University Place

Indian Mounds of Wisconsin

Today, we are pleased to introduce Robert A. Birmingham as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum’s employees. Now retired, Robert Birmingham served as the State Archaeologist of Wisconsin for many years and received the Increase Lapham Research Medal from the Wisconsin Archeological Society. He’s the author of “Spirits of Earth: The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four Lakes,” and “Skunk Hill: A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin,” among other books. His book, “Indian Mounds of Wisconsin,” coauthored with Wisconsin Historical Society archeologist, Amy Rosebrough, was recently released in a second edition. So now please join me in welcoming Robert Birmingham. [audience applauding]

– Well, thank you. And it’s that time of year when for Wisconsinites, temperature doesn’t make any difference. The sun’s out, it’s a nice day, beautiful day. You can tell, you know? So, thank you very much for coming out today. I’m gonna talk about my book, or the book that I wrote along with Amy Rosebrough of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the new edition. But I wanna go back to the first edition, and that which was published in 2000, and why a second edition was necessary. Back in the 1990s, when I was State Archaeologist, this was a time when mound preservation began. New laws had been passed, starting in ’89 or so, that protected burial places of all people and no matter how old they were. Before that, interestingly, Native American graves were not protected by law, cemeteries and ancient ones. So this law sought to correct that and included mounds because so-called Indian mounds are burial sites. So this created a great deal of public interest. And constantly, I was getting calls asking a few questions. And that was, those were, “So, how old are these mounds?” “Who made the mounds?” “What do they mean?” “What were they used for?” Every day, [chuckles] asking the same questions.

“How old are these mounds?” “Who made them?” “What were they used for?” You know, and so on. So I was giving the answers. We were all giving the answers as best we knew, but it occurred to me, I should write this down, you know? There’s so much interest that what we need to do is to put this together in book form. And the first edition of Indian Mounds of Wisconsin in fact turned out to be the first synthesis of Indian mounds published in 150 years. No one had put together the complete story before. And that was, of course, very popular. Now, since then, and I think because of the book, there has been a great deal of additional research. Not archeological excavations, ’cause mounds are protected, but people are going back, developing new hypotheses, looking at new angles. For example, universities, Madison, Milwaukee, and so on, they assign their graduate students who are looking for topics to go back and look at excavations that took place 50, 60 years beforehand, but now with fresh eyes and now with new insights and so on. So, dozens of theses and publications are derived by just going and looking at old data, but with new insights.

My coauthor, 2010, wrote the encyclopedia of effigy mounds. They literally looked at every single mound group. Thousands of mound groups ever recorded and compiled all the data on each one. And again, for the first time, we had the full record in which you could go back, whereas before, you really had to search and scratch and do that, which has been an unbelievable boon. New technologies have developed, which I’ll be showing you in a few minutes, that have given us incredible insights. So basically, Indian Mounds of Wisconsin, number one, is out of date. And it was important to keep it updated, not just for the public interest, but this is being used as a textbook. You want students to always be having the most current information. So that led to Indian Mounds of Wisconsin II, with all of this new information, some of it quite exciting. Now so, first of all, let’s talk about what we mean by Indian mounds.

Everybody is familiar with big, round mounds. These are burial places. And these kind of huge mounds were built very early, probably starting about 500 BC, 800 BC. These are the first burial. Native people lived here for 13,000 years, but didn’t start building mounds until way late, which is interesting. So why did they start building mounds when they hadn’t before? And, in fact, by 1200 AD, they stopped building mounds even though they continued to occupy here. So one of the things that we’re very interested in is, so what’s this about? Why do people make monuments during only some periods of time, and afterwards don’t? Beforehand, don’t? So these are familiar round mounds. The most interesting, at least from my account, are the so-called effigy mounds that we now know were built in the form of animals important to Native American belief systems and supernatural beings. Many of these are not animals seen in the woods when you go out walking. They aren’t visible.

And so on. This is an image. Can you see the bears there? The bears, and then there’s birds right there. This image kind of looks kind of weird, but it’s a cool image in that this is a part of this new technology called LiDAR. LiDAR. And as most of our technologies, it actually came from military use. They needed to make 3-D pictures of your enemy installations. So, basically how LiDAR works is an aircraft or satellite sends down a laser that hits something solid and then it pops back and it makes a map. It’s gotta hit something really solid, like the ground. Not like a bush, not like a tree, not like high grass.

