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cc >> Today we are pleased to introduce Kurt Sampson 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. Kurt Sampson is an archaeologist and Aztalan State Park naturalist. Here today to take us on a photographic journey through early excavations of Aztalan State Park, please join me in welcoming Kurt Sampson.

APPLAUSE

>> Thank you. Thank you all for coming today. Like she mentioned, my name is Kurt Sampson. I am the curator of the Dodge County Historical Society. That's my real job. And I do work out at Aztalan State Park. I've been a member of the friends group out there for over almost 20 years now. I was the president of the friends group out there for several years, working closely with Bob Birmingham. Many of you know Bob Birmingham. And I have done some excavating at Aztalan as a graduate student, and we, as a state park friends group, we help to propagate the state park, mostly financially, and our goal is to build an interpretive center. And most of you know that we are well on our way to doing that right now with the help of Elizabeth Parker. And so we hope to have that done sometime within the next five to six, seven years maybe, give or take. I also am the current president of the Wisconsin Archaeological Society, and the Wisconsin Archaeological Society has been around for over a hundred years now. And the society was instrumental in doing a lot of mound site preservation in the state of Wisconsin. And we have a very proud legacy about that. The Wisconsin Archaeologist Journal, a lot of people don't realize this, but that's actually the oldest continuous published scientific journal in the country. So we're very proud of that here in Wisconsin as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you guys on a photographic journey of the first systematic professional archaeological excavation in the state of Wisconsin, which actually occurred right at Aztalan with the Milwaukee Public Museum. And the Milwaukee Public Museum excavated there in 1919, 1920, and then again later on in 1932, all with Samuel Barrett, who was the director of the anthropology department and later the director of the Milwaukee Public Museum. First of all, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you guys, give you guys a little bit of general background information about what Aztalan is and what it's not and what exactly Mississippian culture is so you can have a general background idea of what that is before we actually start going through some of the photographs because if you don't have a general idea of what Aztalan State Park actually is, it might not make much sense to you. But Aztalan is a late woodland village and a Mississippian cultural and ceremonial site. Today it's preserved as a state park and an archaeological preserve since 1948. And the Wisconsin Archaeological Society at one time actually owned part of Aztalan State Park, and it was turned over to the state from the society years ago. And the primary occupation of the site was from roughly AD 1050 to 1250 AD. The Mississippian presence occurs just prior to 1100 at Aztalan. They're in Wisconsin a little bit prior to that. And Aztalan is abandoned for unknown reasons by about 1250 AD. So there's about 150 years of occupation of the site of middle woodland or late woodland culture and Mississippian culture. Mississippian culture is intrusive to Wisconsin. And what Aztalan is really best known for is it's actually Wisconsin's first large scale farming village, maize farming village. So a state like Wisconsin that prides itself on agriculture, this is literally Wisconsin's first farming village. And there has been roughly about 160 years of exploration at Aztalan by avocational and professional archaeologists. And most recently, UW Milwaukee, where I went to graduate school, and Michigan State, with Lynne Goldstein, have taken the lead on the archaeological research in the last couple of decades. Many of you might have been out to the site, maybe the last couple summers, and seen my old advisor John Richards, Dr. John Richards from UW Milwaukee out there excavating. And Lynne Goldstein and even some of the archaeologists from UW Madison here like Sissel Schroeder and some of them are out there helping with that the last few years. And what Aztalan is known for with the Mississippian civilization is being the northern most large scale village outpost of the Mississippian civilization. So what is this Mississippian civilization? The Mississippian culture, again, was originally intrusive and foreign to Wisconsin. By AD 1050, Mississippianized people are in Wisconsin. And this culture develops by about 800 AD in the lower Mississippi River Valley region down by St. Louis. And we call that area the American bottom. And this includes portions of Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and all these different Mississippianized sites in that region are not politically unified. Many of you have heard of Cahokia. Well, Cahokia is the granddaddy Mississippian site of them all. It is literally right across the Mississippi from the arch in St. Louis, just a few miles inland, and that's where this Mississippian cultural big bang expands from right around 1,000 AD or so. And Mississippian culture has a higher degree of social and political