![]() ![]() Inside the Rapid City lab, located in an office park behind a hardware store, archaeologists are sifting through the city's turbulent past. Even HBO's gritty period drama "Deadwood" uses the city's Chinatown as an important setting. The discovery has helped fuel interest in Chinese-American history, already the subject of recent books and a PBS documentary. When researchers examined the property, they realized that the Chinese residents, who first arrived in the frontier town in 1876, had left behind thousands of significant artifacts. The city of Deadwood is a National Historic Landmark, so an archaeological assessment had to precede the demolition. The excavation is South Dakota's largest: a half-million-dollar project that began in May 2001, after a developer announced plans to tear down a former restaurant to build a parking lot. In August they closed down the dig and shipped the final box-loads of bone, wood, metal and glass to the state's lab for analysis. State archaeologists have been working at the Deadwood site, in the Black Hills 50 miles northeast of Rapid City, for three years. Last summer, Ivey drove his RV to this lab, run by the state's Archaeological Research Center, to participate in the excavation of a 19th-century Chinese neighborhood buried under the fabled Wild West boomtown of Deadwood (once home to Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane). "I found a pair of tweezers, right there," he said, pulling out a rusted, V-shaped strip of metal and carefully putting it aside. With his right, he nudged a pair of stainless-steel forceps into the dark earth. With his left hand, he adjusted his trucker's cap. In a small lab on the outskirts of Rapid City, South Dakota, Donn Ivey, an itinerant researcher whose business card reads "Have Trowel, Will Travel," swiveled in his chair and peered into a small pile of dirt. ![]()
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