cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome, everyone
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of those organizations and our other sponsors,
Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at
the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm delighted to be
able to introduce to you Danielle Benden.
She has served as the curator of anthropology here at UW-Madison
in the Department of Anthropology.
She manages the anthropological collection holdings, provides
teaching support for faculty and graduate students, facilitates
research for visiting scholars, and designs and installs
exhibits. Danielle also oversees the
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
compliance here at UW Madison. She teaches and archeological
curation methods course to undergraduate students, and she
conducts here own archeological research focused in southwestern
Wisconsin, which is also where she's from.
She received a bachelor's of science in archeology from the
University of Wisconsin La Crosse and a master's of
science in museum and field studies with an archeology
emphasis from the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Currently, she's co-directing a three-year research project
sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
This project focuses on the presence of Mississippian
peoples in the upper Mississippi River Valley prior to what's
called the big bang at Cahokia about a thousand years ago, and
that's where we get tonight's title: "A Thousand Years Ago
in Trempealeau." [LAUGHTER]
Danielle is a member of several professional organizations
including the American Association of Museums,
the Association of Midwest Museums, the Society for
American Archeology, the Wisconsin Archeological Survey,
and the Wisconsin Archeological Society.
She is currently serving a three-year term on the Society
for American Archeology Committee on Museums'
Collections and Curation. Thank you for laughing.
I appreciate that. [LAUGHTER]
You're from La Crosse? >> I am.
Please join me in welcoming Danielle Benden
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Well, thank you very much. [INAUDIBLE]
Your mic is not on.
Should we try that again? Okay.
Thank you very much for that kind introduction.
I'm pleased to be here tonight to talk about a National Science
Foundation sponsored project that I and two of my colleagues,
Ernie Boszhardt and Tim Pauketat, have been working on
in Trempealeau. And for those of you who aren't
familiar, Trempealeau is in the southwestern part of the state
in the unglaciated driftless region.
You can come, apparently, next week and learn all about that.
A thousand years ago in Trempealeau there were a group
of local late Woodland effigy mound builders living in the
area. The whole part of the southern
part of Wisconsin was actually filled with effigy mound
builders. So most of you are familiar with
these animal-shaped mounds. We had quite a few of them here
in Madison. And about a thousand years ago
there were a group of foreigners that came up from Cahokia, and
these people are called Mississippians.
And they interacted with the local late Woodland population.
And so Cahokia is the largest pre-Columbian site north of
Mexico. It is, essentially, America's
first city. So anywhere from 10,000 to
30,000 people were living at this city a thousand years ago.
It's really an incredible place. You can go visit it today.
It's near present day East St. Louis.
And it's a World Heritage site actually.
Cahokia is known for its pyramid-shaped mounds.
So the largest is Monks Mound here.
100 feet tall, 15 acres at its base, and what it is, is it's
constructed with basket loads of earth.
It's really an incredible feat. And there's hundreds of these
platform mounds that surround Cahokia and the American Bottom.
And Mississippian people were living in a society that was
highly stratified. So there's craft specialists,
there's a chiefly elite that's residing potentially on one of
these mounds that is overseeing the population.
There's a complex religion associated with this group of
people. And they were large-scale
agriculturalists. So we find evidence of their
farm fields, but we also find these stone hoes that you see on
the bottom on your left. These are made out of a kind of
material, a flint called Mill Creek chert.
We find these quite often. There's also a distinctive kind
of pottery that Mississippian people make, and it's called
Ramey Incised. There is an example of it in the
second one here. Let's see if I can get the
cursor. And it's this scrolled motif.
It's very elaborate. Very beautiful.
This photograph shows evidence of that craft specialization I
was talking about. Finely made projectile points
and chunky stones. These are these chunky stones
here. Here's figurine depicting the
game of chunky being played. Another term for this, it's a
discoidal. And, essentially, the game of
chunky was played up until the French get here in the 1600s.
People are playing it in the southeast.
Native people are playing it all the way out to the plains.
It's a very important game, and it was a thousand years ago for
Mississippians as well. The essence of the game is this:
the game is played on a ball court, the chunky stone is
rolled down the court, and at the same time the stone is
rolled, two men are launching poles toward the rolling stone,
and whose ever pole lands closest to the stone wins that
round. That's essentially a very short
description of the game. It's an incredibly important
game that's played, again, up through contact.
