>> Today, we are pleased to introduce Amy Rosebrough as part
of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In
lecture series.
Amy has worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the State
Archaeology 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 of 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 share her perspective on Wisconsin effigy
mounds, please join me in welcoming Amy Rosebrough.
[applause]
- Thank you very much. The mic is on.
Everyone can hear me? All right.
Well, we are here today to talk about a very timely subject
for a number of reasons.
First of all, you may have seen articles about effigy mounds and
effigy mound preservation in the news in the past few months,
and so I'm glad to be able to come and bring out some
information that you may have seen in media and may not have
with regard to how important these sites are.
And secondly, because this is Wisconsin archeology month.
So, hooray.
[laughter]
We're gong to be having all kinds of events in
the next month, and if you go to our calendar at
WisconsinHistory.org, you should see many wonderful things
to do around the state.
And you could perhaps even visit some of these sites yourself
and see them for yourself.
All right, so what is an effigy mound?
We'll start with the basics.
And effigy mound is a burial mound made out of Earth.
It's a sculpture. It's a funerary monument.
Effigy mounds are unlike other mounds in that they're shaped like animals or spirits.
It could birds. It could be bears. It could be even human form.
And they're built by a group of people we call Late Woodland between 8750 and 1200.
Wisconsin is the center of the effigy mound phenomenon.
There are a few in Iowa, a few in Minnesota, a few in Illinois.
Just kind of the tear of counties that adjoin us.
But, for the most part, they're here in Wisconsin,
which is why it is not fair at all that Iowa
has Effigy Mounds National Monument.
That should be ours.
[laughter]
So here is what they look like.
This is one of the few photos I've got where
you actually see the bird shape.
That's only because it's flooded.
If you try and take a photo of these,
they drop into the ground.
They disappear So you see the tail is pointed at the camera,
and the wings are off to either side.
The effigies are different from the other mound forms.
Conical mounds are the most common type
of mound in Wisconsin.
This is what our state archaeologist refers to as a
great big mound u in Burnett County.
Most conicals are considerably smaller than these.
Linear mounds were also made by the effigy builders.
They're a little more recent in time.
Linear are part of a class of mounds that we call geometrics.
They're long.
They sometimes have projections and angles and bends to them.
They may have conical components to them,
but they don't appear to represent living beings,
or at least not beings we can recognize.
And then accompanying mounds at some sites are other Earth works
such as enclosures.
This is the Whistler Enclosure up in central Wisconsin.
It probably represents a dance ground.
You're looking at the green oval in the middle,
which is the innermost edge of the dance ground,
and you can just barely make out around here the outer ring.
So you can imagine dancers in between those two embankments
conducting ritual and dancing as part of ceremonies related to
the mounds.
The effigy mounds are, for the most part,
concentrated in southern Wisconsin,
and Madison sits at the epicenter of it.
We're right here in the middle.
There are mounds at the northeastern Wisconsin.
I've tagged them the small mound area.
They're conical and linear in form with a few other
geometrics, but they're usually fairly low and pretty sparse.
And then up in northwestern Wisconsin are the great big
mounds, and those are big conical and oval and low shaped
mounds that, again, our state archaeologist says can be
as big as a Buick.
[laughter]
We have records of over 3,000
effigy mound sites in Wisconsin.
Each one could contain one effigy mound,
sometimes up to hundreds.
Most of those, however, are gone.
They were plowed away in farms fields.
Roads were cut through them.
They were taken out in quarries.
Cities were built on them.
Maybe 10% of what used to be here is left, and of those,
most have suffered damage in one way or another.
So we have very few pristine examples of effigy mounds left,
which is a real shame because, as we'll see,
each mound is a unique work of art and a unique representation
of ancient belief systems, and each is a sacred place to
today's native peoples and to others who respect the history
and honor those who came before.
So, who built them?
In the 1800s, there was a great controversy.
The lost race of mound builders.
You would have seen that phrase repeated in the literature.
