How old is the oldest site in South Dakota?
The oldest site we know if is the Jim Pitts site, which was located about 20 miles west of Custer, in the Black Hills. The earliest inhabitants of the site have been identified as belonging to the Goshen complex, and it has been dated by radiocarbon to about 11,300 years ago. Note that this is the oldest site we know of now. We do not really know when the first people came to the Americas. Until recently, it had been commonly believed by many North American archaeologists that people could not have arrived via the Bering Straits before about 12,000 years ago, when the great ice-age glaciers retreated. Now, with the discovery of sites in some areas dating back more than 12,000 years ago, archaeologists suspect that people may have entered the New World much earlier–perhaps 20,000 or more years ago.
