University Place

New Perspective on Wisconsin’s Monumental Earthworks

– Today we are pleased to introduce Amy Rosebrough, as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. Amy Rosebrough has worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society, in the State Archeology and Maritime Preservation Program since 2000. She received her PhD at UW-Madison in 2010. And the focus of her research was the effigy mound phenomenon in Wisconsin. Prior to that, Amy worked in the private sector for some years and conducted research at sites from Arkansas to South Dakota. Here today to discuss the monumental earthworks of the Midwest, from burial mounds to ceremonial geometric urban enclosures, please join me in welcoming Amy Rosebrough. (audience clapping)

– Thank you very much for having me here at our wonderful museum. So I’m here to talk about technology, and how it is helping us to identify and preserve and interpret Wisconsin’s monumental landscape. Wisconsin is one of the few places in the world, where you can find effigy mounds, the only place where you find them in any number. We have more earthworks in our state, than any other state in the United States.

More were built here, to begin with, than anywhere else. Some of the early surveyors called Wisconsin “the sculpted land,” because there were so many mounds, so many earthworks of different types, in Wisconsin, in the prairies and the forests and the fields. Man Mound is our ambassador, National Historic Landmark, the only human-shaped effigy mound on the planet. So even though he’s missing some bits of his lower feet and legs I highly recommend that you go visit just to experience for yourself how amazing these pieces of art can be. Monumental figures of various kinds can be found worldwide, but usually carved down into the landscape, geoglyphs like the Nazca Lines, or the Chalk Horses of England, or they’re built up with rocks, and kind of outlines, and those are tiny little things called Petra forms. You can find some in Canada, and a few in Minnesota. But only in Wisconsin do we have, monumental bas-relief sculptures. And these are pieces of art. Native American peoples have been manipulating and changing Wisconsin’s landscape, for 10,000 years and more. The first people to arrive here after the ice melted back, mined and quarried stone, and later copper, leaving pits and spoil piles at various places on our landscape, such as Silver Mound in Jackson County.

They began to manipulate the plants around them, experimenting with early forms of agriculture and changing the makeup of the forest and the prairies, and they burned Wisconsin. Started prairie fires, that kept Wisconsin from revegetating, after the high in temperatures, that occurred five, 6000 years ago. So when you hear a naturalist talking about restoring Wisconsin, to its natural, oak savanna landscape, you can laugh at them. Because it’s not natural at all. This is a very managed phenomenon. But after 500 AD– 500 BC, rather, people began to actually sculpt the earth itself, by raising, at first burial mounds and then earthworks of various other kinds. The first earthworks, the first mounds, were simple domes, which we call conical mounds, but they’re not really cones, they’re domes, built for burial of the dead. And these mounds arrive at the same time that other changes are sweeping through Wisconsin. The first agriculture, that y’know, first real planting of seeds in order to gain crops. Pottery arrives for the first time.

And there’s an uptake in ceremony and symbology. And all these things together, create what we call the Woodland tradition. Succeeded later by a Mississippian tradition, and then by historic Native American peoples. So it’s a very exciting time to be in Wisconsin when these first earthworks are being built. So what do we find here? Well, conical mounds. Here’s a big one. This is one of the big mounds up in Burnett County. This is what’s called an accretionary mound, at a place that people return to, over and over again, every 10, 15, 20 years, in order to add more layers as another burial ceremony would take place. So these mounds up in northwestern county, get really, really, really big. Our state archeologist once said, “Hey, that’s big as a Buick.

” So, big as a Buick mound. Here’s Milwaukee Public Museum, scoping one out, trying to decide if they want to open it up or not. The very first conical burial mounds, built in Wisconsin are pretty enigmatic to us. We really don’t know much about the ceremonies that went with them because there’s so few on the landscape. And because so few were ever professionally excavated. Based on excavations elsewhere outside of Wisconsin, we suspect that these mounds were built to cover structures called charnel houses, places where the bodies of the dead were laid out, kind of like an above ground tomb or mausoleum, until it was full and then that building would be burned down, and a mound built over them to cap them. So this is a mound, over in the Ohio Valley and you can see the posts, from that former structure preserved in what’s now the mound floor. Mounds of that time also, typically contained a pigment called red ochre. It’s a naturally occurring bright red mineral, that coats the burial features and some of the artifacts that might be found in these mounds. This early mound building tradition continues, up until about 2000 years ago or little after, and then new impulses, new ideas, come in from the Ohio Valley and from Illinois.

