cc
I work here at the UW-Madison >> ToBiotechnology Center.eryone
I also work for UW Extension
behalf of those organizations Cooand our other sponsors, on
Wisconsin Public Television,
and the Science Alliance, thanks Wisconsin Alumni Association,
the Lab. for coming to Wednesday Nite at
night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm delighted to be
able to introduce to you
She has served as the curator of Danielle Benden.
in the Department of anthropology here at UW-Madison
She manages the anthropological collection holdings, provides
teaching support for faculty and
research for visiting scholars, graand designs and installstes
exhibits. Danielle also oversees the
Native American Graves
compliance here at UW Madison. Protection and Repatriation Act
curation methods course to She teaches and archeological
conducts here own archeological research focused in southwestern
Wisconsin, which is also where
She received a bachelor's of she's from.
University of Wisconsin sLa Crosse and a master's ofhe
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
called the big bang at Cahokia River Valley prior to what's
that's where we get tonight's abtitle: "A Thousand Years Agod
in Trempealeau."
Danielle is a member of several professional organizations
including the American
the Association of Midwest Association of Museums,
American Archeology, the Museums, the Society for
and the Wisconsin Archeological Wisconsin ArSociety.cal Survey,
She is currently serving a
for American Archeology threCommittee on Museums'ciety
Collections and Curation. Thank you for laughing.
I appreciate that.
You're from La Crosse? [LAUGHTER]
Please join me in welcoming Danielle Benden
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Well, thank you very much.
Your mic is not on.
Should we try that again? Okay.
Thank you very much for that
I'm pleased to be here tonight kind introduction.
Foundation sponsored project to talk about a National Science
Ernie Boszhardt and Tim tPauketat, 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
You can come, apparently, next region.
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
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
these people are called that caMississippians.kia, and
And they interacted with the
And so Cahokia is the largest lopre-Columbian site north ofn.
Mexico. It is, essentially, America's
first city. So anywhere from 10,000 to
30,000 people were living at
It's really an incredible place. this city a thousand years ago.
It's near present day You cEast St. Louis.today.
And it's a World Heritage site
Cahokia is known for its actually.
So the largest is Monks Mound pyramid-here.d mounds.
100 feet tall, 15 acres at its
constructed with basket loads of base, and what it is, is it's
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.
there's a chiefly elite that's So there's craft specialists,
these mounds that is overseeing residinthe population.n one of
There's a complex religion
people. asAnd they were large-scaleof
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.
material, a flint called These are made out of a kind of
We find these quite often. Mill Creek chert.
of pottery that Mississippian Thpeople make, and it's calledd
Ramey Incised.
second one here. There is an example of it in the
cursor. And it's this scrolled motif.
It's very elaborate.
This photograph shows evidence Very beautiful.
was talking about. of that craft specialization I
and chunky stones. Finely made projectile points
here. Here's figurine depicting the
game of chunky being played.
discoidal. Another term for this, it's a
chunky was played up until the And, essentially, the game of
People are playing it in the French get here in the 1600s.
Native people are playing it all southeast.
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
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.
description of the game. That's essentially a very short
game that's played, again, It's an incredibly important
So I guess I won't spend a whole up through contact.
there's three periods of time that are really important to
understand at Cahokia in order
up in Trempealeau. to understand what we're finding
called the Edelhart phase. So the first period of time is
This is when people are living It's between 1000 to 1050 AD.
beginning of mound construction. in small hamlets, probably the
mounds, probably the beginning So those flattop, pyramid-shaped
The pottery type during this of that occurring.
It's red slipped and it's shell time is tempered.inctive.
The predominate chert type, or flint material,
used to make stone tools
We also call it root beer chert ibecause of the color.e.
The architectural style at this time is predominately this
rectangular what we call
So, essentially, you can see the single-post construction.
here. smLet's see if I can get thein
cursor to come up again.
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.
like. ThThat's an artist rendition.ked
Okay? During the Lohmann phase,
AD 1050 to 1100, this is what we call the big bang in the
American Bottom.
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.
built, that large mound I showed That's when Monks Mound was
The predominate pottery type you earlier.
