During the early 1970s, Science Museum of Minnesota archaeologists spent three seasons excavating the Pederson site in western Minnesota. The site was situated on what at one time was an island in Lake Benton that was lived on by different groups of people for thousands of years. One of the key contributions of this project was increasing our understanding of life on the eastern prairies during the Late Woodland period. These two small cooking pots are of this era.

I chose these objects to illustrate another important archaeological research project of the Science Museum of Minnesota. Both pots were beautifully restored by former anthropology curator Tim Ready, a master in the art of artifact replication and restoration.
– Ed Fleming, Curator of Archaeology