So for the first time, we can see the effigy mounds without the obscuring vegetation, which has led to. . . And in three dimensions, in three dimensions. As you can see here, this is the Effigy Mounds National Monument. Can you see how the bears march, following the contours of the topography? The birds, which are probably peregrine falcons, are on the slope, as though diving down for the kill. So these were produced to conform to the national environment and to animate the mounds themselves. That is, we believe that when people made these mounds, they believed that they were ceremonially giving life to the spirits themselves. These are spirits. They’re not statues of spirits.

These are spirits. And the use of the environment gives that motion, and we can study it so easy now with the LiDAR, again, because of the lack of obscuring vegetation. I’ll just mention one thing local. Oops. Oh, before I go to that, another group of effigy mounds. Aerial photography is often good here too. But this gives you an idea of what effigy mound lines look like. This is a bird and a bear shown here, among other mounds. Both of these animals, very important in religious beliefs of Native American society. Now going back to LiDAR, and again, we’re seeing a map made by lasers, so it’s not crystal clear, but you can see in three dimensions, right? Can you see a ridge running down here? Okay, so this is an effigy mound group I discovered last month, [audience chuckling] near Madison, in a woodlot.

I had been consulting with the Bishops Bay development people, and there had been mounds recorded a hundred years ago, somewhere in the vicinity, that we were looking for. And so in previous days, I spent some time just walking around, doing the searching, beating down the bushes, looking for mounds. But in 15 minutes, I just went on the website, Dane County LiDAR website, it’s publicly accessible, pulled up the map, and bingo! There was a round mound, just like I showed you before, an effigy mound, and something like we call a linear mound. And this has been happening almost every week, new mounds, or mounds that we thought were destroyed all of a sudden appear, maybe in a slightly different location. And unfortunately, this gets to be like a web search. You know how you go in, when you get on the web and then it’s almost midnight. [chuckles] And you spent all the day getting distracted, you know? Effigy mound LiDAR is exact, oh, look at this, look at this, stuff like that. So I gotta start ridding myself of the addiction here, the science addiction to do that. Leave it up to the younger people who like sitting in front of devices all day long. I seem to have lost my one image here.

But a third type of mound that we’ll talk a little bit later are platform mounds, big bases for buildings that were introduced to the area about 1050 AD by a group of people we call the Mississippians. How many people have been to Aztalan? Well, great, yeah. So you saw the platform mounds there. These are bases. These aren’t burial mounds. These are bases for buildings. And we only have a couple examples. One spectacular example is Aztalan itself, a large fortified town that’s 1,000 years old and a part of this Mississippian society that expanded in the area and then disappeared. Another group of platform mounds is up in Trempealeau, Wisconsin, which has been a subject of very new research described in the book, because to everyone’s surprise, they found a village area associated with the mounds of people who were directly from an ancient city we call Cahokia. And all the stuff is from Cahokia in southern Illinois.

There’s no local stuff. People just brought all their stuff and their religious beliefs. They built the temp and maybe stayed for two decades and left. All right, so with mound building, in order to put this in context, I just briefly wanted to run through what was happening before that. Again, mounds were not built until about 500 AD, as you can see, went through changes. So, the book goes through sort of the trajectory of changing Native cultures. And what we see starting 13,000 years ago is that populations grew through time and populations became more complex. In the whole Midwestern area, as a result, a city was made, an actual Native American city. Again, Cahokia. So we see this trajectory of complexity.

And many of these Native cultures are as every bit sophisticated and complex as equivalent societies anywhere in the world for their time. So we always struggle with the stereotype, at least the older people do, of sort of the savage, the primitive people, when in the archeological record shows quite the opposite in many, in all cases. So but, going back 13,000 years, we have people who came into the area, small bands at the end of the glaciers. And when our lakes here were in fact all a part of one giant lake because they, you know about this? Yeah. You remember the name of the lake? – [Audience Member] No. – Glacial Lake Yahara. Yeah. But the glaciers are melting and so on. And people started moving in the area, and they made some artifacts that are pretty spectacular and pretty special, like these. These are projectile points used to hunt extinct game.

