- Today we are pleased to intr
oduce Amy Rosebrough,
as part of the Wisconsin Historic
al Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture ser
ies.
Amy Rosebrough has worked
at the Wisconsin Historical Socie
ty,
in the State Archeology
and Maritime Preservation Progra
m since 2000.
She received her PhD at UW-Ma
dison in 2010.
And the focus of her research
was the effigy mound phenomenon i
n 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 techno
logy,
and how it is helping us to iden
tify
and preserve and interpret Wiscon
sin's monumental landscape.
Wisconsin is one of the few pl
aces in the world,
where you can find effigy mounds,
the only place where you find the
m in any number.
We have more earthworks in o
ur state,
than any other state in the Unite
d States.
More were built here, to begin w
ith,
than anywhere else.
Some of the early surveyors
called Wisconsin "the sculpted la
nd,"
because there were so many mounds
,
so many earthworks of different t
ypes,
in Wisconsin, in the prairies and
the forests
and the fields.
Man Mound is our ambassador,
National Historic Landmark,
the only human-shaped effigy mou
nd 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 ki
nds 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, a
nd kind of outlines,
and those are tiny little thin
gs 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 land
scape,
for 10,000 years and more.
The first people to arrive here
after the ice melted back,
mined and quarried stone, and lat
er copper,
leaving pits and spoil piles
at various places
on our landscape, such as Silver
Mound in Jackson County.
They began to manipulate the pl
ants around them,
experimenting with early forms of
agriculture
and changing the makeup of the fo
rest and the prairies,
and they burned Wisconsin.
Started prairie fires,
that kept Wisconsin from reveget
ating,
after the high in temperatures,
that occurred five, 6000 years a
go.
So when you hear a naturalist tal
king about
restoring Wisconsin, to its natur
al,
oak savanna landscape, you ca
n 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 t
he earth itself,
by raising, at first burial mound
s
and then earthworks of variou
s other kinds.
The first earthworks, the first
mounds,
were simple domes, which we cal
l conical mounds,
but they're not really cones,
they're domes,
built for burial of the dead.
And these mounds arrive at th
e same time
that other changes are sweeping t
hrough Wisconsin.
The first agriculture,
that y'know, first real plant
ing of seeds
in order to gain crops.
Pottery arrives for the first ti
me.
And there's an uptake in ceremo
ny and symbology.
And all these things together,
create what we call the Wood
land tradition.
Succeeded later by a Mississippia
n tradition,
and then by historic Native Ameri
can peoples.
So it's a very exciting time
to be in Wisconsin
when these first earthworks are b
eing 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 acc
retionary 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 northweste
rn county,
get really, really, really big.
Our state archeologist once s
aid,
"Hey, that's big as a Buick."
So, big as a Buick mound.
Here's Milwaukee Public Museum,
scoping one out, trying to d
ecide 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 t
he ceremonies
that went with them
because there's so few on the lan
dscape.
And because so few were ever prof
essionally excavated.
Based on excavations elsewhere
outside of Wisconsin,
we suspect that these mounds wer
e built to cover
structures called charnel houses
,
places where the bodies of the d
ead were laid out,
kind of like an above ground tom
b 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 preser
ved
in what's now the mound floor.
Mounds of that time also,
typically contained a pigment ca
lled 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 mou
nds.
This early mound building tradit
ion 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 Spher
e.
It's a set of ceremonies and a ki
nd of artistic style,
that gets some popularity in Wis
consin, not too much.
At that point,
people were building below ground
family tombs,
there may still have been struct
ures over them,
but they're digging tombs down i
nto the earth
and covering them with matting, o
r 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 tha
t style
that comes in from the Ohio Valle
y.
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 re
al beaver teeth added,
a hand made out of mica,
a ceremonial knife made out of ob
sidian,
from Yellowstone National Park,
and then a copper ornament
that would probably have been tie
d to fabric,
and the copper is coming
from the Great Lakes region, our
area.
So Wisconsin was part of this gre
at
almost continental style, or
scale trade,
that's occurring during that peri
od.
And then, it all fell apart.
The trade network collapsed,
people went back to doing what t
hey were doing locally,
except in Wisconsin.
They started changing the way mo
und 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, t
wo, three,
maybe four people.
And then from there, they got re
ally elaborate.
Our first effigy mound.