So I guess I won't spend a whole lot time here, but, briefly,
there's three periods of time that are really important to
understand at Cahokia in order to understand what we're finding
up in Trempealeau. So the first period of time is
called the Edelhart phase. It's between 1000 to 1050 AD.
This is when people are living in small hamlets, probably the
beginning of mound construction. So those flattop, pyramid-shaped
mounds, probably the beginning of that occurring.
The pottery type during this time is very distinctive.
It's red slipped and it's shell tempered.
The predominate chert type, or flint material,
used to make stone tools is called St. Genevieve.
We also call it root beer chert because of the color.
The architectural style at this time is predominately this
rectangular what we call single-post construction.
So, essentially, you can see the small little circular areas in
here. Let's see if I can get the
cursor to come up again. These all represent where posts
used to be. So single posts were stuck into
the ground, and then this would have been thatched over like you
see in this upper corner here. That's what it would have looked
like. That's an artist rendition.
Okay? During the Lohmann phase,
AD 1050 to 1100, this is what we call the big bang in the
American Bottom. It's when Cahokia coalesces.
It's becoming a city. People are coming in from miles
and miles away. They're drawn into this new
city, and there's massive construction going on during
this time. That's when Monks Mound was
built, that large mound I showed you earlier.
The predominate pottery type at that time is called
Powell Plain. It's this really plain,
but highly burnished kind of black looking pottery.
You still do get a little bit of this red slip pottery but
mostly they're moving towards this Powell Plain-like ware.
The chert types become heavily Burlington and Mill Creek.
These are two different kinds of flint that are available near
Cahokia. They are using a little bit of
St. Genevieve, but it drops off dramatically during the Lohmann
period. There's also quite a change in
the architectural style as well. So the house shape is still
rectangular, but instead of putting individual posts in the
ground, they're building trenches, four trenches for
walls. We think they're actually
pre-fabbing walls and then sinking the walls down into the
trench. Again, thatching over very
similar to what you see in this photograph depicted up here.
Okay? Finally, during the Sterling
phase, 1100 to 1175, this is really what we call the Cahokian
climax. This is when the city of Cahokia
is at its height, its power, and what we find there is the
pottery type moves from Powell Plain to this Ramey Incised,
this highly beautifully decorated and scrolled design
you see on the pots. You get a very angular shoulder
with this pottery type, and the rims are what we call rolled
rims. Okay?
During Sterling you see the same use of this Mill Creek and
Burlington chert, and the architectural style stays the
same as the wall trench structures.
That's kind of a lot of information, but it's really
important to understand these time periods so that we can
understand what's happening in Trempealeau and place it into
time. By the Sterling phase,
Mississippian people and/or ideas are everywhere.
So here we have the site of Cahokia, and there is this
explosion into northern Illinois, into Wisconsin,
Minnesota, even out into western Iowa.
During the Lohmann phase, which again is really when Cahokia is
coalescing as a city, there's a little bit of evidence of some
material culture from the Lohmann phase recovered from the
site of Aztalan, which is right here.
Some of you may be familiar with that site.
But the only two other locations where you see this early
presence of Mississippian people outside of the American Bottom
is at Trempealeau and another site called Fisher Mounds.
Fisher Mounds is a small circular site, and Trempealeau
is the rectangular site. I'm only going to really focus
on Trempealeau tonight because it's just too much information
to get into one talk here. Just a few words about Aztalan
before I move into Trempealeau. Aztalan was first documented by
Nathan Hyer in the 1830s, and he, of course, named it Aztalan
because he thought it was affiliated with the Aztec
people. And of course we now know that
not to be true. In the 1850s, Increase Lapham,
a really important figure in Wisconsin archeology, came to
Aztalan and made this map in the upper left.
And, basically, if you haven't visited the site, I highly
recommend it. It's a state park, and Aztalan
is near Lake Mills. It's tucked way back into the
hills, and it's on the Crawfish River.
The Crawfish River is a very small stream.
This is a really defensive posturing.
This is a chosen location that is extremely defensive.
It is fortified or palisaded. This picture in the middle shows
the reconstruction of a palisade.
When you go there today, you'll still see that.
Estimates of 10,000 trees to construct this palisade.
A foot in diameter. We estimate them to be about
14 feet tall. They're sunken down about four
feet into the ground. It's an incredible amount of
labor to make this. So, clearly, there's some
conflict going on, but what we find at Aztalan is this mix of
these local late Woodland people and Mississippian people or
ideas kind of intermixing. So, for example, we might find
pottery there that is locally made but has stylistic
attributes that are Mississippian and vice versa.
