It's doubtful you'll ever see a CSI spinoff originate from the South Dakota prairie. But some pretty important detective work takes place deep underneath our home soil.  Workers with the Archeological Research Center in Rapid City are assigned to investigate mysterious discoveries accidentally unearthed in remote corners of the state. Most of the time, the painstaking process of identifying these artifacts goes unseen.

When archeologists pay a house call, it's like trying to solve a historical whodunit.

"This is sort of like playing a game of Clue, or working with a jigsaw puzzle that you're missing some of the pieces," Adrian Hannus of Augustana College said.

It's up to the archeologists to fill in the blanks of those missing pieces.

"Since much of what we work with dates to periods before written records, then we're working with very limited amounts of material," Hannus said.

Last month, experts from the South Dakota Archeological Research Center were called to a home in Humboldt where workers dug up a nameplate that was thought to be part of a tombstone. State archeologists are required to investigate such findings. The concern was that there might be a grave underneath the family's driveway.

"I think, in a lot of cases, not too many people have a very high comfort level for wanting to deal with human remains.  At the same time, I guess we understand them as part of our past, part of the heritage," Hannus said.

After carefully removing the stone and cleaning it up, archeologists determined that it was part of a marker that had been removed from a cemetery decades earlier and used as a ornamental display near the house that once stood here. Mystery solved. There was no gravesite to be discovered, but to an archeologist, even a mundane explanation is better than none at all.

"Most of the time, we are doing things that people might think are actually rather boring, but they become intriguing in the sense that you reconstruct this," Hannus said.

State archeologists are called out about dozen times a year to investigate suspected gravesites. About half of those cases turn out to be actual graves.

Hannus says additional cases are likely to turn up as developers build more homes and businesses in areas that have been undisturbed for centuries. Fertile ground for future discoveries that will fascinate and challenge archeologists for years to come. Delving into South Dakota's past sometimes requires digging up some dirt.

Earlier this year, the state archeology center itself had to rise from the grave when Governor Rounds proposed eliminating the program in a budget-tightening move. But in March, lawmakers restored the funding.