And the builders were tagged as anyone from Phoenicians to
Romans to the lost tribes of Israel.
The idea was that, well, if you ask a currently living native
person who built this, a lot of time you wouldn't get an answer.
That means they didn't built it, and if they didn't built it,
someone else must have built it.
And if somebody else built it and the natives are here,
then that means they took over the land, so we can take it back.
And it's all okay.
Well, in the late 1800s, the Smithsonian Institution sent out
archaeologists to cover the eastern half of the country and
open mounds to try and settle the issue:
Who were the mound builders?
And, surprise, surprise, it turned out it was native
peoples.
They found portraits of native peoples, native pottery,
native skeletal remains.
And the race of the mound builders poofed away
into history with that.
These are native creations.
These are the only portraits that we have of actual mound
builders in Wisconsin, just a couple.
The one at the lower corner, the death mask,
is from the great big mound area up in northwestern Wisconsin.
That appears to actually be a clay funerary mask.
So that's an actual person.
Mr. Head was found in the driftless area in Iowa County at
what appears to be a religious shrine dating to the period
of effigy construction.
So he may be our only portrait of an effigy builder.
And it has been pointed out that the painting on his face-- If
you can see the stripes and the circle on his chin.
That painting is identical to funerary face paint for the
Ho-Chunk Bear Clan a thousand years ago.
So, the first mounds in Wisconsin were built
around 500 BC.
We call those folks Early Woodland people.
We don't know what they called themselves,
and there were probably many different groups
in Wisconsin building mounds.
They're succeeded a little while later by a group we call Middle
Woodland, who also built conical mounds, and then,
around 8750 or so, by people who built effigy mounds.
With each succession, funerary ritual and mound ritual
changed just a little bit.
The effigies were a major innovation,
and they appear to have kind of turned mounds inside out,
as we'll see.
And then there's these folks: the Cahokians.
They show up here around AD 950 or so and have a big impact on
effigy mound construction in Wisconsin.
For most of the period of mound building,
communities would have looked a lot like this.
Temporary seasonal camps with structures that could be easily
dismantled and erected and moved if necessary.
So, wigwam type structures.
Very few traces left behind.
Archaeologists call these ephemeral sites.
It is where people were there and then they left,
and they really didn't leave much in the way of material
culture behind to tell us about their lives.
We know that they hunted during the period of effigy
construction with bows and arrows,
that they gathered seasonally to harvest mussels from the rivers
and nuts from the uplands.
We know that they fished.
We know that they traded for stone from Silver Mound
in Jackson County.
But other than that, their lives are a pretty big mystery.
We can map out the distribution of the Late Woodland effigy
builder communities by mapping the mounds.
And when we do that, we find that they fall into clusters
represented by the green shading on the slide.
Some of these, not coincidentally,
match the location of modern communities in Wisconsin,
like Madison and Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, La Crosse,
Prairie du Chien, because a good place to live then is a good
place to live today.
The red stars represent a phenomenon that began to happen
a little bit before AD 1000 that we call the Kekoskee phase.
Corn is introduced into Wisconsin around that time,
and some communities begin to take those first steps towards
settling down and establishing year-round habitation,
year-round villages.
Kekoskee communities contained what are called
keyhole house structures.
They looked a little bit like igloos except made out of a
wigwam frame and with matting or hide or bark covering.
The slide on that side of the screen is the actual floor
of one of those houses.
Now, you can imagine, you guys have Hoover vacuums.
You know how the dirt accumulates on the floor,
especially if you've got kids.
This is what's going on there.
That's the actual stain left behind by the house.
In a few places, we've got a little broader view
of the community.
This is a stripe that cuts through a village site when a
utility project was going in.
The archaeologist hired to monitor that found not just two
keyholes structures, shown in red,
but very large storage pits.
Those are the blue blobs.
And then those little black dots are post molds.
And the arrangement there tells us that this village
was fortified.
They'd put a defensive wall up around it,
which is something that tends to occur when people begin to
settle down in one place all year.