So we do find some evidence of things being imported directly
up from Cahokia. Here is one of those Sterling
phase Ramey Incised pots found at Cahokia.
Here's one of those chunky stones or discoidals.
So, clearly, there is at least a very strong Mississippian
influence here, probably Wisconsin's most famous
Mississippian site. Moving on, of course, to
Trempealeau, and Trempealeau, as I mentioned, is in the
unglaciated driftless region of Wisconsin on the Mississippi
River. This is the modern day village
of Trempealeau here. These are the Trempealeau
Bluffs, which I'll talk about in a minute.
But Trempealeau is most famous for Trempealeau Mountain that
you see here, and it's this little remnant bluff system that
the arrow is pointing to right here.
So this is a unique geologic landmark.
As a matter of fact, it's a unique landmark in the entire
124-mile stretch of the river. You do not get this phenomenon
happening anywhere else except for right here.
So, undoubtedly, this point on the landscape is important, and
it has been for thousands of years.
It's a landmark. And I'll just say that
Trempealeau gets its name from when the French get there.
It's a French word and they called Trempealeau Mountain
la montagne qui Trempealeau, that's the mountain whose foot
is bathed in water, and it makes a lot of sense because,
of course, Trempealeau Mountain is surrounded by water
on all sides. So what did we know about
Mississippian in Trempealeau before we started our
excavations there? We knew a little bit.
We knew about a map that was made by T.H. Lewis,
a pretty famous mound surveyor, and he created this map in 1884.
Lewis mapped thousands of mounds up and down the river, but he
stopped in Trempealeau and he mapped these three platform
mounds. So these are, if you recall back
to the site of Cahokia, these are very common down there,
but very uncommon in Wisconsin. So here's one mound.
Here's a second mound. He mapped a ramp going down to a
third mound. There's a small little,
what we call a ridge top mound that he mapped on top of this
third mound, and then there's another ramp going off the edge
of Little Bluff. This is on top of Little Bluff
which is about a 100-foot-tall natural bluff.
He also mapped these borrow pits.
This is where the dirt was removed from the ground to build
up the mounds. So they were these very, very
large, now gaping holes in the landscape.
They're still there today. In the early 1900s, there's
another character that enters the story, and his name is
George Squier. He was trained as an avocational
geologist. He's an avocational archeologist
but he was trained as a geologist at Harvard.
He returns to Trempealeau to help with farming his family's
dairy farm which happens to be the property of Little Bluff.
And so Squier also makes a map of Little Bluff.
He shows the borrow pits back here.
He shows the largest mound one, mound two leading down into
mound three. He even does some good by taking
some photographs of the mounds. You can see them in profile
here. There's one, there's two, and
then there's a third one off the tip.
This is standing back and this one is standing in the borrow
pits right here looking back toward mound one.
So this is the base of mound one.
It's pretty large. This one is standing right
between two and three looking back up towards mound two and
mound one. You'll see in a minute that the
vegetation pattern looks nothing like this now.
It's completely different. This is about a hundred years
ago, and now it's pretty heavily forested.
So flash forward to the 1990s. There were some archeologists,
mainly Bill Green and Rollie Rodell, from the Mississippi
Valley Archeology Center, that went back to a couple of maps
that Squier had made. Squier made this additional map
in 1921. So, again, here's Little Bluff.
Here's his sketch of it. Here is what's called we now
know as Squier's Garden. He recorded in this little area,
this is his garden plot, he recorded while gardening finding
this red painted pottery. He didn't know exactly what it
was, but he knew it wasn't local.
He did a lot of archeology around the area, and he knew it
not to be from locally made by the native people that had been
living in Wisconsin. So he didn't know exactly what
it was but he knew it was rare and he knew he was fascinated by
it. So he did another really good
thing too. He put the street names on his
map. So what that did is it allowed
Bill Green and Rollie Rodell to go back to his garden plot and
put a couple of test units in, and indeed they recovered more
of this red slipped pottery and just verified that there is more
material that hasn't yet been uncovered.
In 1867, there was a judge by the name of George Gale.
Galesville, the town of Galesville, is named after him.
He recorded a reference to a mound we now know as the Third
Street Mound that happens to be in this person's front yard.
There's a remnant mound right here.