complexity. It's a chiefdom level society with semi-divine rulers. And kingship lineages were determined through various social relationships within that chiefdom, and we know today that a lot of those social relationships were determined through the female side of lineages. At this time, there is an increased population all throughout the Midwest and the lower Mississippi Valley region due to the intensification of agriculture. And they had planned permanent villages and ceremonial centers. What Aztalan brings is large earthen platform mounds. Many of you are familiar with the platform mounds at Aztalan, and that is a different type of mound construction that has never been seen before in Wisconsin at that time. In the late woodland in Wisconsin, we have late woodland effigy mound culture, effigy mound builders, but the actual construction of earthen platform mounds in a planned village site is new to this area at the time. And that's what the Mississippians bring north with them. These centers, like Aztalan and Cahokia and some other Mississippian sites, they help to support small hamlets and farmsteads and extraction camps for various types of materials that they're looking for, stone materials for stone tool production, animal hides, different types of plants, things that are part of their economy. Copper from the Great Lakes, for instance And they have a very formalized system of iconography such as birdman imagery and fertility goddesses. This is an example of some statuettes from some other Mississippian sites that show fertility goddesses and things of that nature. Violence and warfare were very common, and there was a lot of violence at Aztalan. And one of the things that I'm not going to do today is show you excavation photographs that show human bones or human osteology just out of being respectful and sensitive to Native American causes. But when Barrett was there in 1919, 1920, and 1932, the majority of the 500-plus black and white photographs that they took at the time showed a lot of human anatomy or bones and a lot of violence on the site. We believe that there was human sacrifice in a staged mortuary rituals and warfare at various Mississippian sites, including Aztalan. And they are also known for having a vast trade network across North America for exotic goods and, in some cases, a control of certain commodities like Hixton silicified sandstone, which is a very particular type of stone material that they held sacred at the time. And I'll show you some examples of that. As I mentioned before, the Mississippian culture has a system of elaborated and formalized concepts with their religious belief system. Things like sun worship. They had detailed knowledge of the summer solstice and winter solstice. Moon phases. Things of that nature. Falconist serpent imagery, serpent imagery, upper world connotations, mother corn goddesses and fertility ceremonies, and a continuation of the underwater panther, serpents, and thunderbirds that you actually see in middle and late woodland times with effigy mounds. This imagery is produced on a lot of their artifacts, pottery, engraved shell, embossed copper plates, things of that nature. Here is an example of what Cahokia looked like down by St. Louis about 1150 AD. And Cahokia covered about a five-square-mile area and had about 210 earthen platform mounds, where at Aztalan we have three. And it was estimated at Cahokia that there were between 10,000 and 15,000 people that lived in that area at the time. At Aztalan, we estimate the population was between about 400 and 500 people in a much smaller scale outpost village. This is the location of Aztalan in Jefferson County. It is on a tributary of the Rock River called the Crawfish. And this map here, Aztalan was first discovered in 1836 by Timothy Johnson who was the founder of Watertown and Johnson Creek, and he came out there as a settler and found the ancient city mostly intact. And word spread back to Milwaukee at the time, which was really in its infancy at that time, and people started to come out and check the site out. And this is one of the first maps that was produced of Aztalan by a guy named Judge Hyer. And Judge Hyer at the time was influenced by a Prussian naturalist named Baron von Humboldt at the time, who was writing about Aztec and Toltec legends. And the Mayan and the Toltec, or the Toltec and the Aztec, excuse me, have these legends about how they came from a northern homeland called Aztalan. So when Hyer and some of these early settlers saw these platform mounds out there very reminiscent of Central America, they thought, well, this must be the homeland of the Aztec, the northern homeland. Well, we know today from archaeological excavations that that's not true. But that's where the name Aztalan comes from, and it stuck to this day. This is what Aztalan State Park looks like today. You can see where it says northwest platform mound there, southwestern platform mound, which is a large two-tiered mound. Northwest platform mound is a mortuary mound where there were burials discovered in that mound. Agricultural fields to the north of the enclosure here, and the river is kind of tucked behind the woods there. If you go to Aztalan today, the DNR has clear-cut a lot of that undergrowth and trees back there, and you can actually see the