And it’s called the Hopewellian Exchange, or Hopewellian Interactions Sphere. It’s a set of ceremonies and a kind of artistic style, that gets some popularity in Wisconsin, not too much. At that point, people were building below ground family tombs, there may still have been structures over them, but they’re digging tombs down into the earth and covering them with matting, or hides or bark, and then something temporary over that. And then the mounds are built up over them again. The Hopewellian style mounds, may or may not contain artifacts. If they do, they’re probably that style that comes in from the Ohio Valley. And, the Hopewellian Exchange had incredible art. You see on the far left, an effigy pipe in the form of a beaver, with freshwater pearl eyes and real beaver teeth added, a hand made out of mica, a ceremonial knife made out of obsidian, from Yellowstone National Park, and then a copper ornament that would probably have been tied to fabric, and the copper is coming from the Great Lakes region, our area. So Wisconsin was part of this great almost continental style, or scale trade, that’s occurring during that period. And then, it all fell apart.

The trade network collapsed, people went back to doing what they were doing locally, except in Wisconsin. They started changing the way mound ceremony took place. It became much more localized. They severed themselves from long distance trade networks, but they also began to experiment with mound form. They were still building conical mounds, but they’re smaller, mostly, and usually, only containing one or two graves. There’s exceptions to that, which I’ll get to in a minute. And then they started building not just, dome-shaped mounds, but long mounds like this. This is a linear mound at Lizard Mound County Park, in Washington County outside West Bend. Again, marking the graves, one, two, three, maybe four people. And then from there, they got really elaborate.

Our first effigy mound. So around AD 750, people began to sculpt burial mounds, into the shapes of birds, animals, spirits and even human-like forms like the Man Mound at Baraboo. This is one of the few photographs that I have, that actually shows an effigy mound from the ground. They’re very, very hard to photograph. They sink down into the earth, the second you raise your camera up. So we have to wait for floods like this, to outline them for us. Or, you wait for them to fill up. So there is a very, very, very rare, effigy mound variant called an intaglio, instead of the mound being built up, it’s dug down in. Obviously this doesn’t contain a burial, we’re not really sure about intaglio, there’s only one left that we know of, at Fort Atkinson. So on highway 106, on the west side of town, still there in a little park and, years like this year and last year when it rains a lot, I mean really a lot, sometimes the intaglio fills up.

Which I absolutely love to see, and that may be a clue, to why this particular intaglio, is where it is and why it looks like it does. Because the shape is the shape of a Native American water spirit. So during floods, the water spirit intaglio turns into a spirit made out of water, which I love. And there’s a huge variety in form, not just among the effigy or the animal-shaped mounds, but among the rest of mounds. Not just dome-shaped and linear mounds, but any geometric combination of those shapes you can think of. Things that look like triangles, and clubs and tadpoles and caterpillars and crosses and knives. And we have no idea really what any of that means, but it’s spectacular. And this is one of the only places on the planet where you see this, in any form. Effigies are built mostly in the southern half of Wisconsin, in the northwestern part of the state, during the same period of mound building, you have the great big mound people, the accretionary mound people, possibly ancestral to the Dakota, up there. You have this tradition is very related to effigy mound, except, no effigy mounds, but they’re building linear and geometric forms.

We’ll call them the small mound folks. That’s in far northeastern Wisconsin. And then again, effigy mound builders all across the southern half of the state, with a couple of special places. Trampealeau and Aztalan, which I’ll get to in a second. Most of the mounds I’ve been talking about, pretty much all of them, up till now, are burial mounds. There are some, ideas out there that have gained some currency, that effigy mounds weren’t used for burial, that is not the case. We know from past excavation, that at least 87% contained burials, and the ones that have not yielded burials, I suspect that’s just due to soil chemistry, or the fact that there were cremations that weren’t recognized. Because effigy mound people would cremate their dead from time to time. As such, all of the mounds I’ve been describing are protected by state law. Wisconsin Statute 157.