And this is in the property of Terry Uhl, hence the name of the
site as the Uhl Site. And on the other side of the
house here, if this were to extend, this it towards the
other side of the house, this area was under construction in
the 1960s, and a construction worker came and walked the back
dirt piles, and he found these red slipped cherts in the back
dirt pile. And he brought it to the
attention of Bill Green. And it was just another
indication that there's just a little bit there.
So just to sort of summarize, what did we know before we
started our excavations here? We knew about Little Bluff and
the temple mound complex on top of it because of Lewis' map and
because of Squier's maps. We knew about Squier's garden
because of his maps and his descriptions of the pottery he
was finding and because of the work that Bill Green and Rollie
Rodell had been doing. We knew about the Stull site or
the Uhl site because of the Third Street Mound mapped in
1867 by George Gale and because the construction worker in the
1960s had found those few pieces of pottery.
We also knew about one little, tiny red slipped chert that was
recovered from, believe it or not, Central Park in
Trempealeau. It's nothing like the real
Central Park. [LAUGHTER]
And we knew about a silt, or a very finely made
wood-working tool, Mississippian style, that came just a block
from the Mississippi River, right in front of the
Trempealeau Hotel if anybody is familiar with the area.
We did not know about a site we now call Pelkey after the
landowners. So now I'm just going to take
you on a virtual tour of our excavations.
I'm going to start first with Little Bluff.
We're going to then move to Squier Garden, Pelkey, and then
end up at Stull. So off we go with Little Bluff.
In 2010, we had two main questions we wanted to answer.
First, we wanted to excavate into the borrow pits.
That's this area highlighted back here.
And we thought that if people are living up on these mounds,
or on Little Bluff itself, we should find evidence of that
because people have to throw their garbage somewhere.
And this is a common phenomenon you find down at Cahokia.
The borrow pits are full of garbage.
So our goal was to put several test units into the borrow pits.
[INAUDIBLE] A borrow pit, so the dirt
is borrowed from the earth. The other goal was to map the
site. So you can see here in the
center we brought a total station out and mapped the site
as well. You can look at the vegetation
on the site. It looks very, very different
than it did when Squier had taken his photographs in the
early 1900s. We spent a lot of time clearing
off the vegetation. And also, I just want to point
out, there are two what are called lidar images.
We got really, really lucky because at the same time we were
doing our work, the government was doing a lidar survey of the
Upper Mississippi River Valley. And what this does, this imagery
is amazing. It allows you to sort of paint
out the vegetation and see the natural landscape.
So you can see in these lidar images, you can see the borrow
pits pretty well in this contour map on the left.
You can see, here's another view of it topographically as well.
Pretty, pretty great. One of the things, probably one
of the most amazing things we uncovered through our mapping,
was that there are all sorts of alignments going on.
And so this is highly geared towards the summer solstice.
So the borrow pits, the mounds, all line up to the summer
solstice. This is something that George
Squier had alluded to in his notes.
I really, this would be a perfect place to watch the
summer solstice sunrise come up. And he was right.
We have this science to prove it now with the total station work
that we've done. This ramp coming off the third
mound is aligned to the winter solstice, and then the second
mound we think has some tie to the equinox as well.
So this is really exciting for us because this is exactly what
you find down at Cahokia. There are all sorts of
alignments going on. These people are watching the
heavens, and just like we have mathematicians and engineers
today, they knew exactly what they were doing a thousand years
ago. So here's our excavations into
the borrow pits. We put a total of 21
one-by-two-meter units into the borrow pits, and we recovered
two pieces of pottery. [LAUGHTER]
Well, that sort of blew our theory of the borrow pits
being full of garbage. And this is a good lesson
because sometimes the absence of material culture can tell you
just as much as the presence. And what that told us was people
were not living up here. They're just not.
There's some other kind of activity going on, but it's not
habitation related. Probably the second greatest
discovery in 2010 was that we realized that at one point the
borrow pits, so there's one here and there's one here, two very
large holes in the earth now, used to be connected.
And what they did prehistorically, there's some
historic rubble that's here which is common when you dig
sites, but underneath here, all these splotchy areas,
those are all basket loads. What we found working with a
geomorphologist, a soil scientist, is that the
Mississippian built back up what we call the causeway.
It's this area leading from the back side of the mounds all the
way up to the mounds on the back side.
So think of this in terms of a procession, maybe in a church,
the aisle that leads up to the alter.