river much easier from the site itself. And then it's kind of hard to see in the photograph here, but there are a line of 76 conical mounds that once existed that stretch north, and I'll talk about their significance as well. Another shot of the enclosure area with the large platform mound closer this time in this area of the northeast platform mound where John Richards has been excavating the last couple of field seasons. That mound was destroyed by agriculture. And when this site was first found in 1836, it was put to the plow almost immediately. They tried to save it, but they weren't successful. So there was over 80-plus years of agriculture on this site before it was actually preserved as an archaeological preserve. This area closer to the river down here is where the habitation site was where they found a lot of the archaeological remains of the housing structures. There wasn't a palisade around this entire site, 24-acre. This is an example from Angel Mounds in southern Illinois of a reconstructed palisade, and one of the things that they found around this site when people first found this site was these large chunks the looked like brick. And that's where they got the idea that this was a bricked city. But we know today that's that just a mixture of clay and field grasses that was hard-packed onto the edges of the walls. And they also used this for their housing structures. If you go up to the second floor after the talk today, you can see a reconstruction of an Aztalan house on the second floor and how they would have constructed that. This just shows the river again, a village site habitation area, and the general area of the northeastern platform mound. This is the river itself. And, interestingly, if you see this large V with the stones right here, this is all remnants of fishing weirs that ran the river at one time. And over the many thousands of years of thawing and things of the water, things have gotten jumbled up, but you can still see remnants of those fishing weirs when the water is really low. And we had Craig Wilson from Madison here who has that kite with the big camera on the bottom of it. We had him come out a couple of years ago, and he took these photographs for us. Many of you might know his book Above Madison where you see the state Capitol and the peninsula. These are paintings from the Kenosha Public Museum done by Rob Evans which are part of museum exhibits there that show what life in the village site would have looked like. They had rectangular and square wattle and daub packed walls, and you can see the platform mound off in the distance, things of that nature. Now, we're getting to the excavation photographs. In 1919, 1920, and 1932, like I mentioned, Samuel Barrett, the guy in the middle there who looks kind of like Colonel Sanders there, he was at the Milwaukee Public Museum. He came to the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1911 to become the first curator of anthropology. But he was also the first formally trained archaeologist east of the Mississippi at that time. Went to University of California Berkeley, and he actually studied with some famous anthropologists back then, Alfred Kroeber and actually the father of American anthropology and northwest coast ethnography Franz Boas. And when Samuel Barrett came to Milwaukee, he was quite young at the time. His beard was not as gray as a lot of ours are today. And he started to employ excavation techniques in the state that were new at the time. And at this time archaeology as we know it, or the formalized science of archaeology as we know it today was really in its infancy. So different types of excavation techniques that were going on then might not be quite up to the standard as we use today, but his techniques at Aztalan during these excavations were pretty good at the time. So when they come out to, so how do they get to Aztalan, or why do they decide to wait this long? We don't really know why they waited as long as they did to excavate the site systematically. But in 1919, the Crawfish and the Rock River had a lot of flooding, and, at the time, there was big washouts along the Crawfish River at Aztalan that exposed large archaeological deposits that I'll show you in some of the photographs. And George West here was one of the founding fathers of not only the Wisconsin Archaeological Society and the State Historical Society at the time, he convinced Barrett to come out to Aztalan and show him these washouts. And he was like, you got to come out here and see this, see what's going on. So Barrett goes out there with him on a field trip, and that convinces Barrett to seek permission from the board of the Milwaukee Public Museum to excavate the site. And they do that literally three days later. Then the excavations begin from July 10th through September 30th of that year. And they had the secure permission from the landowners Albert Crock, August Crock, Emil --, all these guys right here, August --. And they also had to assemble a crew of people from the Milwaukee Public Museum. I'll talk about Lou Dartt here from Montello and Robert Aiken and John Jesky and Byron Trasky as well. These are all people who helped Barrett excavate. And a lot of these sketch drawings that you'll see and some of the photographs I'll show are from this George Peters here. This