So around AD 750, people bega
n to sculpt burial mounds,
into the shapes of birds, ani
mals, spirits
and even human-like forms li
ke the Man Mound at Baraboo.
This is one of the few photograph
s that I have,
that actually shows an effigy mou
nd from the ground.
They're very, very hard to photog
raph.
They sink down into the earth,
the second you raise your camera
up.
So we have to wait for floods lik
e this,
to outline them for us.
Or, you wait for them to fill up.
So there is a very, very, very r
are,
effigy mound variant called an
intaglio,
instead of the mound being built
up,
it's dug down in.
Obviously this doesn't contai
n a burial,
we're not really sure about intag
lio,
there's only one left that we kno
w of,
at Fort Atkinson.
So on highway 106, on the we
st side of town,
still there in a little park and,
years like this year and last ye
ar 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 th
is particular intaglio,
is where it is and why it loo
ks like it does.
Because the shape is the shape
of a Native American water spirit
.
So during floods, the water spir
it intaglio turns
into a spirit made out of wat
er, which I love.
And there's a huge variety in f
orm,
not just among the effigy or the
animal-shaped mounds,
but among the rest of mounds.
Not just dome-shaped and linear m
ounds,
but any geometric combination of
those shapes
you can think of.
Things that look like triangles,
and clubs
and tadpoles and caterpillars an
d crosses and knives.
And we have no idea really what a
ny of that means,
but it's spectacular.
And this is one of the only place
s 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 mou
nd building,
you have the great big mound pe
ople,
the accretionary mound people,
possibly ancestral to the Dakota
, up there.
You have this
tradition is very related to eff
igy mound, except,
no effigy mounds, but they'r
e building linear
and geometric forms.
We'll call them the small mound
folks.
That's in far northeastern W
isconsin.
And then again, effigy mound bui
lders
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 ti
ll 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 bu
rials,
and the ones that have not yi
elded burials,
I suspect that's just due to
soil chemistry,
or the fact that there were crema
tions
that weren't recognized.
Because effigy mound people
would cremate their dead fro
m time to time.
As such, all of the mounds I've b
een describing
are protected by state law.
Wisconsin Statute 157.70
protects burial mounds
as grave markers and burial place
s,
no matter how old they are,
how many people are buried insid
e,
they're protected that way.
And if you look at the mounds,
built in southern Wisconsin at l
east,
during that period of effigy con
struction,
you see amazing variation in rit
ual too.
It's not just,
someone dies, they get a mound.
They might or might not get a mo
und.
Not everybody got to be buried in
a mound.
Some people are buried far aw
ay from mounds,
some people are buried next
to mounds,
some people are buried in their v
ery own mound,
perhaps a simple one like a do
me shape or conical mound,
maybe something a little mor
e elaborate,
like the linear mound, or they m
ay share a mound,
with hundreds and hundreds of ot
her folks.
So every once in a while,
during the period of effigy const
ruction,
750 AD to around 1200 AD,
a community would build one
great big mound,
containing, again, hundreds of p
ackages of bones.
It's a mass grave,
and it may reflect the presen
ce 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 t
akes place
when a community is about to spl
it into two,
or it's about to move.
And it's a way of gathering ance
stors together,
into one place, in order to empha
size
the unity of the community.
In other words, our ancestors sl
eep 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 tak
ing place here.
So these are sculptures,
they're sacred places, they'r
e burial places,
they're not simple places.
People have often assumed that b
ecause you don't find
really interesting artifacts in t
he effigy mounds,
the stuff built after AD 750,
that people must have been pret
ty 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 yea
r
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 dw
arfs the capitol in size,
stretching from one corner of Cap
itol Square to another.
Estimating let's say we have 50 a
dults
working sunrise to sunset wit
hout a break.
That is three months of work, eas
y.
Now that is a substantial
amount of time to devote to a p
roject like this,
taking away from survival strateg
y,
if it's not really, really impor
tant.
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 en
ough,
to get a huge monument to the
mselves,
1000 years ago.
The shapes themselves tell us so
mething
about the people who built them.
So here's a very, very compl
icated path.
It's a little busy.
This is 10 years of my life righ
t here.
(audience laughing)
This is what the dissertation led
to.
It's a map showing the most c
ommon mound form,
in every effigy-building communit
y.
Sometimes the two or three most c
ommon forms.
And the proportion of effigy moun
ds
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 differ
ent shapes.
These are probably identifiers.