Same kind of concept. Well, we returned in 2011 with a
couple of other questions to answer.
And in the 1930s, unfortunately, the village of Trempealeau put a
water tower right into the center of the largest mound,
mound one. And it was at the absolute
abhorrence of the state archeologist Charlie Brown at
the time. He wrote several letters trying
to stop them and trying to preserve this mound, and they
went ahead with it, unfortunately.
Here's a look at that water tower in 1990.
It's a pretty big, kind of ugly-looking thing.
Shortly after this photograph was taken, it was demolished.
So, again, we're talking about this mound right here, the
largest of the mounds. But we wanted to do was we
wanted to look to see how much damage has been done because of
that water tower building, and is there intact soil remaining
that we can see how the Mississippians constructed the
mound. So those were sort of our two
major questions for this project.
So what we did was, here's the water tower, we put a T-shaped
trenched going down the north flank of mound one.
Here's our field school students helping to lay out the trench
and us beginning to excavate it. What we found was just so
exciting for us, and that was that, yes, indeed, there was a
historic fill zone with concrete and rubble and rebar.
Unfortunately, that's probably all due to the demolition of the
water tower, but, happily, there is still quite a bit of intact
mound building that we can see. We can see this sequence of
mound building. So, basically, what we have is
this black silt cap, and underneath that is a pretty
large zone of yellow silt, and then under that is this
red-brown silt that they're probably getting from the borrow
pits. This is exactly the same kind of
mound construction you get down in the American Bottom at sites
like Cahokia, both in mounds and also in really special
buildings, what we call buildings that have a religious
nature or some kind of ritual feature associated with them.
This intentional light and dark banding is something that is,
like I said, it's intentional. And they're doing this exactly
the same way up here. So for us to see this is really
pretty incredible. We also learned that this was
all done in one mound-building episode.
Here's a look at distinctive individual basket loads.
So all these little splotches of different colored soils, those
all represent individual basket loads of people building this
mound together. What we find sometimes in them
are bits of shell, sometimes a broken piece of pottery,
sometimes a piece of stone tool. Not a lot of stuff up here.
It's pretty clean, but it was enough to verify that these
mounds are, indeed, Mississippian and that they were
made about a thousand years ago. We also uncovered a hearth.
This red kind of circular feature in plan view.
Here it is in profile. And what this represents is a
very intensive fire burning for a long period of time.
This isn't a campfire that we normally find.
A lot of times we excavate fire pits at sites, and they're
usually full of charcoal. They're full of garbage.
They're full of ash. But this was different.
This was completely clean. This was burning so long
and so hot that there were not artifacts in it.
There was no ash. There was no charcoal.
It was just brick, brick red. Very, very hard to even cut
through with the trowel. So we think that this was
intentionally cleaned at least one time during its use.
Here's that hearth I just showed you moving over to the east.
This darker stain in the soil here, and then the edge of it is
right here, is a building. Here it is in profile.
So this darker stain coming down here, oops, and then on this
side here. Again, we have layers of this
darker black, yellow, and then a thin layer of black.
That's the house floor or the building floor, and then there
was an interior hearth in there as well.
That was really, really outstanding to find.
Again, no artifacts in it. These are just, this is
intentionally kept clean. We also did a similar thing on
mound three. So here we are off the edge of
Little Bluff. Here is an up-close view of
that. And, like mound one, there was
some historic disturbance. There's siren pole sunk right
into, unfortunately, into mound three.
The village of Trempealeau used to light off fireworks from this
area. So there was definitely some
disturbance going on, and we decided to put a trench through
this area to, again, what kind of damage has been done and what
remains. Is there anything intact and
what can we learn about the activity if there is something
intact. And what we found was this
pretty large post-pit. Or a stain where a pit used to
be. The center part of the pit was
this burned area that was full of mammal bone, it was full of
charcoal, and what this represents, we also, by the way,
this is an elk antler that was off to the side that was kind of
interesting, but what this represents is a pit where a
large post would have stood. And these posts you find down at
Cahokia, and they're marker posts.
You set these up to align the whole site around these posts
so you can then mark solstitial alignments and things like that.
This is an example of one down at Cahokia.
This is the summer solstice coming up, and these are like
calendar sticks. Think of them like that.
Very common in the Mississippian world.
Are those the original ones or reproductions?