70 protects burial mounds as grave markers and burial places, no matter how old they are, how many people are buried inside, they’re protected that way. And if you look at the mounds, built in southern Wisconsin at least, during that period of effigy construction, you see amazing variation in ritual too. It’s not just, someone dies, they get a mound. They might or might not get a mound. Not everybody got to be buried in a mound. Some people are buried far away from mounds, some people are buried next to mounds, some people are buried in their very own mound, perhaps a simple one like a dome shape or conical mound, maybe something a little more elaborate, like the linear mound, or they may share a mound, with hundreds and hundreds of other folks. So every once in a while, during the period of effigy construction, 750 AD to around 1200 AD, a community would build one great big mound, containing, again, hundreds of packages of bones. It’s a mass grave, and it may reflect the presence in Wisconsin, with ceremony we call, Feast of the Dead. Something that’s historically only known from the eastern Great Lakes. And this is a ceremony that takes place when a community is about to split into two, or it’s about to move.

And it’s a way of gathering ancestors together, into one place, in order to emphasize the unity of the community. In other words, our ancestors sleep together, we are one people. So even though we’re taking our leave of each other, or we’re moving from one place to another, we’re going to remember that this is our home, this is where our ancestors lie together. So that ceremony was also taking place here. So these are sculptures, they’re sacred places, they’re burial places, they’re not simple places. People have often assumed that because you don’t find really interesting artifacts in the effigy mounds, the stuff built after AD 750, that people must have been pretty simple, back then. It’s only recently that we’ve begun to recognize the variation in burial ritual, and only recently we’ve begun to see the mounds themselves are markers or status. So let’s say you’re a very simple hunter-gatherer out, and your entire focus in the year is gathering food for the winter so that you don’t starve. Are you going to take the time out of your daily routine, to build an effigy mound? It depends on how long it takes. Well effigy mounds sometimes took a very, very long time to build.

So here’s the Capitol Square, and in a second I’m going to push a button and the largest effigy mound that we know of, is going to appear on it. So, Okay, all right. So this an earth work in that dwarfs the capitol in size, stretching from one corner of Capitol Square to another. Estimating let’s say we have 50 adults working sunrise to sunset without a break. That is three months of work, easy. Now that is a substantial amount of time to devote to a project like this, taking away from survival strategy, if it’s not really, really important. I think the person buried in that mound was considered pretty important. Considering there may only be one person, in there. In other words this is, I won’t say king, but the equivalent. Someone who was deemed worthy enough, to get a huge monument to themselves, 1000 years ago.

The shapes themselves tell us something about the people who built them. So here’s a very, very complicated path. It’s a little busy. This is 10 years of my life right here. (audience laughing) This is what the dissertation led to. It’s a map showing the most common mound form, in every effigy-building community. Sometimes the two or three most common forms. And the proportion of effigy mounds that that form takes up. So in Madison, 34% of the effigy mounds are birds, 21% are bears. And all the other shapes take up single digits, sometimes in the one or 2%.

And you’ll notice they’re different shapes. These are probably identifiers. Either it’s the clan of the person buried within, or perhaps a religious organization, something like the Masons or the Optimist Club, that they belong to. But this is saying that the landscape itself, that if you were to track down a person in Beloit, and ask them to identify themselves, versus a person up in Trempealeau or a person in the Horicon area, they would probably identify themselves differently. And then, so about 900 AD or so, when the effigy mound building is at its peak, some new folks arrived from the south, they had different ideas about mound building. They didn’t build effigy mounds, they did build some conical mounds, and things that looked a little like linear mounds, except kind of a peaked, top to them, but mostly they built platforms. In other words, heaping up earth in a kind of truncated pyramid so that it could hold or elevate a structure. Whether it’s a temple, or the house of somebody very important. They came from a place called Cahokia, which is the closest thing North America ever had to a city. Tens of thousands of people, just on the other side of the Mississippi River from St.

Louis, you can actually as you head south on I-55, pass the mound, the big mound you see here in this artist reconstruction. It looks just like a hill, off to your left on the way into St. Louis. This is a World Heritage Site, I highly recommend a visit if you haven’t been, fantastic museum. Plus you get to walk up to the top of this mound, Monks Mound and you get a view of St. Louis and the Arch in the distance if the pollution’s not too bad. They sent colonists or traders north. Maybe exiles, who settled in two locations. The places I mentioned just a little while ago. Aztalan, Aztalan State Park in Jefferson County, just east of Lake Mills, and Trempealeau.