Either it's the clan of the pers
on buried within,
or perhaps a religious organi
zation,
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 themsel
ves,
versus a person up in Trempealea
u
or a person in the Horicon area,
they would probably identify them
selves differently.
And then,
so about 900 AD or so,
when the effigy mound building i
s at its peak,
some new folks arrived from t
he south,
they had different ideas about mo
und building.
They didn't build effigy mounds,
they did build some conical moun
ds,
and things that looked a little l
ike 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 ele
vate a structure.
Whether it's a temple,
or the house of somebody very im
portant.
They came from a place called Cah
okia,
which is the closest thing North
America ever had to a city.
Tens of thousands of people,
just on the other side of the Mis
sissippi River
from St. Louis, you can actually
as you head south on I-55,
pass the mound, the big moun
d 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 t
op 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 n
orth.
Maybe exiles, who settled in two
locations.
The places I mentioned just a lit
tle while ago.
Aztalan, Aztalan State Park in Je
fferson County,
just east of Lake Mills,
and Trempealeau.
The little bluff just above the b
luffs
at Trempealeau on the Mississipp
i 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 charne
l house,
so it does contain burials.
The others seem to have been for
temples
or residential structures.
So no human remains have bee
n found there.
Trempealeau, same thing,
they appear to be more temple-re
lated.
So in red, you see Trempealeau on
the left,
Aztalan on the right,
there were other platform mou
nds built,
on the Minnesota side of the rive
r up near Red Wing,
or Diamond Bluff,
and some at Jo Daviess County ju
st south of our state line.
And then there these things, en
closures.
We really don't have any idea wha
t these were for.
(audience laughing)
There's similar things built in h
istoric period
that function as dance circles.
So as archeologists, we're going
to guess,
make sense to us.
They're small enough to have bee
n used for dances.
Every so often you'll find one t
hat's pretty big
and they're definitely houses
inside it.
So those may be the remains of f
ortifications.
But something like this,
this is a type called a race
track enclosure,
because it's oval and it has bo
th an inside and outside,
and you could just see the outer
ring right at the front
and then the far right of this on
e,
the inner ring is pretty easy to
see.
And you could imagine dances tak
ing place there.
These people worked their way ar
ound this oval enclosure.
And finally our garden beds.
These get overlooked,
people don't think of these as e
arthworks 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 bet
ween them.
And these can cover acres and ac
res and acres.
These are built from around AD 9
00,
up to the historic period.
This is done in part, to man
ipulate the soil.
This is a form of changing soil
chemistry.
The ridges were built up,
not just by moving soil to one lo
cation,
but they would slash and burn, wa
it for rain,
wait for rain to concentrate ash
and nutrients
in low-lying spots.
Build the ridge fields at tho
se locations,
and bring in sometimes extra soil
,
extra minerals, other plants,
perhaps from wetlands to burn
in order to change the soil chemi
stry
and make it what they wanted it t
o be.
Some of these locations,
as excavations in Menominee Coun
ty 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 be
en built in the first place.
So that's great agriculture.
Okay, one quick question.
- [Woman] Is this on like flat g
round,
or is it on a slope like a terra
ce?
- 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 gon
e.
There were tens of thousands at o
ne 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, quar
ries took them out,
they were mined away, for garden
soil.
There was a
kind of an urban legend for a whi
le
that mound dirt was really ferti
le,
so people would haul mounds away
and spread them across the ga
rdens as mulch.
They were quarried for fill,
for railroad grades and for road
s.
Very few are left.
The ones that are left, like
the Man Mound,
like the Wehmhoff Panther, many h
ave suffered damage.
So what you see in some of the ph
otos 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 happe
ned 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 se
eing.
And,
I bring them up because it i
llustrates
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 t
hem and see them,
you can't just look at them f
rom a distance
and go, "Oh, that's obviously su
ch and such,"
you really have to experience the
m close up.
And Wisconsin does not often
make that easy.
So here from the original
land surveys of Wisconsin from 1
834,
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 spir
it effigy,
and possibly, maybe a mink,
I'm not sure, some other effigy.
It has legs, it's long.
The first written account we hav
e 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 terrib
le fortifications,
that people could walk right thr
ough."
But if you map out what he's
talking about,
he was pretty clearly finding
bird and bear effigies outside Pr
airie 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 te
rrain 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 lowe
r right hand corner here,
so you see what you should be se
eing.