Probably these were used to hunt woodland caribou. And they come from the largest site, we call these Paleo-Indian sites, in the whole Midwest, if not whole North America, which is on the Yahara River near McFarland, another thing that makes this whole area special. This in fact shows you, these little triangles are where the earliest people live, these Paleo-Indians live. And as you can see, that white area is Glacial Lake Yahara. It’s all on the shores there; they were living on the shores of this great glacial lake. Through time, the climate warmed, population grew, and with them again becoming a great deal of complexity. For example, trade for exotic items developed, already starting about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, often bringing in, again, very exotic and symbolic items to the people themselves. About 5,000 years ago, in fact, the people started to trade copper, especially in Wisconsin, which is bizarre because there’s no copper deposits in Wisconsin. They were getting the copper from Lake Superior. But as I pointed out in the book, the copper items that are being traded are almost identical.

I mean, they’re trading similar objects for similar objects, basically. But when you think about it, if you’re giving a gift, it doesn’t matter what it is. And in fact, again, I pointed out in the book, in Native American belief systems, copper is a source of power. Great power, great supernatural power. In fact, some of the water spirits in the Great Lakes, monsters, are known for their copper tails. But these are powerful. So people were exchanging gifts of power and therefore, binding people together. So this theme religious beliefs keeps moving right down the line. The first mounds occur, as I mentioned, about 500 or 600 AD and are associated with other developments. For example, the first pottery.

Now, they’ve been around for thousands of years. Why would pottery, as for cooking and other containers, only come now? Well, the answer is because before that, they’re very mobile. And what’s the last thing you wanna have when you’re moving? And that is something you could break. Alright, everybody stop. Gotta make some new pottery. So it was only when people started to live in more permanent communities, and then bingo, pottery starts. But, as I point out in the book and other works, they’re decorated with special designs that relate to the powers of the earth, air, and the underworld and so on. So we see these themes keep being elaborated on. And at the same time, we see these first mounds, these conical mounds that I talked about. People were buried in pits below the mounds.

People weren’t buried in the mounds. Starting about 300 BC, we see a great influence in the cultures here in Wisconsin from Ohio. In Ohio, about 300 BC and going to about 200 AD, we have the development of a very complex culture that is called Hopewell. And Hopewell people had, again, a very complex society, but most visibly built huge earthworks in circles and in squares, along with mounds and sacred roads leading to these. And what you’re seeing right here covers many square miles. I mean, these are huge. This covers 18 acres. This covers 20. This is a huge ceremonial center, but earthen ceremonial center. Hopewell was, in fact, like this exchanging of copper, a religious movement.

But a part of that religious movement also included the trade for exotic items from throughout Eastern North America. So, trade. This is from a mound in Wisconsin that was built because the Hopewell influence reached into Wisconsin at the time. People here did not build these giant earthworks, but they did build burial mounds. Basically, the mounds were covered, covered a mausoleum. The idea here would be to dig a big pit, or if the bedrock was too close to the surface, make a room out of stones. And that became a family mausoleum. And as people died, they’re put in the pit or in the enclosure. Somebody else died, they’d open it up again. And then when it needed to be abandoned, when they left or it was filled, they put a mound over it.

So these are mausoleum mounds. But in many cases, huge offerings, very important offerings that show this Hopewell influence. This is, again, from one mound near Trempealeau, actually. And these are the grave goods that accompanied these people that were buried in the mounds. Obsidian from out west. Copper, again, from Lake Superior. Other blades from other areas. These beads are wood that was covered with silver, with a silver coating. And the silver, again, is from distance. So they’re bringing in, but these items obviously had symbolic value, but they also seemed to mark the status of one group of people who were buried in the mounds that was different than others.

Archeological excavations, inadvertently in fact, found some years ago where other people were buried. Near Prairie du Chien, there’s an island, and archeologists in Madison were excavating to get the history of the region and came across a huge pit with over 60 people that had not been mounded and very few grave goods. But the mound with the grave goods was in the high bluff area, and this was near the water, showing a division between upper world and a lower world. And the people in the upper world were at that society, or in that time, the nobles, the leaders. And they got the burial with the treasures, basically, in the high bluffs, whereas the others represented a lower world where more people were represented. Now, the Hopewell collapsed for reasons we’re still trying to figure out. But about 600 AD, we see a new movement taking place. Similar to the extent it was not purely economic. I’m sorry, when I stand in the way, please. [audience laughing] ‘Cause I tend to roam here.