They begin to defend the village, defend the site.
And they were lucky enough-- This stripe, this excavation,
actually cut across the entrance.
So you see that line of double posts there.
That is a fortified entrance.
Anyone wanting to go in or out of that village would have had
to squeeze through that wall and be isolated.
It's a single file kind of entry system.
And they gardened.
They began to devote more time to agriculture
around this period as well.
So the corn hills that you might hear about in the historic
period at that point were ridges.
What we call ridged gardens or raised fields.
This is a site up in northeastern Wisconsin
where they're preserved.
And you see the green stripes.
Each of those represents a raised ridge on the ground.
Corn would have been planted across the top of that,
and then squash in the rows in between them,
along with other plants like sunflowers and goosefoot.
Now, how many of you have heard of the three sisters?
Okay, so, beans. Beans are missing.
We only had two sisters at this point.
Beans come in later.
Over time, effigy mound life diverged.
And you see multiple areas where everyone's kind of having their
own take on how life should go.
The Kekoskee people are settling down in southeastern Wisconsin.
The folks of the driftless area are very conservation,
and I won't make that joke.
[laughter] The Lewis phase people are looking towards
Minnesota, as they do today.
And then we've got the northern and southern tier of effigy mound.
We really don't know much about them because there haven't been
that many excavations at those sites.
All right, so, what do the mounds tell us?
A lot. This is the Shadewald group.
It's publicly accessible in Richland County,
just north of Muscoda.
So, go online, find out about this, make a trip.
It's one of the finest views in the driftless area
from the top of this hill.
All right, each of these dots represents one site, one place,
where effigy mounds have been recorded.
Again, they're mostly over southern Wisconsin.
Almost always near water. A major water source.
Water was very important, not just to life,
for travel and for drinking water and for resources,
but from a religious standpoint as well.
The path of the dead was said to begin in water.
And these are funerary monuments and sculptures.
So, there's a hypothetical cutaway
into a water panther formed mound.
You'll see the burial feature is at the heart of the animal.
If it were alive, that's where the burial is placed.
So the burial, the person buried there becomes one with the
creature and with its spirit.
Inside, you're not going to find much in the way of artifacts.
Out of all the effigy mounds ever opened,
we've got reports of four pots.
That's it.
And handful of stone tools, including the knife shown there,
and then, from time to time, much more common,
clusters of burned stone.
Not burned inside the mound but burned someplace else and then
gathered and placed in the mound.
And these may represent light and fire and heat
to accompany the deceased.
They come in all different kinds of forms.
So we've got an aerial view of the Devil's Lake bird.
And you can see one wing is kind of hiding in the trees.
But you see it's got a long, forked tail.
He may represent a swallow or a raptor that used to live
in Wisconsin called swallow-tailed kite.
Our famous two-tailed turtle on Observatory Hill here on campus.
The only one of his kind.
Goose Mounds, this is a Madison formed goose distinguished by
the zigzag wings.
The only place in Wisconsin where you find them.
It's a style particular to this area.
Our famous Man Mound.
It's on the poster for this year's archaeology month.
And then odd things like this.
This is an intaglio. It's an effigy mound in reverse.
We love floods when it comes to effigy mounds.
So he's filled up with water.
At this point, he's fulfilling his function.
This is probably a water spirit formed effigy,
and he is now filled with water.
So they're reversed probably specifically in order to contain
water and reflect the sky.
Sometimes effigy mounds occur alone,
but more often they're in groups with other effigy mounds,
linear mounds, geometric mounds, and conical mounds.
Here's an aerial shot of Lizard Mound County Park
near West Bend.
And you see two long straight-winged geese,
or the Horicon style of goose, and some other linear mounds
around them.
And then, of course, I've got to make a plug for Effigy Mounds
National Monument anyway, even if they are in Iowa.
And you'll see how effigy builders use the terrain.
So this is a LiDAR image of the site.
They've got the bears not exactly on the top of the ridge
but just off of it.