The little bluff just above the bluffs at Trempealeau on the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin. And in both places, they built Cahokian-style platform mounds. At least at Aztlan, one of those mounds was the platform for their charnel house, so it does contain burials. The others seem to have been for temples or residential structures. So no human remains have been found there. Trempealeau, same thing, they appear to be more temple-related. So in red, you see Trempealeau on the left, Aztalan on the right, there were other platform mounds built, on the Minnesota side of the river up near Red Wing, or Diamond Bluff, and some at Jo Daviess County just south of our state line. And then there these things, enclosures. We really don’t have any idea what these were for. (audience laughing) There’s similar things built in historic period that function as dance circles.

So as archeologists, we’re going to guess, make sense to us. They’re small enough to have been used for dances. Every so often you’ll find one that’s pretty big and they’re definitely houses inside it. So those may be the remains of fortifications. But something like this, this is a type called a racetrack enclosure, because it’s oval and it has both an inside and outside, and you could just see the outer ring right at the front and then the far right of this one, the inner ring is pretty easy to see. And you could imagine dances taking place there. These people worked their way around this oval enclosure. And finally our garden beds. These get overlooked, people don’t think of these as earthworks that much, but just as much effort went into these, as the mounds themselves. These are ridged cornfields and squash fields, okay.

Earth furrowed and built up into ridges that are three or more feet high, and then swales dug out in between them. And these can cover acres and acres and acres. These are built from around AD 900, up to the historic period. This is done in part, to manipulate the soil. This is a form of changing soil chemistry. The ridges were built up, not just by moving soil to one location, but they would slash and burn, wait for rain, wait for rain to concentrate ash and nutrients in low-lying spots. Build the ridge fields at those locations, and bring in sometimes extra soil, extra minerals, other plants, perhaps from wetlands to burn in order to change the soil chemistry and make it what they wanted it to be. Some of these locations, as excavations in Menominee County have shown, when the farmers walked away from them, in some cases after centuries of use, they were still more fertile, than before the ridges had been built in the first place. So that’s great agriculture. Okay, one quick question.

– [Woman] Is this on like flat ground, or is it on a slope like a terrace?

– Okay, is it on flat ground or a slope like a terrace. Mostly flat ground but sometimes a slight slope. And on those sites, again, excavations in Menominee County have shown that they would sometimes, as the climate shifted, change the orientation of the ridges, in order to either let water go past faster, if it’s a wet period, or catch it, perpendicular if it’s a dry period. Most of these earthworks are gone. There were tens of thousands at one point in Wisconsin, and they were plowed under, roads put through them, like the Wehmhoff, Panther Mound in Kenosha County, that road has since been moved, by the way the DOT felt bad. (audience laughing) Houses went on top of them, quarries took them out, they were mined away, for garden soil. There was a kind of an urban legend for a while that mound dirt was really fertile, so people would haul mounds away and spread them across the gardens as mulch. They were quarried for fill, for railroad grades and for roads. Very few are left. The ones that are left, like the Man Mound, like the Wehmhoff Panther, many have suffered damage.

So what you see in some of the photos I’m showing you and in the photos that Dan Seurer has on fourth floor, are the survivors. So they’re rare. They’re special places not just because of what happened there, but because they’ve survived. One of the few places you can go, to actually experience Wisconsin’s landscape as it was. The first European explorers to come into this landscape were perplexed by them. They didn’t have the background to understand what they were seeing. And, I bring them up because it illustrates one of the problems with effigy mounds or with earthworks in general, is that they’re monumental. They’re pretty big. And if you’re going to find them and see them, you can’t just look at them from a distance and go, “Oh, that’s obviously such and such,” you really have to experience them close up. And Wisconsin does not often make that easy.

So here from the original land surveys of Wisconsin from 1834, this is our first illustration of an effigy mound ever. The surveyor has dutifully made a map, I’m not sure he understood that he was mapping a water spirit effigy, and possibly, maybe a mink, I’m not sure, some other effigy. It has legs, it’s long. The first written account we have from the 1820s, was written by a military man and he kept thinking in terms of fortifications. And they didn’t make any sense at all, to him. He’s like, “Oh, these are terrible fortifications, that people could walk right through. ” But if you map out what he’s talking about, he was pretty clearly finding bird and bear effigies outside Prairie Du Chien he just didn’t know it. In the winter, they’re under snow. So unless it’s a really big mound and the wind and the weather and the vegetation and the terrain is really cooperating, they’re gone. You can’t see them.

