer. The place burnt down a couple times.
On the geologic/historical side (aided by pollen-counts), there was evidence they moved up from the Missouri River Valley into riparian areas that previously had been arid (again indicated by pollen-count at X-layer, etc.) but which a fairly dramatic climate shift rendered it wet-enough to sustain crop growth. It lasted about 150-years? and then they disappeared. Vanished. That was my first exposure to Climate Change...
Fortified stockade construction implies a conflict with regional co-habitant "other tribes" who saw resource-usages in profoundly different ways. In this case one side obviously felt it necessary to defend a static patch of cultivated land and a village lifestyle, while other non-static regional inhabitants probably dealt with resources very differently as mobile hunter-gatherers.
The evidence of the village burning down (charred post-holes) and reconstruction on a slightly larger and altered plan/scale, indicates more than just fire-carelessness and could well be attributed to animosity and violent conflict with neighbors who well-knew how to set fires and drive game.
Fire was a frequent danger on the Settler's prairie, caused by lightning strikes in the arid atmosphere - but this was densely wooded at the much earlier time, the evidence being the very large amount of timber necessarily cut-down to create the houses and the fortified village walls.
The villagers may have shared the work of de-forestation with naturally occurring wildfires, because when The Settlers arrived some 1,000 years later there were very-very few trees on the rolling grasslands, and place-names like "Two-Trees" were given as appropriate indicators, outstanding in the treeless plains.
It could have been Vikings??
We know they traded things that originated with people on the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi, by shell-goods specific to that location that have been found.
Certainly Vikings would have had conflicts with their "neighbors".
Given the large quantity of animal debris (mostly deer in the large sized bits, but lots of rat and smaller rodent bits indicating a good-sized population of vermin) and the lesser number of garbage pits (a significant indicator of household density), we assumed the village had a pretty strong odor also. It stank.
Anyhow....that's what little I know.
The sky didn't look very promising - it had been raining all night and again all morning, but Mr. C. from the club emailed and said at least he of The Older Gents was going to the range (he has a key) - and since I had left my shooting coat down there at the last match this was a chance to retrieve it. 