So it looks like feet are downhill and they're just about
to stand up, and they're walking along the ridge line with birds
flying to either side.
Well, effigy mounds, even without excavating them,
which we don't want to do because they're protected by
law, can tell us a lot about Late Woodland culture and belief
systems, just like funerary monuments can today.
If you look at a more recent tombstone,
you can learn a lot about the person.
You can tell when they lived.
Were they rich? Were they poor?
What was their name?
Did they have family members nearby?
What was their religion? Christian?
Jewish? Hindu?
The mounds tell us similar things.
So let's start with the form.
These particular animals aren't just animals.
These are the totems of the Ho-Chunk clans.
The Ho-Chunk, like many native groups,
divide their population into related families by clan,
each clan descending from a spiritual ancestor.
In this case, pigeon, hawk, eagle, thunderbird, wolf, bison,
deer, elk, bear, water panther, fish, and serpent.
It's probably no coincidence that the most common effigy
forms are these animals.
So the animals depicted in effigy form may be saying the
person buried here is bear clan, the person buried here is
thunderbird clan, the person buried there is elk clan.
If you map the shapes out, they're not evenly distributed.
It looks like some communities were under the control
of particular clans.
In Madison, the most common forms are a bird form and bear.
If you go to Prairie du Chien, it's the same,
but if you head up to the Bad Axe,
it's a bird and an animal with a tail, a short tail.
If you go east, the water panther forms begin to take over.
In most communities, the first most common and the second most
common mound form are bird and something else.
And this may represent native views of the cosmos.
Powerful beings up above, the most famous of which
is the thunderbird.
Powerful beings down below, the most famous of which
is the water panther, Mishipeshu.
These beings are opposed to each other,
occupying different levels of the universe,
with winged creatures above associated with light and order
but also warfare.
And furry creatures down below associated with fertility,
darkness, and chaos.
In native belief systems, the two opposing forces are
neither good nor bad, they're just opposing,
and you have to have both in order to have balance
in the universe.
And this cosmogram, which depicts the Cahokian view of the
universe as we understand it, could be substituted in for
Aztec, for Inca, or for pretty much any other group
in North and South America.
This is a very widespread concept,
and it even extends far enough back in time that it's shared
with the old world.
The mounds themselves are sculptures.
They're monuments made by the hands of particular artists.
And you can see the artist's style in a mound as well.
So again, returning to current tombstone manufacture,
this is weeping willow motif seen on modern tombstones.
And you can tell very easily that there are four different
artists at work on each of these four stones.
Looking at effigy mounds, it's the same.
So I've put a selection of water panther
or water spirit mounds up here.
And you'll see some designers like a curve tail or a wavy
tail; others like their tail to be straight or angled.
Some designers like a hook or a knob at the end of their mound.
Other people like more anatomical detail,
while some artists went for an abstract kind of presentation.
Mounds can tell you something about the relative power of the
individual buried inside.
Out of these two tombstones, who's the richest?
[crowd noise]
Yeah, it's pretty easy.
So, here we have a set of mounds up in Richland County.
You've already seen the Shadewald Effigies.
These are the Shadewald Conicals.
You see the highway cutting through the lower corner
of the screen.
On the other side of that highway, just out of view,
is the hill containing the Shadewald Effigies.
So these two sites are right next to each other,
looking at each other from one hill to another.
The conical mounds are built, boom, boom, boom, boom,
all in a row down the hill, probably one after another.
Excavations inside effigy mounds and conical mounds have shown
that if you're in an effigy mound,
you're more likely to have that mound to yourself.
You're also less likely to have ever suffered a broken bone or a
serious injury in your life.
If you're in a conical mound, chances are you're sharing it
with one, two, three, four, maybe more other people,
up to 50 in some cases, and you probably went in sometime after
your death as a bone bundle, not right away.
Now, that would imply that the folks that went into effigy
mounds had a higher status than the folks who went
into the conical mounds.
But is every effigy mound burial equal?
Well, see the farmstead at the top of the screen and then the
high then that runs past it.