The ones at Cahokia, some are reproductions, some are
originals. Okay, that wraps up
Little Bluff. We're moving now in our tour to
the eastern edge of Little Bluff to a site called Squier Garden.
So I showed you some photographs before or in a map of Squier's
where Squier's Garden was. Since his garden, in the early
1900s, it has now become a church property.
So it's this pretty large grassy area.
And what we do in areas like this is we use a method called
shovel testing. And shovel testing is like
exploratory surgery for archeologists.
That's the best way I can put it.
Every 10 feet or so we dig a foot and a half wide hole about
three feet deep, and we screen all the dirt, and we just get an
idea of what's down there. Are there artifacts?
Are there not? And then it allows us to open up
larger areas over the most productive shovel tests.
So here's an example. Here's a shovel test.
There's some pottery coming out. So we would mark this as a
positive shovel test, and we would just keep doing this.
And then what we do, like I said, is open up larger areas
around the densest shovel test. So sometimes we bring in little
backhoes, in this case we did, to strip off the plow zone and
the disturbed historic overburden, and it gets us down
to the prehistoric surface. So here's one of those wall
trenched structures. It's this one right here with an
interior hearth. In all at Squier we found three
of these wall trenched structures.
That puts a marker in time. So this is affiliated with the
Lohmann phase in the American Bottom right when Cahokia's
becoming a city, about 1050 AD or so.
This is just kind of fun to think about.
Little Bluff is, I think I might have said, it's 100 feet tall
naturally, and then you've got these mounds on top.
You've got people living below at Squier Garden.
This is a rendition, artist rendition, of Cahokia with Monks
Mound, which is about 100 feet tall, and people living below.
And might this not be what's happening right here at
Trempealeau looks incredibly similar.
Moving on to the site of Pelkey, which is just off the toe of
Little Bluff. Pelkey is kind of an interesting
site. It's what we call a downslope
midden. So normally we don't test slopes
because people don't live on slopes.
So this was kind of, we found this in part by luck, I have to
say. But, basically, we ran out of
things for our students to do and we kept them shovel testing.
[LAUGHTER] And, sure enough, they're
recovering all these artifacts out of their shovel tests.
So we then opened up these block excavations and, again, mapped
with a total station. Here's a map of the area.
And what we uncovered were a series of these pits.
And this one is capped with clay, and there's a burn zone.
And inside this pit we did find a couple of interesting things.
One being that there's this Powell Plain pottery that's
Mississippian, but there's also this local what's called
Angelo Punctated pottery. That's what the local effigy
mound people make. So there's this interaction
going on that we found a little evidence of at Pelkey.
Mostly what we found at Pelkey, though, was probably a result of
people just living on top and throwing garbage off the edge.
Moving on then to Stull. The Stull site, you might
remember, here's that extant Third Street mound.
Here's Terry Uhl's house. This is Jay Street.
This is where that construction had occurred in the 1960s.
What we did is we put a one-by-four-meter test trench in
this guy's front yard, and that was, of course, over positive
shovel tests. And so we put this test trench
in, and we, again, got kind of lucky because what we uncovered
was these darker stained soil, can you all see that?
That darker stain? That represents the edge of a
house. This is a wall trench coming
down right here, and then there's a second house, we call
it the edge of a second house coming that way.
This is it in profile. Here's a wall trench.
Here's the basin of a house right here.
And so in this little trench we recovered all sorts of things,
but two of probably the most important were this kind of
pottery. It's called Coles Creek Incised.
Its normal area is the Lower Mississippi Valley, like south,
south, south of Cahokia. There's this variety of pottery
called Hartley Crosshatch that's usually associated with a little
bit later period of time, about 50 to 100 years later, and it
comes form a site called the Hartley Fort site in Iowa,
northeastern Iowa. So, it was enough to bring us
back in 2011 to come back an chase those two houses and
expose more area, basically. So we were thinking we were just
going to come here and by hand kind of open up off the trench.
But we thought what are the chances if we just ask the
landowner if we can just tear up his front yard for the summer.
[LAUGHTER] And he said yes.
[LAUGHTER] But we put it back,
we put it back pretty well. And so we brought in a small
little backhoe and, again, removed the topsoil, and when we
did, this is what became exposed.
That lighter soil here, that's our one-by-four-meter trench
from 2010. This darker soil, that's the
edge of two houses. You can't see the break in it
yet. Underneath these tarps is
actually a third house we uncovered.