Powell Plain. It's this really plain,
but highly burnished kind of
You still do get a little bit of black looking pottery.
mostly they're moving towards this Powell Plain-like ware.
The chert types become heavily
These are two different kinds of Burlington and Mill Creek.
Cahokia. flint that are available near
St. Genevieve, but it drops off dramatically during the Lohmann
period. There's also quite a change in
the architectural style as well.
rectangular, but instead of putting individual posts in the
ground, they're building
walls. trenches, four trenches for
pre-fabbing walls and then We think they're actually
trench. sinAgain, thatching over veryhe
similar to what you see in this photograph depicted up here.
Okay? Finally, during the Sterling
phase, 1100 to 1175, this is
climax. This is when the city of Cahokia
is at its height, its power, and
pottery type moves from Powell what we find there is the
this highly beautifully decorated and scrolled design
you see on the pots.
with this pottery type, and the Yorims are what we call rolledr
rims. Okay?
During Sterling you see the same
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
time. TremBy the Sterling phase,nto
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
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
But the only two other locations that site.
presence of Mississippian people where you see this early
is at Trempealeau and another ousite called Fisher Mounds.om
Fisher Mounds is a small
is the rectangular site. circular site, and Trempealeau
on Trempealeau tonight because I'm only going to really focus
to get into one talk here. it's just too much information
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
Aztalan and made this map in the Wisconsin archeology, came to
And, basically, if you haven't upper left.
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
This is a really defensive small stream.
This is a chosen location that posturing.
It is fortified or palisaded. This picture in the middle shows
the reconstruction of a palisade.
When you go there today,
Estimates of 10,000 trees to you'll still see that.
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
these local late Woodland people find at Aztalan is this mix of
ideas kind of intermixing. and Mississippian people or
pottery there that is locally So, made but has stylisticfind
attributes that are Mississippian and vice versa.
So we do find some evidence of
up from Cahokia. things being imported directly
phase Ramey Incised pots found Here is one of those Sterling
Here's one of those chunky at Cahokia.
So, clearly, there is at least a stones or discoidals.
influence here, probably very strong Mississippian
Mississippian site. Moving on, of course, to
Trempealeau, and Trempealeau, as
unglaciated driftless region of Wisconsin on the Mississippi
River.
of Trempealeau here. This is the modern day village
Bluffs, which I'll talk about in These are the Trempealeau
But Trempealeau is most famous a minute.
you see here, and it's this little remnant bluff system that
the arrow is pointing to right
So this is a unique geologic here.
As a matter of fact, it's a unique landmark in the entire
124-mile stretch of the river.
happening anywhere else except You do not get this phenomenon
So, undoubtedly, this point on for right here.
it has been for thousands of the landscape is important, and
It's a landmark. years.
Trempealeau gets its name from And I'll just say that
It's a French word and they called Trempealeau Mountain
la montagne qui Trempealeau,
is bathed in water, and it makes that's the mountain whose foot
of course, Trempealeau Mountain ais surrounded by water
on all sides. So what did we know about
Mississippian in Trempealeau
excavations there? before we started our
We knew about a map that was We knew a little bit.
a pretty famous mound surveyor, and he created this map in 1884.
Lewis mapped thousands of mounds
stopped in Trempealeau and he umapped these three platforme
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.
third mound. He mapped a ramp going down to a
what we call a ridge top mound There's a small little,
third mound, and then there's another ramp going off the edge
of Little Bluff.
which is about a 100-foot-tall This is on top of Little Bluff
He also mapped these borrow natupits.luff.
This is where the dirt was
up the mounds. removed from the ground to build
large, now gaping holes in the So they were these very, very
They're still there today. landscape.
another character that enters Ithe story, and his name is
George Squier.
geologist. He was trained as an avocational
but he was trained as a He's geologist at Harvard.logist
He returns to Trempealeau to
dairy farm which happens to be help with farming his family's
And so Squier also makes a map the property of Little Bluff.
He shows the borrow pits back of Lihere.Bluff.