Here's an aerial photo.
You can just see the driveway for that farmstead.
Excuse me. Up there.
So the hill and the road running in between--
There's the road that runs in between the two sites,
and the two hills in the last frame would be just off the
upper corner of that image.
The effigy mounds shown there are the famous Ghost Eagle site.
This is an effigy mound, the large one,
that was only discovered after it was destroyed.
The mound was plowed flat, and then in the '30s the USDA did an
overflight to take aerial photos of that region.
And somebody looking through that went, hey,
there's a bird and another bird and some other shapes.
This mound was so big that even plowed out it left a stain,
a shadow, behind.
Like the house did at the Kekoskee site I showed earlier.
That's why it's called the Ghost Eagle.
How big is this mound?
Well, let's superimpose it on Madison's Capitol Square.
[crowd noise]
900 feet plus, just based on the soil shadow,
from wingtip to wingtip breast over the burial area.
It probably stood at least eight feet high.
That's a lot of dirt to move for one guy.
So I'm going to guess this guy was possibly a little bit more
important or powerful, or she, mind you,
than the folks even buried in the effigy mounds up on the hill
at the Shadewald site.
Mapping the distribution of the different styles versus the
different shapes tells you who's moving on the landscape as well.
So those goose mounds, the Madison goose.
You only see that design here in Madison,
but you see goose mounds representing the Goose clan at
the Horicon area, the West Bend area, as far east as Milwaukee.
Just one or two mounds.
This tells us that members of the Goose clan were moving
from village to village.
While they mostly lived in Madison and Horicon,
they were sometimes transferring to other communities.
But the person who designed the mounds didn't leave.
They stayed here in Madison.
The zigzag wing style never transfers to any other place.
And that says that a couple of things are going on.
First of all, if you're a native person and you're not satisfied
with your leadership or there's a problem,
let's say the nut harvest fails, you want to be able to do
something called voting with your feet, you leave.
You go visit relatives in other communities.
So, a community, let's say, in the area of the Shadewald site
in Richland County, the nut harvest fails,
there's nothing to eat in the fall.
The members of the different clans each head out to live
with their relatives.
That means that that community can, in essence,
draw from a much, much, much wider area in case of emergency.
So, mobility is good, if you're a rank and file member
of a Late Woodland society.
If your leader, however-- There's two ways to go about
leadership in native systems.
One is to engage in conspicuous consumption.
To show that you're important by having wonderful things,
wonderful paraphernalia.
Another is a basic shamanic system called masked ranking.
In other words, you're important but not because of how you look
or what you own but because of what you know.
Knowledge is intangible.
The Middle Woodland folks, especially in Ohio,
went for the first system, conspicuous consumption.
They employed incredible artists,
ran a trade network that covered most of the central
and eastern US.
Stuff was moving from the Gulf coast out to Yellowstone
National Park, the Appalachians, up to the copper deposits
in northern Wisconsin.
That pile of stone knives is composed entirely of Knife River
chalcedony from one quarry in North Dakota.
This was found in one burial in Ohio.
He took it with him.
The other system is much, much harder to see archaeologically.
So, I'm going to turn to an historic parallel.
The Mandan are a village-based society that live
in North Dakota.
They were plains farmers.
Grew corn, hunted bison.
From general perspective, you would say that they were an
egalitarian society, unless you looked really, really closely.
One lodge in the center of the village was always slightly
larger than the rest and faced the direct center of the plaza
in the middle of the site.
People who lived in that lodge were the traditional
owners of a ritual bundle called the lone man bundle.
And marriages were arranged to keep that bundle
in that family's hands.
Why?
Because without that bundle you could not perform ceremonies
crucial to the continued existence of the universe.
Now, if you own the key to the universe, you've got power.
Can you see this archaeologically?
Well, let's take a look at the lone man bundle.
This is a painting done of its contents on a rare occasion when
it was opened for non-native people.
The problem is that most of the items in this bundle
are perishable.