So here’s the Gale Mound Group, and I’ve added a map in the lower right hand corner here, so you see what you should be seeing. From a distance you just get bumps. And you are, “Are those snowdrifts, are they mounds?” Yeah. In the summer, good luck. Even when the oak savanna was at its full extent, Wisconsin is tall grass prairie. So, even from this point forward in the spring, the mounds are quickly disappearing. Here is John Broihahn, our state archeologist, He’s looking for an effigy mound group at this location. He and I walked back and forth over these mounds about five times, before we realized that at some points in the brush, we were going up and then down a little bit. So we had to feel them out with our feet, which is not an ideal way to survey a mound group. But they’re incredibly difficult to see most of the year.

So if you’re going to find a mound, protect a mound, preserve a mound, map a mound, learn about the landscapes that those mounds document. Surveying on foot is not easy. Wisconsin is full of thorns, so many thorns. (audience laughing) Poison ivy, the occasional snake, okay, not many poisonous, but, he doesn’t like snakes, I don’t like them either. They’re creatures, and as much as archeologists like to go outside and dig, we don’t like coming back bloody, with our clothes torn and itchy. (audience laughing) And mounds surveys lead to that. Because there’s a lot of crawling around, feeling on the ground, trying to find these things. And then, technology came to our rescue. So LiDAR, Light Detection and Ranging. Wonderful stuff.

You may have seen it in the news, the news articles, couple three months back now maybe a little bit more, some folks using this in the Amazon Basin, and in the Yucatan Peninsula to find whole cities hiding in the jungle. We get to use it too. Okay. How does it work? Well, there’s a plane with a laser, like a laser scanner, the kind of thing that reads barcodes at the grocery store, plane flies over an area, shoots the little laser down, laser goes down, bounces off stuff, goes back up. So instrument on the plane records how long that takes. In the meantime, the plane is talking to all these GPS instruments on the ground and via satellite. And they are tracking exactly where the plan is in relationship, north, south, east, west in its altitude, how far above the ground it is. So this is what the computer initially sees. It’s going down, some laser pulses are hitting the tops of the trees and bouncing back, some laser pulses are hitting the middle of the trees and bouncing back, some are hitting the base of the tree or the ground beneath the tree, and they’re bouncing back. And it’s more or less mapping the forest.

Well, here’s the fun thing. You can tell the computer to ignore everything, except the very last pulses it got back. The stuff that went down the furthest, the stuff that hit the ground. Say ignore all the rest of that. So here’s an aerial photo of Wyalusing State Park, trees. LiDAR.

– [Woman] Wow!

– Good, good reaction. (audience laughing) The trees are gone, suddenly, mounds appear. A line of linear mounds running, from the top to the bottom, you see a nice bear mound just off to the right, right, your left, okay, another two linear mounds, heading to your right, to my left off to the side. You see the cuts through the modern roads.

You can even see the hiking trails, on the south where they’ve been worn down into the ground surface. Okay, LiDAR is wonderful. No more thorns. (audience chuckling) What does it do? Well, DNR contacted our office a little while back, said that they had a forestry project coming up in northwestern Wisconsin. And there were some funny things in the woods, would we mind taking a peek at the LiDAR? Great big mounds. So here are those lovely dome-shaped accretionary mounds quite a few of them. The big ones are showing up fairly well. And then you can just to make out and I forgot to put an arrow on that unfortunately, a set smaller mounds just to the left, bottom center of this. So some smaller conical mounds in a tight cluster. We knew about the smaller ones, didn’t know anything about the big ones.

Again, thorns, brush, wildlife, but LiDAR found them for us. So the DNR is now able to talk to the foresters, talk to the landowners and help them negotiate this landscape, to get their timber harvest in and protect the mounds all at the same time. Here’s Trempealeau. Okay, so you see the street grid of Trempealeau itself, the city, the river, in the lower half of the screen, and then the arrows up top. There are Mississippian platform mounds. They’re a little harder to pick out. So the yellow one, is pointing to two huge pits. These are borrow pits, where they got the soil to build the platforms in the first place. And notice there’s a line in between those. That’s a causeway.