is the crew here with Barrett being the guy on the end here, going from left to right. This photograph actually was unknown to us until about a couple months ago. This was found in the archives of the Lake Mills Historical Society and nobody had seen it for literally a hundred years. And Robin Untz, who is the director over there now, I helped her go through some of the archaeological collection that's on site there, and she gave me permission to use some of the photographs here. But this is a really interesting photograph because it's the only photograph that shows the entire excavation crew. The Milwaukee Public Museum doesn't have this photograph. This is Albert Crock, who was the main farmer of the Aztalan enclosure area back then, and he found hundreds and hundreds of artifacts just from walking behind a plow for several decades of farming the site before it was actually systematically excavated. And most of his artifacts are in the church museum which is on the historic Lake Mills site just north of the Aztalan enclosure. Now, I put a lot of stuff on my slides. You guys can read that if you want. It's just for me to kind of help me keep my pace. But the goals of the excavation, really, when they went out there was to disprove and to see if a lot of the earlier excavations were to hold true. There is that idea of the brick city and what the true nature of the palisade was. Was it really a brick city or was it just a palisaded village that had mud packed brick? Many of you have heard of Increase Lapham, who first mapped the site in 1850 as part

of his Antiquities of Wisconsin

As Surveyed and Described. Well, he mapped the site in 1850 and produced one of the first formalized surveyed maps, and everything that's been done on this site since then goes off what Increase Lapham did. So what Barrett wanted to do, he wanted to see if Barrett's map was accurate. So he started excavating around the site using that map to see if it was going to be accurate, and some of the things that were said about Aztalan were to hold up to actual excavation. And then eventually Barrett publishes Ancient Aztalan in 1933. Part of the reason there's a big gap from 1920 to 1932 is that Barrett becomes the director of the museum which kind of takes him out of the field, and then he isn't able to get back to Aztalan until 1932. And then he publishes the book about his finding in 1933 of the three seasons of the excavations. So when Barrett shows up at Aztalan in 1919, Aztalan is very much still under the plow at that time. You can see some conical mounds which are part of the upper part of the park at this time. And back then, big crop in Wisconsin was wheat. Supplying breweries and things in Milwaukee. Here's a wheat field from 1919 when they show up. This is the actual habitation area here down by the river. You can see the river over here. So he has to contend with the agricultural fields there. This is the river, down along the river. And when they started plowing this site, there was a lot of runoff and slope wash, which affects what we see in archaeological excavations today on the site. So when we excavate along the river and in other portions close to the river, when we look at the stratigraphy of the excavations, we have to take that into account to see what's going on because of the loose soil from the farming and stuff. But that's what it looked like in 1919. Oops, I got to go back one. Sorry. This is what the washout looked like in 1919, and it was seven feet deep. And when they looked at it, it's kind of hard to see in the photograph, but when they were looking at it, they could see four and a half feet deep deposits of archaeological material that had been built up over time. And human bones and pottery and stone tools were literally just crumbling out of the walls along the river. This is another view of one of the washouts there that they examined that convinced them. And you can see the agricultural field comes right up to the bank. This is Lou Dartt, one of the team members. You notice Lou has the fedora on. He was the original fedora-wearing archaeologist. It was not Indiana Jones. When you see Lou Dartt, he has that hat on all the time. So Lou Dartt's down there, and Lou Dartt, he excavated hundreds of mounds in the state of Wisconsin from the turn of the last century up through really the 1930s on various other Milwaukee Public Museum mound excavations around the state, especially with Will C McKern. This is Barrett and George West at the site on May 24th near the river examining washouts, doing a little digging of their own. And you can see they're just collecting tons of stuff. Pottery, bone material. They're just piling it on the banks there. So they get the permission and they start to set up camp, and these are just images of the camp life, some of the people that were there. They'd excavate during the day, and at night they'd have time off. So they'd recreate on the river, and Barrett would sit in his hammock and drink. He'd drink and smoke his pipe and all that kind of stuff. But they actually set this up almost like an African expedition. They brought these huge canvas tents out there, and they actually lived on site. Barrett was kind of, I don't want to call him soft, but he made the men sleep in the tents and he slept in Albert Crock's house.