But another movement that was, again, not totally economic, but may be called religious. And that is when these effigy mounds were being built, that I talked about before, into vast landscapes. Between 600 and about 1100 AD, here in Wisconsin, 15,000 to 20,000 mounds were built during that time period, which in itself are more mounds than any equivalent area of North America, and I suppose, by extension, in the world. Wisconsin, always been a really popular place to live. But this is correlated by a climatic shift. We call it the Medieval Warm Climate, which made things even warmer and more productive. It was rainy and warm. And so we see people population, in southern Wisconsin especially, growing extraordinarily larger than surrounding populations because the resources were so good. Now that population growth, huge. Here in Madison, people are all over the place.

Madison was packed with people. They were living in uplands, little upland ponds and lakeshores and prairie. They were living everywhere. And so this is a recipe for friction. So many people competing. But just like the copper I mentioned before, they develop a system of bonding together in a common religious or world view. Instead of making war, they’re all participating in a religious movement that probably emphasized values and included a common ancestry. The effigy mounds themselves are important spirit beings, but for example, among the Ho-Chunk today, these same beings are literally their ancestors. If you’re a Bear Clan member, it is because you are bear in that your ancestor was a bear that became human. If you’re a Thunderbird Clan member, it is because you are a thunderbird.

That is, your thunderbird ancestor came from the sky, lit in a tree, and became human, and then goes down here. So by expressing themselves this way, they’re relating their ancestry and claims to the land. Many different forms of effigy mounds. And again, many of these are clans, of Native American clans that is. In modern times, Native people had these forms as clans. But again, also ancestors, and also these spirits, played other roles in society. For example, thunderbirds are known because they give incredible blessings to human beings and so on. Bears are associated with earth, and in many Native traditions, are associated with healing and curing and so on. So there’s many different roles that these spirits play, but as I emphasized, I and others have emphasized, mounds are often made to be animated or the earth itself animates these creatures. They all have burials in them.

But it is my belief that through ceremonial rituals, the people, probably medicine people, are actually bringing the spirits to life at the places where they dwell. So these aren’t statues. These aren’t symbols. These aren’t simply clan totems. These are living spirits that are brought up. And once they’re brought to life, that’s where they are. That’s where the spirit is. No need to bother it anymore. And again, people were buried in this, probably with the thought that they’re being buried with their ancestor, and that their ancestor is taking them, is now carrying them. So you have this merging of the generations that they become cyclical, right? You know? And these effigy mounds were built in vast landscapes.

These black dots are all the places where mound groups have been recorded, not just individual mounds. And you can see Southern Wisconsin is lit. So we are the heartland of this amazing effigy mound, what we call now the Effigy Mound Ceremonial Complex. And we characterize it as an international world wonder. And the center of it, look at where the center is. Madison. [chuckles] The Four Lakes area is the central part of this. So the Madison area did play a major role in the development and continuation of this ceremonial complex. But associated with the ceremonial complex were new types of pottery, sometimes very, very intricate. These are all made with corded designs.

You see the bird? Thunderbird. So the pottery itself is not just simply utilitarian, but also has religious connotations. Look at the cordage on this. Very time-consuming. Women made pottery in Native American cultures. So the women themselves were spending as much time making pottery as the people were, in general, making mounds. So somehow, this fits in to what was going on in terms of the ceremonial complex’s religious movement. The pottery made here in Southern Wisconsin and elsewhere in the effigy mound region is simply the most complex pottery ever made in ancient Midwest. And again, highly symbolic, has great deal to do with this effigy mound complex. And what was going on in terms of economy was that the people were making a transition from hunting and gathering to growing crops.

Corn and so on is introduced during this time. So that is a clue to increasing complexity. For example, during that time, we see the first evidence of fortified villages. And the best example is here in the Madison area. At Governor Nelson Park, an archaeologist found a fortified village very near to where effigy mounds were. New types of housing. These are like earth lodges, except made by bark, but they’re semi-subterranean. They dug two or three-foot basements, and then made these small structures. Best known of these in the Upper Midwest is again in this area. Several sites have been found in the footprints of these particular pictures.