That is a road that they’ve left, a ceremonial road leading between the borrow pits that runs directly up to the platform mounds. And you can imagine processions of people in full regalia, working their way down that causeway to the mounds. The big platform has the biggest pink arrow, the middle platform has the middle sized pink arrow, and the smallest platform, which may have had a temple or some sort of marker post, out on the end of the point has the smallest pink arrow. The enclosure I showed you earlier though, the Hancock enclosure that double racetrack the yellow arrow is pointing it. Can people pick up at least the outer embankment? Not as perfectly oval as the photos make it look, and some of the maps make it look. You stand back like, “Oh, that’s a little more circular than oval. ” We’ve got that sort of misnamed. Notice the bumps, that run in lines, two lines of bumps. Those are conical, dome-shaped burial mounds, associated with that site. And so now, who needs to spend hours making a survey map of this? It’s done. (laughing)

You can even on this one, notice that the top row as you move down to the right, one of those is a depression not a bump. So that may be another borrow pit associated with this site that people have overlooked over the years. Okay, can you see the circle? We got a call from someone at a wildlife refuge, up in the central part of the state, they said “We’ve found this funny circular thing on our land, could you take a look?” This appears to be a historic Ho-Chunk dance ring. It matches known examples, the entrance is due east like it should be, it is perfectly circular, like it should be. We have known accounts of historic villages just north of this, so this is probably a forgotten Ho-Chunk dancer ceremonial site. Okay preserved, thank goodness on a wildlife refuge. So we’re able to help them now with interpretation on that, and it’s helping us with our own research. So this is an older map of the Raisbeck Mounds group in southwestern Wisconsin. It’s one of the largest surviving effigy mound sites in the state. It’s on private property, so not accessible to the public.

But Milwaukee Public Museum headed out there just, as the Great Depression hit, in order to excavate some of these mounds and make a map. When they finished their field season, they got back to Milwaukee, the Great Depression hit. And suddenly they were much more focused on keeping the museum open and the budget intact, than on working on that report. The map vanished. We knew that it existed, but it’s gone now. The field notes have for the most part been lost. So we thought well, these mounds are still there. So why don’t we head on out, use some money we had from the sales of Indian Mounds Wisconsin book, and use that to remap the site, formally catalog it under Wisconsin’s Historic Preservation Statutes and Burial Site Law. Talk to the landowner and see what we can do about checking its condition, and making sure that it’s preserved, for another 100, 200, 300 years, or more. First thing we found out, on the ground, is that there were a lot more mounds out there than Milwaukee Public Museum ever found.

We found 30 to 40 more, than they ever found, and they found a lot. So they are packed in there. Mounds are at some places so close together that they’re actually touching, that they had to make one wing of a bird shorter because there was another mound in the way. They really wanted these mounds at this particular spot. Why? We’d like to know. But it seemed to kind of be an anomaly, just this giant mound group, out there, not completely by itself, there were few other mounds known around, but kind of in the middle of nowhere. So here’s the Grant River Valley. Each of the yellow dots, is a known mound site. And before we initially did that survey, we didn’t know about most of those dots. When the Burial Site Law was being checked over, reexamined just a couple of years ago, one of the legislators involved in that project asked us, “As we’re going through this looking at the law, can you tell us how many mounds we don’t know about?” (audience laughing) Sure.

(laughing) LiDAR, we’ll do a LiDAR survey. So we sampled two places in Wisconsin, instead of doing on the ground, how many, didn’t we know about. We LiDARed how many that we didn’t know about. We found in the Grant River Valley, we didn’t know about a lot of them. They were kind of everywhere. And it changes our perception of that valley and its history. We had known that there was a site called Fred Edwards, not too far from the Raisbeck Mound, it’s a village site. And it dates to the period after the Cahokians have arrived in Wisconsin. Fred Edwards has Cahokian-style houses, Cahokian-style and even Cahokian imported pottery, Cahokian-style gaming pieces, Cahokian-style arrow points, and everyone thought, “Oh, it’s a Cahokian colony. ” Problem with that is, it also has effigy mound-style pottery, sort of.

