96. Archeological Construction Monitoring for the Water and Fire Suppression Systems, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Chase County, Kansas.
Bruce A. Jones

Midwest Archeological Center personnel undertook monitoring of construction activity related to installation of waterline and fire suppression systems at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. This work resulted in the recovery of moderate amounts of historic artifactual material and the formal recording of one prehistoric site. The majority of the historic artifacts at the Spring Hill Ranch Headquarters complex were found immediately outside the doorways of the various structures, particular the site of the former Quonset hut, the icehouse, and the barn, where ranch implement maintenance and repair took place. Domestic trash was generally confined to the hillside a few meters north of the curing room.

No previously unrecorded structures were exposed in the course of the various components of the construction project. Likewise, while an underground tunnel was rumored to exist between the barn and the main ranch house, trenching across the probable tunnel alignment produced no evidence of such a feature.
The single prehistoric site recorded during the project, 14CS124, lay in a cultivated field on the east side of Fox Creek and immediately north of U.S. Highway 50 at the south end of the Preserve. No temporally or culturally diagnostic artifacts were found at the site.

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