And then there's these series of storage pits, these circular
pits, that wound up being associated with what we call
the Oneota Culture. It's about a couple of hundred
years later. So this area is occupied fairly
densely by people through time. Here's a look at a map of that
block excavation. So here's one of the houses.
Here's a second one. And, unfortunately, there's a
whole bunch of buried cables along this area so, of course,
we couldn't get the edge of either of these.
And then here's that third house again.
We didn't get a complete house, but we got a good look at three
of them. There's a really beautiful fire
hearth here that I'll show you. Here is the basin in profile.
Here's that fire hearth, and out of this hearth, believe it or
not, was this section of a vessel.
This vessel is about this big. It's a huge utilitarian cooking
pot. It's not very fancy.
It's what we would refer to as our sort of every day dishware
that we use at home. This, on the other hand, is the
fine China. This is what we bring out when
people come over, very important people come over for company.
And we found quite a bit of this red, highly burnished,
red slipped both interior and exterior.
These are smaller vessels. They're like individual serving
sizes. You find them at Cahokia
in places where some kind of ritual or religious
activity is going on. Everybody doesn't have access to
these. This darker stained soil here is
the third house. This lighter stuff is a historic
disturbance that kind of cut through the top of it.
This is getting down to the base of the floor.
All these little blotches are posts.
Actually, this is a wall trenched structure but you can
see the individual posts stuck into the ground.
This is interesting. We go to the base of the floor
and we found a series of these burned logs.
And this probably represents, at some point, the structure burned
at some point. We took these logs to Michael
Wiemann at the Forest Products Laboratory here in Madison,
and he identified them as being red pine.
And that's a species you probably could have gotten in
the uplands on top of Little Bluff nearby Cahokia, or nearby
Trempealeau. Okay, now to the fun stuff, the
examples of kinds of artifacts we recovered from these sites.
These are lithics or stone tool material recovered from the
Squier Garden site. This is a kind of material
called Crescent Hills. Burlington Chert I showed you
earlier. These are cores.
So you use these cores, or large nodules, to knock off individual
flakes to make a series of tools.
These are little flake tools that are very common.
This is a kind of Burlington called High Ridge.
It's really quite beautiful. It's this banded colored chert.
Pinks and blues and kind of grays.
And then we did find just a little bit of evidence of
locally made material. So this is a projectile point
made out of Hixton silicified sandstone.
It's a common material type for stone tools that you get in
Wisconsin. These are some of the stone tool
material recovered from the Pelkey site.
So, again, Burlington flake tools.
We call these, this is called expedient flake tool technology,
and it's something where take a large piece of flint, you knock
off a couple of flakes to get a nice cutting edge, you use the
tool and then you pitch the tool.
It's the same exact technology you get down in the American
Bottom. This is a really beautiful
little micro drill. We find these in context where
there's shell bead-making going on.
We have not recovered any shell beads to date, but we certainly
have quite few of these so that's interesting.
Another projectile point made out of Burlington.
Whole series of different kinds of variety of chert.
This is High Ridge again, St. Genevieve or root beer
chert, Fort Payne, Dover, and then Mill Creek chert.
So the whole point of this is that all of this stuff is being
imported up. This is mostly not local
material. >> Do you know where the
locations are for the formation names?
I think Fort Payne is Alabama, isn't it?
It's Tennessee and I have a map of that for you.
I do. These are some lithics recovered
from the houses at the Uhl site. Another nice core of expedient
flake tools. This is another micro drill.
These are all, again, with the exception of these two images,
they're all imported material. These two are locally available
varieties of silicified sandstone.
It's not the Hixton, that's the higher grade.
This is the lower quality silicified sandstone.
Beautiful what are called Cahokia tri-notched points.
They're notched in three places. These are just side notch points
recovered from those houses. Just to give you an idea,
these two are paper-thin. Incredible, incredible
craftsmanship in making these, but also you usually don't find
them in any other context except for some kind of offering.
These are not meant to be used. These are meant to be offered.
And, interestingly enough, these were found on the floor of two
of the houses at the Uhl site. Some other kinds of materials
recovered besides ceramics and lithics were, this Galena ore
and this is hematite. These two kind of materials
commonly found at Cahokia. What they are is you grind them
up and they're used for pigments.
We also recovered this tablet from one of the houses.
There's a famous tablet called the Birdman Tablet that you get
down at Cahokia. One side is crosshatch design
and the other side has this image of a birdman on it.