Some of it’s effigy mound style, 100%. Some of it’s like you took some ideas from Cahokia about how a pot should be made, and you blended them with some ideas, from the local effigy mound folks about how a pot should be made. What we call hybrid ware. People kind of tended to ignore that bit. They focused on the Cahokian side of Fred Edwards. Like Cahokians, they came in, they settled, and those effigy mound people, they either left or they were gone. Because Mississippians aren’t going to come in and settle right in the middle of somebody else’s territory. So, they must have abandoned that valley. The Grant Valley was empty by the time the Fred Edwards folks got here. See, I tend to take the effigy mound builders’ side of things.

So I was focused on this effigy mound-style pottery more or less, so I didn’t really like that explanation. So the LiDAR survey of the Grant River Valley made me very, very happy. Because we found mounds. Or, did we find mounds so many mounds. Raisbeck, where we crawled through vegetation and found mounds and went back and found more mounds, and got bloody and cows coughed on us in a windstorm, and it sleeted, we still didn’t find them all. We found more on the LiDAR. So, it was like, “Oh, really?” So faint the arrow to your left, you see linear mound on the corner of that terrace and on the right even fainter, they’re very hard to make out, two birds. Okay, and then the pink up top. Those are two bird effigies that we did know about. So we’re able to map those then in relationship to the larger site.

Okay, Raisbeck is even bigger than we thought. And the hills and bluffs around it. They just started popping out of the forest, one after another. So a procession of conical mounds and linear mounds, at this location with the field roads. Obviously, the people lived there know about these. So they’ve got a field road running right alongside them. A bird mound. You can even see a looters’ pitch in the breast of the bird, in this image. So, I’m not happy about that, but the bird otherwise, is in great shape. Conical mounds, off to its side, to the right, your perspective on this image and possibly some even down a little lower, in that floodplain.

More birds, an animal, a linear mound. We even had to revisit the history of archeological thought, in this section of Wisconsin. So William Pidgeon, who wrote The Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah in the mid 1800s, had always been considered this huge crank and crackpot, and he probably still was. He had an imagination, we’ll put it that way, he said that he interviewed the last of the mound builders. The last member of what he called the Elk nation. And he had the key to deciphering all the mounds. So this is a famous illustration from his book of a “battle mound,” okay, this never happened. But he had a wild imagination. But he did actually visit on the ground, this part of Wisconsin, the Mississippi Valley, and he did map and find some mounds, but everyone had always kind of blown off his maps, because they’re so geometric and so precise, and they’re really fanciful, and we’re like, “Yeah, there’s nothing like that out there ever. ” Maybe y’know like that one image I showed you.

There might be mounds winding their way down a ridge line. So they appear to be sort of in a straight line, but you’re not going to find anything like this. And then we did. (audience laughing) So this site got deemed Pidgeon’s Revenge. (audience laughing) I would love to visit it in person, I mean big mounds surrounded by a circle of smaller mounds with a line of mounds coming off either side and then maybe a linear mound at the end. Something’s happening here that you don’t see at most sites so eventually we’re hoping to visit these in person. What we found was that Fred Edwards is literally surrounded by effigy mounds, they guard every potential approach to that village. If you’re coming on the river they’re alongside the river, if you try and cut through that little side valley, over that ridge in the lower right to get there, there are mounds literally guarding the pass. There are mounds on the bluffs above watching the river, there are mounds right behind the village. I have a hard time believing that colonists from Cahokia would willingly come up and plop themselves down right in the middle of what would have been a very spiritually-charged landscape belonging to somebody else.

Many Native American groups are not happy living right next to the dead, especially if there’s somebody else’s dead or enemy dead. This is a difficult situation to find yourself in. There is another explanation, however. Was it wasn’t just Cahokians. It was the local folks too, this is like Aztalan, there were people there first, Cahokians came to stay with them. Fred Edwards makes a lot more sense if this is an effigy mound building community, right where it should be surrounded by its burial mounds, its effigy mounds. And it’s in the process of transforming, of two cultures blending to become something new. Okay, so that’s my theory about Fred Edwards take it or leave it. The mounds, which I hope you go visit, please head upstairs to the fourth floor to look at Dan Seurer’s photographs, and I’m open for questions. (laughing) Thank you very much.

(audience applauding)