LAUGHTER

of his Antiquities of Wisconsin

But he was the boss. But this is them setting up camp and getting it ready. And this is a funny photograph that shows our buddy Lou Dartt in the outhouse here. Somebody snuck up on him and took a photograph of him. But this was camp life during the day. And then they get to excavating. And they used professional surveying equipment and plotted out the site. And this is them beginning to start to figure out how they're going to excavate this massive site. So what Barrett does is he makes this map and he sections off the site with these Roman numerals here, the entire 24-acre-plus enclosure, and he uses this as a grid system of where he's going to excavate. And like I mentioned before, this is based off of Increase Lapham's map from 1850, which was published in The Antiquities of Wisconsin. This was one of the first publications by the American Antiquarian Society, which later became the Smithsonian Institution to their contributions of knowledge. And you can see the outline of the palisade wall and some of the inner workings here. Looks very much like Judge Hyer's map from 1836, and then a long line of conicals up here as well. Many of those are already destroyed now. So, they begin excavating down in that section where they had the large washouts here. And all these little things that you see on the maps here are areas that they actually examined and excavated. And they start to map those features. This is them digging along the river and up slope from the river. You can see there's some pottery shards in the soil right there where they dug down a little bit. They're using pretty crude techniques of just shoveling, but they're trying to keep some control of the stratigraphy of the soil and where things are placed in the soil, but it's still fairly crude by today's standards. And here's them excavating a little bit again. And you can see they're just piling up pottery and things that they're finding. Many of the pots that are in the Milwaukee Public Museum collection are pots that have been reconstructed from these excavations. This is them excavating along the ridge up close to the road near the entrance of the park where the long line of conicals are. Most of those conical mounds were excavated, and what they found was that they were not burial mounds. They were mounds that contained large wooden posts in the middle of them. And we think that those posts had a couple of possible meanings. One would be for celestial alignment posts or astronomical alignments, or it was possibly part of what we call a busk ceremony or a green corn ceremony where Native Americans in the past would construct an earthen mound and place a pole in it as part of a ceremonial activity of the first harvest, if you will. This is Lou Dartt here with his fedora in the middle of one of those mounds. They would dig a trench through the middle of those mounds, about five to six feet wide, with the idea that if they hit the middle of the mound that they would more than likely hit the features that may or may not be inside the mound. They didn't find burials, but they did find these mounds were constructed with poles, posts in the middle of them. This is the section, the site and maps here. Here are some views of them trenching through some of those mounds back in the day. And when they found the central features of where these posts were, they mapped them. And what they would find is dark stains in the soil where organic material once was for a post that had rotted away over a thousand years, but you find that organic stain. And then you find these pits where they took rock and packed hard rock along the edges of the poles just like we would do today if we were going to try to put a fencepost in or something. And in some cases, they did find the bases of the poles still preserved in the mound. Here's one of those mounds in that section that they trenched through. Here's Barrett way in the heart of one of them. They dug down seven, eight, 10 feet in some cases in these mounds. This one had a large boulder that was placed in the middle of the mound. What that means, I don't know. But there's Barrett in there surveying. And that's just another shot. You see Barrett sitting in the middle there. He'd sit in there with his map and draw stuff. There's a feature there. You can see where they packed the clay in the middle of those things. That one shows the remains of wood still in the hole there, preserved wood fragment in the hole there. See the rocks in the middle where they packed it. Barrett mapping features with his crew again, sitting in the archaeological features that they had dug. Along the river, some archaeological features. This is actually a burial. I'm not showing human remains, but they found this feature and they found this hard gravel cone thing in the feature. And they were like, what is this? So they started digging in it, and they found the remains of two infants buried underneath that pile with large turtle shells placed right over the top of them. And we have photographs of that, but I'm not showing any of those today. These are just refuse pits from where they had garbage pits where they threw animal bones and shell bones and things into garbage middens along the river. Aztalan, this is feature 50, and feature 50 was a crematorium feature where there was an Aztalan brick lined pit in the ground, and it was about nine feet long, I believe, by about four or five feet wide. And when Barrett excavated it, he found a lot of human remains in it. And that's the general location of feature 50, just up slope in the habitation area there. And at the head of this mortuary feature was a pile of 80 to 86 projectile points all made out of the same stone material in an offering pile. And you see this at Cahokia in the famous mound 72 burial from Cahokia with the same type of projectile points all the way down by St. Louis. This is some of those what we call Madison triangular projectile points. All made out of Hixton silicified sandstone, which is a stone that only comes from one place up by Black River Falls by Hixton, Wisconsin. It's right on the very northeast edge of the driftless area, and this stone material was used throughout the entire 12,000-plus year span