From a distance you just get bum
ps.
And you are, "Are those snowdrif
ts, 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 disappeari
ng.
Here is John Broihahn, our st
ate 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 dow
n a little bit.
So we had to feel them out wi
th our feet,
which is not an ideal way to sur
vey a mound group.
But they're incredibly difficult
to see most of the year.
So if you're going to find a moun
d,
protect a mound, preserve a moun
d, map a mound,
learn about the landscapes that t
hose 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 do
n't like them either.
They're creatures,
and as much as archeologists li
ke 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 crawlin
g around,
feeling on the ground, trying to
find these things.
And then,
technology came to our rescue.
So LiDAR, Light Detection an
d Ranging.
Wonderful stuff.
You may have seen it in the news
,
the news articles,
couple three months back now mayb
e a little bit more,
some folks using this in the Ama
zon 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 lase
r, 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 stuf
f, goes back up.
So instrument on the plane record
s how long that takes.
In the meantime,
the plane is talking to all thes
e GPS instruments
on the ground and via satellite.
And they are tracking exactly
where the plan is in relationshi
p,
north, south, east, west in its
altitude,
how far above the ground it is.
So this is what the computer ini
tially sees.
It's going down, some laser puls
es are hitting
the tops of the trees and bounci
ng back,
some laser pulses are hitting th
e middle of the trees
and bouncing back, some are hi
tting the base of the tree
or the ground beneath the tree,
and they're bouncing back.
And it's more or less mapping th
e forest.
Well, here's the fun thing.
You can tell the computer to ign
ore everything,
except the very last pulses it
got back.
The stuff that went down the fur
thest,
the stuff that hit the ground.
Say ignore all the rest of that.
So here's an aerial photo of Wya
lusing State Park,
trees.
LiDAR.
- [Woman] Wow!
Good, good reaction.
(audience laughing)
The trees are gone, suddenly, mo
unds 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 lef
t off to the side.
You see the cuts through the mode
rn roads.
You can even see the hiking trail
s,
on the south where they've be
en 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 pro
ject coming up
in northwestern Wisconsin.
And there were some funny things
in the woods,
would we mind taking a peek at th
e LiDAR?
Great big mounds.
So here are those lovely dome-s
haped accretionary mounds
quite a few of them.
The big ones are showing up f
airly well.
And then you can just to make out
and I forgot to put an arrow on t
hat unfortunately,
a set smaller mounds
just to the left,
bottom center
of this.
So some smaller conical mounds i
n 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 lowe
r half of the screen,
and then the arrows up top.
There are Mississippian plat
form mounds.
They're a little harder to pick o
ut.
So the yellow one, is pointing t
o two huge pits.
These are borrow pits,
where they got the soil to b
uild 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 betwee
n 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 caus
eway to the mounds.
The big platform has the bigg
est pink arrow,
the middle platform has the midd
le 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 ha
s the smallest pink arrow.
The enclosure I showed you ea
rlier though,
the Hancock enclosure that doubl
e racetrack
the yellow arrow is pointing it.
Can people pick up at least the
outer embankment?
Not as perfectly oval as the phot
os make it look,
and some of the maps make it loo
k.
You stand back like,
"Oh, that's a little more circula
r than oval."
We've got that sort of misnamed.
Notice the bumps,
that run in lines, two lines of b
umps.
Those are conical, dome-shaped bu
rial 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 mo
ve down to the right,
one of those is a depression
not a bump.
So that may be another borrow pi
t 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 w
ildlife 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 loo
k?"
This appears to be a historic Ho-
Chunk dance ring.
It matches known examples,
the entrance is due east lik
e it should be,
it is perfectly circular, like i
t should be.
We have known accounts of his
toric villages
just north of this, so this is p
robably a forgotten
Ho-Chunk dancer ceremonial site.
Okay preserved, thank goodne
ss 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 head
ed out there just,
as the Great Depression hit,
in order to excavate some of thes
e mounds and make a map.
When they finished their field se
ason,
they got back to Milwaukee, the
Great Depression hit.
And suddenly they were much more
focused on keeping
the museum open and the budget i
ntact,
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 W
isconsin book,
and use that to remap the site,
formally catalog it
under Wisconsin's Historic Preser
vation Statutes
and Burial Site Law.
Talk to the landowner and se
e what we can do
about checking its condition,
and making sure that it's preser
ved,
for another 100, 200, 300 years,
or more.