He shows the largest mound one, mound two leading down into
mound three.
some photographs of the mounds. HeYou can see them in profileing
here. There's one, there's two, and
then there's a third one off the
This is standing back and this tip.
pits right here looking back one is standing in the borrow
So this is the base of mound toward mound one.
It's pretty large. one.
between two and three looking back up towards mound two and
mound one.
vegetation pattern looks nothing You'll see in a minute that the
It's completely different. like this now.
ago, and now it's pretty heavily This is about a hundred years
So flash forward to the 1990s. forested.
mainly Bill Green and Rollie There were some archeologists,
Valley Archeology Center, that Rodell, from the Mississippi
that Squier had made. Squier made this additional map
in 1921.
Here's his sketch of it. So, again, here's Little Bluff.
know as Squier's Garden. Here is what's called we now
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
He did a lot of archeology local.
not to be from locally made by around the area, and he knew it
living in Wisconsin. the native people that had been
it was but he knew it was rare So he didn't know exactly what
it. aSo he did another really goodby
thing too.
map. He put the street names on his
Bill Green and Rollie Rodell to go back to his garden plot and
put a couple of test units in,
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
Galesville, the town of Galesville, is named after him.
He recorded a reference to a
Street Mound that happens to be min this person's front yard.d
There's a remnant mound right here.
And this is in the property of
site as the Uhl Site. TeAnd on the other side of thehe
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
dirt pile. red slipped cherts in the back
attention of Bill Green. And he brought it to the
indication that there's just a And it was just another
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
Rodell had been doing. work that Bill Green and Rollie
the Uhl site because of the WeThird Street Mound mapped inr
1867 by George Gale and because the construction worker in the
1960s had found those few pieces
We also knew about one little, of pottery.
recovered from, believe it or tiny rnot, Central Park int was
Trempealeau.
Central Park. It's not[LAUGHTER]the real
And we knew about a silt, or a very finely made
wood-working tool, Mississippian
from the Mississippi River, stylright in front of thelock
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
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.
In 2010, we had two main So off we go with Little Bluff.
First, we wanted to excavate questions we wanted to answer.
That's this area highlighted into the borrow pits.
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
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
[INAUDIBLE] tesA borrow pit, so the dirtits.
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.
on the site. You can look at the vegetation
than it did when Squier had Itaken his photographs in the
early 1900s.
off the vegetation. WAnd 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
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
So you can see in these lidar images, you can see the borrow
pits pretty well in this contour
You can see, here's another view map on the left.
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
So the borrow pits, the mounds, tall line up to the summere.
solstice. This is something that George
Squier had alluded to in his
I really, this would be a perfect place to watch the
summer solstice sunrise come up.
We have this science to prove it And he was right.
that we've done. now with the total station work
mound is aligned to the winter This ramp coming off the third
mound we think has some tie to solstice, and then the second
So this is really exciting for the equinox as well.
you find down at Cahokia. us beThere are all sorts ofwhat
alignments going on.
heavens, and just like we have These people are watching the
today, they knew exactly what they were doing a thousand years
ago.
the borrow pits. So here's our excavations into
one-by-two-meter units into the borrow pits, and we recovered
two pieces of pottery.
Well, that sort of blew our theory of the borrow pits
being full of garbage.
because sometimes the absence of And this is a good lesson
just as much as the presence. And what that told us was people
were not living up here.
There's some other kind of They're just not.
habitation related. acProbably the second greatestt
discovery in 2010 was that we realized that at one point the
borrow pits, so there's one here
large holes in the earth now, and used to be connected. very
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
It's this area leading from the back side of the mounds all the
way up to the mounds on the back
So think of this in terms of a side.
the aisle that leads up to the procession, maybe in a church,
Same kind of concept. Well, we returned in 2011 with a
couple of other questions to
And in the 1930s, unfortunately, answer.
water tower right into the the village of Trempealeau put a
mound one. center of the largest mound,
abhorrence of the state archeologist Charlie Brown at
the time. He wrote several letters trying
to stop them and trying to
went ahead with it, preserveunfortunately.nd they
Here's a look at that water tower in 1990.
It's a pretty big, kind of
Shortly after this photograph was taken, it was demolished.