So there’s a great deal of change going on in this time. Here’s a LiDAR picture of one of the vast landscapes. This is from Southwestern Wisconsin. It’s called a [unintelligible] site. Birds, animals of various sorts. All have the special symbolism and are considered to be powerful. Again, in this case here, I see a lot of what I think are peregrine falcons. At the Effigy Mound National Monument, the peregrine falcons that I pointed out before are logical because that stretch of the Mississippi River is known to be the roosting ground of peregrine falcons, to the extent that the National Park Service is reintroducing falcons to the park and elsewhere. And here, 1,000 years ago, they’re building peregrine falcons because this is where they live, this is where their spirits are, right here. And so obviously, that influences, the habitat of important spirit beings influences where they’re made.

In the Madison area, this is Lake Mendota. All these black dots are effigy mound groups or had been effigy mound groups. Many of them survive, but about 80% of all effigy mounds have been, 80% have been destroyed. Even so, there are many thousands left. Gives you an idea on the extent of the ceremonial complex. One of my favorite places is up at Mendota State Hospital. How many people have been there? Yeah, okay, great. It’s extraordinary. The whole complex, it basically explains to me effigy mound ceremonialism and is right here. When I have a question, I can just jump in a car and go visit.

I don’t have to get a grant and go across the sea and get permission to go, stuff like that. But here is big birds. See those? This is a LiDAR, but I filled in just for clarity. Big birds that are almost certainly thunderbirds. And can you see? They surround, arc around what archaeologists found several decades ago to be a village site. So one interpretation now that’s interesting, but doesn’t relate to this, among the Ho-Chunk, traditional chiefs of the Ho-Chunk must come from the Thunderbird Clan. Even today, traditional chiefs come from the Thunderbird Clan. Is this the village, the chief village of the Four Lakes effigy mound people? I think so. In this case, the thunderbirds, I believe, were made to protect, to protect the village, basically. Effigy mounds are built for a variety of purposes.

But the primary idea here was thunderbirds as the great protector of the Thunderbird village. Just makes logical sense and so on. Over here, off to the side is an effigy mound, a group on private land that is most, about 1/2 of it’s there, but we have plenty of good records. And why I like this juxtaposed on the village site is that this is sort of a shorthand of the underlying structure of the belief system of the effigy mound people. And that is a division of the upper world and the lower world represented by great spirit beings, and a subdivision of the lower world into an earth and a watery underworld. But each one having different powers and so on. And too bad you can’t have a closeup, but to explain that, the line begins with another form of thunderbirds. This is how Native people make thunderbirds even today. And then it goes into earth animals: bears and a canine. And then, all of a sudden, the whole grouping switches orientation, goes towards the water, and this mound right here is something called a water spirit, common to this area and especially eastern part of the effigy mound people.

Water spirits are powerful spirits that live in the water. They have a very long tail. They’re sometimes imagined to be horned. Okay? They can be malicious. They can be cranky. Early Ho-Chunk people told Charles E. Brown of the Wisconsin Historical Society a long time ago that Governors Island, if you know where that is in Lake Mendota, is where the water spirits live. And if you don’t put tobacco in the water when you go out in a boat, they’re gonna suck you down [chuckles] into their habitats. So how many people go out on a boat on Lake Mendota without putting tobacco in the water? [audience chuckling] Well, now you know. [laughs] You’ve got the warning now.

Yeah, but anyway, very important. And some of these are colossal, by the way. Water spirits can have tails of 700, 800 feet. The thunderbird there in the center has a wingspan of 634 feet, and a larger thunderbird existed, once existed along the Wisconsin River that was a quarter of a mile long. So some of these were colossal mounds. And I think you can understand why these are so interesting. I mean, besides being just representations, why archaeologists find these, because there are so many clues into their belief system, how they lived, how they perceived the world. The remaining question is why did they build so many during a certain time period? They were calling upon blessings of the spirits for various reasons, but why in such a extraordinary fashion, time-consuming fashion? So if you wanna know the answer to that, you’re gonna have to wait for the third edition. [Robert chuckling] [audience chuckling] So the effigy mound comes– Oh, I should mention that another, to emphasize a ceremonial aspect of the effigy mound cultures is the fact that sometimes water spirits were not mounds, but were water spirits. They’re called intaglios, and the only one left is in Fort Atkinson.