First thing we found out, on th
e ground,
is that there were a lot more mou
nds out there
than Milwaukee Public Museum eve
r 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 clos
e together
that they're actually touching,
that they had to make one wing o
f a bird shorter
because there was another mound
in the way.
They really wanted these mounds a
t this particular spot.
Why?
We'd like to know.
But it seemed to kind of be an a
nomaly,
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 nowh
ere.
So here's the Grant River Valley
.
Each of the yellow dots, is a kno
wn mound site.
And before we initially did
that survey,
we didn't know about most of th
ose dots.
When the Burial Site Law was be
ing checked over,
reexamined just a couple of year
s ago,
one of the legislators involved
in that project asked us,
"As we're going through this l
ooking at the law,
can you tell us how many mounds w
e don't know about?"
(audience laughing)
Sure. (laughing)
LiDAR, we'll do a LiDAR survey.
So we sampled two places in Wisc
onsin,
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 Vall
ey,
we didn't know about a lot of the
m.
They were kind of everywhere.
And it changes our perception of
that valley
and its history.
We had known that there was a si
te called Fred Edwards,
not too far from the Raisbeck Mo
und, it's a village site.
And it dates to the period after
the Cahokians
have arrived in Wisconsin.
Fred Edwards has Cahokian-sty
le houses,
Cahokian-style and even Cahokian
imported pottery,
Cahokian-style gaming pieces, Ca
hokian-style arrow points,
and everyone thought, "Oh, it's a
Cahokian colony."
Problem with that is,
it also has effigy mound-style po
ttery,
sort of.
Some of it's effigy mound style,
100%.
Some of it's like you took some i
deas from Cahokia
about how a pot should be made,
and you blended them with some id
eas,
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, th
ey 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 effi
gy mound builders'
side of things.
So I was focused on this effigy m
ound-style pottery
more or less, so I didn't really
like that explanation.
So the LiDAR survey of the Gr
ant River Valley
made me very, very happy.
Because we found mounds.
Or, did we find mounds so ma
ny mounds.
Raisbeck, where we crawled throug
h vegetation
and found mounds and went back a
nd found more mounds,
and got bloody and cows coughed
on us in a windstorm,
and it sleeted, we still didn't f
ind 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, tw
o 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 i
n 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 moun
ds and linear mounds,
at this location with the field r
oads.
Obviously, the people lived ther
e know about these.
So they've got a field road runn
ing right alongside them.
A bird mound.
You can even see a looters' pitch
in the breast of the bird, in thi
s image.
So, I'm not happy about that, bu
t 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 line
ar mound.
We even had to revisit
the history of archeological
thought,
in this section of Wisconsin.
So William Pidgeon, who wrote
nThe Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah
in the mid 1800s,
had always been considered this h
uge 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 calle
d the Elk nation.
And he had the key to decipherin
g all the mounds.
So this is a famous illustration
from his book
of a "battle mound," okay, th
is never happened.
But he had a wild imagination.
But he did actually visit on t
he ground,
this part of Wisconsin, the
Mississippi Valley,
and he did map and find some mo
unds,
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 the
re ever."
Maybe y'know like that one im
age I showed you.
There might be mounds winding th
eir way down a ridge line.
So they appear to be sort of in
a straight line,
but you're not going to find a
nything like this.
And then we did.
(audience laughing)
So this site got deemed Pidg
eon's Revenge.
(audience laughing)
I would love to visit it in pers
on,
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 t
hat you don't see
at most sites so eventually we'r
e hoping to visit
these in person.
What we found was that Fred Edwa
rds
is literally surrounded by e
ffigy mounds,
they guard every potential appr
oach to that village.
If you're coming on the river th
ey're alongside the river,
if you try and cut through that l
ittle side valley,
over that ridge in the lower righ
t to get there,
there are mounds literally guardi
ng 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 co
me up and plop themselves
down right in the middle of wha
t would have been
a very spiritually-charged landsc
ape
belonging to somebody else.
Many Native American groups are n
ot 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, how
ever.
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 sen
se
if this is an effigy mound buildi
ng community,
right where it should be surround
ed 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 F
red Edwards
take it or leave it.
The mounds, which I hope you g
o visit,
please head upstairs to the fou
rth floor
to look at Dan Seurer's photograp
hs,
and I'm open for questions. (laug
hing)
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)