If you were-- Let's say some sort of catastrophe happens,
and this bundle is buried in the ground for a thousand years,
the length of time between the effigy mound people and us.
It goes away.
Archaeologically, all you would find of that crucial bundle is a
bison tooth, a bird bone, and a rock.
Now, having done archaeology, I know exactly what would happen
if that assemblage were found.
We would go, they ate a bird, they ate a buffalo, oh look,
a rock. [laughter]
And all of that belief system is gone.
So there's a lot more to an effigy mound site than appears.
It's just the surface of the iceberg.
You can see the mound, but what you're not seeing
is everything that goes with it.
The ritual that went into its construction.
The ritual that took place around it.
The belief, the faith associated with that ritual.
The political wrangling and tussling in between leaders
and their followers.
It's not completely vanished.
I believe that today's native peoples know a little bit more
than they're willing to let on, which is fine.
That's their business; archaeology is ours.
But it is a little frustrating to think, oh, if only I knew.
Not gonna happen.
So, meanwhile, so what's going on with those Cahokians?
What brings effigy mound construction to an end?
Well, at the same time the effigy mounds are being built
here, to the south, just a little north and east of
St. Louis and across the river, is Cahokia.
At AD 900 or so, it's just a little village,
one of many in the American bottom.
In AD 950 to 1000, it's the closest thing North America
ever had to a city.
It's called the Cahokian big bang.
Populations just stream to this site.
It emerges as a very complex, planned community,
with ritual alignments, human sacrifice,
incredible stratification and leadership.
The Cahokians did go for the conspicuous consumption route.
The big mound you see in each of these images
is called Monks Mound.
It's bigger at its base than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Stands over a hundred feet high.
And it was a platform for the chief's house.
And this is the chief who could command, upon occasion,
the deaths of 50-60 young women at a time,
all between the ages of, I think, 18 and 32,
which is not a normal death profile.
The Cahokians begin to send traders and explorers and
colonists out from the site.
They're establishing a trade network that, again,
would eventually reach from Wisconsin down to Louisiana.
When they get to Wisconsin, they established a couple of
colonies, some trading outposts, and a major rendezvous.
The colonies are Aztalan, which is the most famous,
Aztalan State Park, and one that we're just beginning to learn
about in the past few years, Trempealeau, up at Little Bluff.
The Red Wing rendezvous has been owned for awhile.
We do know that effigy mound people traveled there to trade
because they built an effigy mound or two at this mound and
cemetery area associated with the site.
When the Cahokians arrive, some of them begin to intermarry,
especially at Aztalan State Park where you can actually see the
pottery styles blend and merge and come out as something new.
A new culture is born as the two cultures engage with each other
and negotiate how life's going to be.
Some Cahokian traits move into Wisconsin.
New pottery technology, the idea that you can grow not just a
little corn but lots and lots and lots.
Warfare begins to pick up,
possibly as a consequence of this.
My own theory is that there's a period of about 100-150 years
where every individual effigy mound community
is having to make a choice.
Do we adopt some of these new Cahokian ways of life?
Do we start paying attention to their religion?
What do we do?
And over time this blend, this Cahokian Late Woodland blend, wins out.
We call that Oneota.
And those are the folks you'll hear right up until contact and
most likely ancestral to today's native peoples in Wisconsin.
Vast areas of Wisconsin empty out as people begin to vote with
their feet and move to those select new born Oneota communities.
The population of Madison appears to have headed south to
Lake Koshkonong to the Oneota sites there.
And as this happened, effigy mound dies out.
We're not sure whether it's a change in religious belief or
whether the fact that people aren't moving around so much
anymore means that you could establish a cemetery and just
keep the knowledge of who's buried where and how important
they were in your head.
So that is a mystery still.
With that said, if you'd like to learn more about mounds,
I recommend the "Spirits of the Earth" book sold by our press,
and then "People of the Big Voice" with just beautiful
images of the Ho-Chunk.
Please buy our books.
[laughter]
And thank you.
[applause]