Ours was not quite that elaborate but we do have some
sort of etching on one side. The other side of this is just
heavily smoothed. So I'm not sure if they just
didn't finish it or what, but it's clearly a Mississippian
artifact. Again, more just of these really
beautifully finely made vessels, red slipped.
Some of these have these, this is called a seed jar with these
small little punctates. Some of this early, early form,
vessel forms of these Lohmann phase jars, and then some
utilitarian ware as well. More of this, you can tell we've
got quite a bit of this fine ware, what we call fine
ware, so it tells us something about the group of people
who came up here. These are people who had access
to some pretty high quality goods.
Beautifully red slipped. This is a section of a small
little bowl. It's slipped red on the inside
and the exterior. More of this early Powell Plain.
Again, this is all Lohmann phase.
It's all very, very early. None of that Sterling phase with
the Ramey Incised pottery, none of that present at all.
More examples from the houses at Uhl site.
A lot of red slipping going on there.
And then something, just another thing
just kind of blew our minds. There are pottery shards
recovered from the houses at the Uhl site.
This is a type called French Fork Incised.
Again, this is a type that comes from the Lower Mississippi
Valley. So to give you an idea of what
we're talking about here, here's Cahokia.
Here's Trempealeau about 850 kilometers up river.
Here are the locations of those sourcing materials where you can
get that chert or flint to make stone tools.
So Burlington, St. Genevieve, Mill Creek are all
pretty close to Cahokia. And then you've got Fort Payne
all the way down to Tennessee. Here's the Coles Creek culture
region. That's where that French Fork
Incised pottery and the Coles Creek Incised come from.
This is its normal range. Now, sometimes you do find that
kind of pottery type up at Cahokia because, undoubtedly,
people from the Coles Creek culture came up to Cahokia when
Cahokia was becoming a city. But Trempealeau is by far the
most northern expression of any of these kinds of materials.
It's really incredible in terms of the amount of miles this
stuff traveled. Just to give you an idea of the
journey from Cahokia to Trempealeau.
About 530 miles upstream, presumably they're coming by way
of the super highway, the Mississippi River, and in doing
so they have to cross two major sets of rapids.
One at the Des Moines Rapids and the other Rock Island Rapids.
On average, 12- to 13-mile stretches of rapids to get here.
They're probably going through territory of people they may not
get along with. They almost certainly don't
speak the same language. We have played with historical
accounts of journeys upstream, not many people go upstream, so
it's really hard to find data to compare this to, but we think it
would have been about a 30-day journey or so.
They really wanted to come to Trempealeau.
[LAUGHTER] So just to wrap this all up,
why Trempealeau? And what does this all mean?
So, we think that Trempealeau, because it is such a unique spot
on the landscape, because it is a landmark, and if you look back
at historic accounts and ethnography, going to the north,
the northland has magical powers.
There's lots of stories about going north.
That's sort of where we came from and that's where the river
comes from. And so it could be something as
simple this is a known landmark. Mississippian people are going
north to enter into this sort of mystical landscape of the
unglaciated driftless region and they happen to land here because
it is such a unique spot. This probably has not just
geological uniqueness to it as a landmark, but it probably held
a lot of religious, and it probably was a very important
thing in terms of religion too. The overwhelming majority of the
material recovered that I showed you, the ceramics, the stone
tool material, is imported. That is, all the stuff was
almost, I would say more than 90% was brought with them.
All their pots, all their stone tools.
They brought their architecture. They brought their religion.
They brought their watching the heavens and their solstitial
alignments. And this, to us,
says colonization. If you think of the first time
that Europeans land at Plymouth Rock, what do they do?
They bring everything with them. Everything.
And that's exactly what these Mississippian people are doing
when they come into effigy mound territory, into Wisconsin.
Certainly, the lack of evidence for habitation on top of Little
Bluff and that careful planning, the marking of the solstices,
tells us that there's some religious activity going on
up there. People are not living up there.
They're living below. And then, finally, the early
varieties of artifacts that we've recovered suggests that
the occupation at Trempealeau is happening at exactly the same
time that Cahokia is becoming a city.
And so this is really writing a new chapter of prehistory in
Wisconsin because prior to this, we've really focused on sites
like Aztalan that are about 50 to 100 years later, and so
I think that we've got this research project going and we
hope to continue it and uncover even more to help us learn about
this period of time when Mississippian first come up
to Wisconsin. So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]