And you can see head, feet, and then what had been a very long tail. Water spirits are known for their very long tails, similar in form to like a panther and so on. And intaglio is sort of the opposite of mound. It’s dug into the mound rather than being mounded up. These were not burial sites. And so the intaglios were always interesting to us. And then several years ago, remember when we had such huge rains? Closed off everything? The intaglio filled up with water and became a water spirit. So this lovely sort of experience for us really gave us the thought that again, even intaglios were meant to be living, but appropriately, not made of earth, but of water itself. All right, so effigy mounds culture came to end about 1100 AD, and in part because of the entrance of these people, the Mississippians that I talked about before. In Southern Illinois, people down there began growing corn, and soon became intensive farmers and built a city, a huge city covering six square miles.

We now call it Cahokia. Have you kids been to Cahokia? Yeah, you should go down there. It’s really. . . It’s climbing the mounds. But Cahokia has also the most wonderful museum in the whole country. Yeah, it’s worth seeing the museum itself. Isn’t that great? And these Mississippians, as they grew, expanded and came into Wisconsin eventually, and again, creating a town we now call Aztalan, which is only 30 miles away. And at Aztalan, they moved in with these woodland people, the former effigy mound people.

In other cases, we get the idea that there was conflict. For example, I showed you the fortified village that’s here in Madison, right? Well, that was there while Aztalan was going, 30 miles away, and yet there’s no evidence of any kind of contact, peaceful contact. So it may be that Madison people were at war. So the idea is that the Mississippians came in, introduced some new ideas, and had various relationships. Some of them were trade relationships, others were intermarriage. Depended on the area. But bottom line is that the effigy mound people and woodland people began to disappear, their traditions. Effigy mounds, for example, were not built anymore. But the Mississippian society, Cahokia, and this whole complex disappeared in the Upper Midwest at 1200 AD, probably for climatic areas. It persisted down south.

But after 1200 AD, we have no Mississippians and we now have no effigy mound people. What happened? And this is where I’m gonna be ending up. I’m not gonna tell you. You have to read the book. [audience laughing] A third new culture springs to life after 1200 AD that we believe to be a product of the interaction of the Mississippians with the effigy mound people. They didn’t build platform mounds. They didn’t build effigy mounds. They had regular cemeteries that we kind of use today, but it was a different, it was a cultural expression that we think derived from this sort of interrelationship between these two cultures. We call it Oneota when the standard, later on, structures were longhouses as compared to the smaller houses that we saw before. We call Oneota, and Oneota comes into the historic period.

That is, when the first Europeans came here, we’re positive that it was the Oneota, archeologically speaking, who were the tribes that the Europeans met, including the Ho-Chunk and others, therefore giving us, giving us a good idea or showing us that the Ho-Chunk belief system and other tribes are reflected. Their ancient belief systems go back to the effigy mound people, you know? And they still have them in modern days, but that’s because there was a cultural condition. We can’t say that, for example, the Ho-Chunk alone built the mounds because we know that the Ho-Chunk were one time, a part of a greater group that included a group called the Iowa Indians who moved off. They split off and moved on. And the Ho-Chunk today are not the same Ho-Chunk that existed 1,000 years ago, you know? Societies tend to split off or attach each other and become bigger and so on. In talking, what people are really most interested in, so which tribe made the mounds? I say, well, Ho-Chunk and other tribes have mound-building in their ancestry. But to say that Ho-Chunk made the mounds is like saying the English built Stonehenge. Well, yes and no.

[chuckles] English did not– English was not an ethnic identity at the time. But are the ancestors of modern English, were they involved? Oh, sure. But the English did not exist, ’cause cultures tend to change. So we cannot make a direct line, but we can talk about common ancestries. And all of these mounds that I talked about before, even the Mississippians probably, are in the cultural traditions of the people, Native people that are with us today here in Wisconsin. And this is their story. So with that, I’m going to end up my presentation.