of Wisconsin prehistory by Paleo Indians all the way up through late woodland peoples. So they start going around, excavating around in some areas, and they start to find black stains in the soil in a line. And what those are are the post molds from where the palisade wall was. So they start to follow them off in the distance, and they start excavating them. So what Barrett's excavation really did more than anything was show us the outer and the inner workings of where the palisade wall was and how that was situated on the site. Here are some of those holes that they found that they excavated out. And you can see how they go off in the distance. This is just their, you can see the dark stain here in the soil all in a line. And they found those for the housing structures as well. And you can see all these posts in the ground here. When they were peeling off the topsoil a little bit, they started to find all these dark circular stains, they started sticking sticks in them. And that's where they were able to find out where a lot of the inner workings of the palisade was. And here are actually some preserved wooden posts that were preserved in the ground from the site. These are in the Milwaukee Public Museum collection. This is a pile of stone material where somebody actually sat down and was flint knapping a stone tool and produced a pile of waste flacks. And they found many features like that are around the site. That's a ceramic gourd. It looks like a gourd, but it's ceramic. Like a drinking gourd. This is an unusual strange feature that they found, a horseshoe shaped feature. We have no idea what it is or what it means. But something that they found. Now, right across the street west of Aztalan is another mound site called the Greenwood Mound Site. And this is a conical burial mound site that's across the street. And they also examined that as well. So they go across the street, and these mounds, we believe, predate Aztalan. Some of them had the middle woodland, 200 BC to 400 AD burial types in them. So Aztalan, as a whole, has been used, we know from the material that's found from the excavations, throughout the entire span of Wisconsin prehistory. There have been Paleo Indian artifacts that have been found on Aztalan. And Barrett actually excavated Paleo Indian projectile points like agate basins and clovis off the site. At the time in 1919, he didn't know what they were, but we know today from reexamination of the collection. So this is them across the street, and this area was under agriculture as well. And they started digging around over there, and these are some of the profiles of some of the mounds. Some of them contained burials; some of them they weren't really sure what they were. This is a mound that was on top of, if you go to Aztalan and you look to the west, the huge farm hill that's off in the distance there, there was a conical mound on top of that hill as well where they found supposedly a very large piece of catlinite, which is pipestone, that the Plains Indians would make their peace pipes out of. And we have not been able to locate that in the Milwaukee Public Museum collection, but supposedly it was found. On the opposite side of the river from the Aztalan enclosure going to the east there are middle woodland conical burial mounds. Those are shots of them in 1919. This guy Jack here, he examined one of the mounds and found a middle woodland burial in there. And then these mounds also were excavated in the later 1920s by a guy from Tennessee, and they showed that they were middle woodland in nature. This is an enclosure that's on the other side of the river and some of those conical mounds. They were mapped by TH Lewis who was a mound mapper like Aztalan and by Charles Brown, our very own founder of the Wisconsin Historical Society. In one of those mounds, we do have photographs of the actual burials but I'm not showing those today, but this is a middle woodland what we call a monitor pipe. That was made out of a purplish pipestone that's not from this region that was found in that mound. Now, in 1919, the Wisconsin Archaeological Society also comes out there on Labor Day and has a big to-do with over 500 people that show up. And a lot of people don't realize this, but the very early history of the Wisconsin Archaeological Society was based on efforts by Wisconsin Federation of Women Clubs organizations that helped preserve mound sites around the state. This Ms. Kellogg here was the president of that society at the time, so she gave an address. Then Barrett here and some of the other men were there. And then they went out and they toured around the site and saw what Barrett had been doing out there. This is just a photo of the people. Here they are down on top of some of the conical mounds out by the road there. Albert Crock's farmhouse. That house is not there today, by the way. The house that you see by the river down there is not the original Crock house. So now we get into 1920. This is a feature of a baking pit with stones in it that they found along the river. I'm going to kind of get going here because I don't want to go over time. But if you have to leave, that's fine, I understand, but we've got a little bit to go through yet. This is excavation part of the northwest mortuary mound. There were 11 burials found in that mound, and we do know that a couple of those individuals did not originate from Wisconsin based on strontium analysis by Jim -- at UW Madison. Here's the wood in the posts right there. So they started to also excavate post molds again in 1920. Here is a very unusual crescent shaped rock pile that they excavated in the habitation area. Don't know what it means. I believe it has some type of astronomical significance, but people debate that. These are just excavation profile maps of storage pits. Different types of storage pits that they would store corn and other food stuffs in in the ground. Another post mold found in a mound up by the row of mounds up by the road. This is a famous princess burial. She is the last mound on the row of mounds, and her conical burial mound is right behind the Aztalan church that's right there on the Aztalan Lake Mills historic site. And that was excavated by Barrett, and they found a very elaborate burial of a young woman about 28 years old who had over 1900 shell beads in a three-wrapped shawl garment around her body. And it's the most elaborate burial that's ever been found in Wisconsin. This is just the profile of that mound. Now, in 1932, they come back after a little hiatus there, and what they try to do in '32 is they look at Increase Lapham's map, and Lapham shows that the palisade wall in the southeastern portion of the site extends down to the river. But they couldn't readily see that in 1932 or prior to that. So they start excavating down in that region along the river, and they want to try to prove or disprove what Lapham had said in 1850 about what he saw. And what they do is they start to excavate in that section down there, and they find that Lapham's description of that in 1850 was accurate. One of the neat things they find in that area is this stone paved walkway that was purposely placed stones of a walkway from the upper part of the embankment down to a spring down by the water, and that the palisade actually extended out into the water to protect that spring. So if they are under siege, they could protect the water source on the site there. This shows excavations near the southwest platform mound, the large two-tiered mound. And they found that that mound was constructed in three levels. And most of the time at Mississippian sites, other Mississippian sites, you will see that every time there's a change of power they build a layer on top of these large platform mounds. So we have about 150 years of Mississippian occupation at Aztalan, so about three generations give or take, and there are three levels of the stage of all of the platform mounds that were built at Aztalan except for the one that they're digging closer to the river in the northeast corner. That mound was constructed in one stage and we know actually had a temple building on top of it. But you can see this long line here goes off in the distance. That's the palisade here. We're almost done. Here's some other excavations around that unusual extra embankment that goes around. And one of the reasons that that's there is because when you stand on top of the southwest platform mound and look to the west, the ground is higher. So that's not good for defensive purposes. So they actually extended this line of palisade out with towers there to help protect that area. In the base of the largest southwest platform mound, they found this large, round, hard packed clay post holder. So when they had the first level of that mound in a rectangular mound there was a post in the middle of it, and you see this at other Mississippian sites. When they also excavated this area, they found areas where there were gates. There's only three gates, I believe, that are shown to have been found in the excavations of how you actually get inside this enclosure. They were regulating who was coming in and out of this place. It wasn't just a walk in. This is just some other areas in the northeast portion of the site where there's heavy habitation area down here. Palisade wall reconstruction This shows the gate area here. And the gates were kind of like false gates. They were hidden. If you didn't know where they were, you wouldn't see it if you were looking at the palisade wall. Here's some post molds. 700 post molds were discovered along the south palisade wall. 700. That's a lot. Here's them digging those post molds with the sticks placed in place there. Each one of them go off in the distance. So, we're at the end here just about. So from those excavations, there were over 3600 individual artifacts that were collected by Barrett. The bulk of the collection consists of pottery shards, stone tools, which date from Wisconsin late woodland period and the Mississippian period of the site. And these are some of the artifacts. This is Mississippian pottery. Utilitarian goods. That spiral motif that you see on the far pot there, that's called Ramey-incised. That's definitely Mississippian. See the spiral motifs? The Mississippian pottery and the late woodland pottery are very easily distinguishable from each other because they're made totally different. Mississippian pottery is made with real thin-walled, grit-tempered, and usually has some type of a slip on it, where late woodland indigenous pottery is sand and rock, crushed rock temper, real thick with cord impressions on them. Very easy to distinguish the two pottery groups. This is the late woodland stuff. Aztalan collared, which is a famous type of late woodland pottery from the site, and you can see the cord impressions there. These are copper long-nosed god maskettes, which are part of that Mississippian religious ideology that was found. These have been found on many other Mississippian sites around the region. Hoes, digging hoes, right? And all of the hoes are made out of Mill Creek chert which come from southern Illinois. Every single one of them. That shows how they took a type of lithic material and kind of made it a commodity and controlled it. And it might have had something to do with religious significance why they used Mill Creek chert as well. Other types of stone tools, groove axes and things that were found. Chunky stones, game stones that they would roll across the plaza, throw spears at them. Several of those have been found. Ear spools, big ear spools, all made out of Baraboo quartzite or pipestone, which comes up by Devil's Lake. All of the ones that have been found at Cahokia are made out of Baraboo quartzite that come from Wisconsin. Another thing that they were trying to control. Many of them were covered in copper as well. Here's some other examples of those. All made out of the same stone material. Shell heaps from food procurement, and they would half those shells as digging tools and scraping tools. Mississippian projectile points look just like the one in the middle there. That's called the Cahokia point. That is indicative of Mississippian projectile point. That's it. This is the oldest known photograph known from Aztalan from 1867. This was recently just discovered about a month and a half ago. Didn't know it existed at all. And this shows that line of conical mounds up near the entrance today in 1867. That's pretty neat. Thank you.

APPLAUSE