So, again, we're talking about
largest of the mounds. this mound right here, the
wanted to look to see how much But we wanted to do was we
that water tower building, and damage has been done because of
that we can see how the Mississippians constructed the
mound.
major questions for this So those were sort of our two
So what we did was, here's the project.
trenched going down the north waterflank of mound one.shaped
Here's our field school students
and us beginning to excavate it. helping to lay out the trench
exciting for us, and that was that, yes, indeed, there was a
historic fill zone with concrete
Unfortunately, that's probably and rubble and rebar.
water tower, but, happily, there all due to the demolition of the
mound building that we can see. iWe can see this sequence ofct
mound building. So, basically, what we have is
this black silt cap, and
large zone of yellow silt, and underneath that is a pretty
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
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.
the same way up here. So for us to see this is really
pretty incredible.
all done in one mound-building We also learned that this was
Here's a look at distinctive episode.
So all these little splotches of individual basket loads.
all represent individual basket loads of people building thise
mound together. What we find sometimes in them
are bits of shell, sometimes a
sometimes a piece of stone tool. broken piece of pottery,
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.
This red kind of circular We feature in plan view.th.
Here it is in profile.
very intensive fire burning for And a long period of time.s a
This isn't a campfire that we normally find.
A lot of times we excavate
usually full of charcoal. fireThey're full of garbage.'re
They're full of ash.
This was completely clean. But this was different.
and so hot that there were not This was burning so long
There was no ash. There was no charcoal.
It was just brick, brick red. Very, very hard to even cut
through with the trowel.
intentionally cleaned at least So we think that this was
Here's that hearth I just showed one time during its use.
This darker stain in the soil here, and then the edge of it is
right here, is a building.
So this darker stain coming down Here it is in profile.
side here. here, oops, and then on this
darker black, yellow, and then a Again, we have layers of this
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.
intentionally kept clean. We also did a similar thing on
mound three.
Little Bluff. SHere is an up-close view ofof
that. And, like mound one, there was
some historic disturbance.
into, unfortunately, into mound There's sirethree. sunk right
The village of Trempealeau used to light off fireworks from this
area. So there was definitely some
disturbance going on, and we
this area to, again, what kind decided to put a trench through
remains. of damage has been done and what
what can we learn about the activity if there is something
intact. And what we found was this
pretty large post-pit.
be. The center part of the pit was
this burned area that was full
charcoal, and what this represents, we also, by the way,
this is an elk antler that was
interesting, but what this off to the side that was kind of
large post would have stood. represents is a pit where a
Cahokia, and they're marker And these posposts. find down at
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.
Very common in the Mississippian Think of them like that.
Are those the original ones or reproductions?
The ones at Cahokia, some are reproductions, some are
originals.
Little Bluff. We're moving now in our tour to
the eastern edge of Little Bluff
So I showed you some photographs to a site called Squier Garden.
where Squier's Garden was. before or in a map of Squier's
1900s, it has now become a Since his garden, in the early
So it's this pretty large grassy church property.
And what we do in areas like area.
shovel testing. thAnd shovel testing is likeed
exploratory surgery for archeologists.
That's the best way I can put it.
Every 10 feet or so we dig a
three feet deep, and we screen foot and a half wide hole about
idea of what's down there. all the dirt, and we just get an
Are there not? Are there artifacts?
larger areas over the most And then it allows us to open up
So here's an example. pHere's a shovel test.s.
There's some pottery coming out.
positive shovel test, and we So we would mark this as a
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,
the disturbed historic to strip off the plow zone and
to the prehistoric surface. ovSo here's one of those wallwn
trenched structures.
interior hearth. It's this one right here with an
of these wall trenched In all at Squier we found three
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
This is just kind of fun to think about.
Little Bluff is, I think I might
naturally, and then you've got have said, it's 100 feet tall
You've got people living below these mounds on top.
This is a rendition, artist rendition, of Cahokia with Monks
Mound, which is about 100 feet
And might this not be what's tall, and people living below.
Trempealeau looks incredibly happening right here at
Moving on to the site of Pelkey, similar.
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
So this was kind of, we found this in part by luck, I have to
say.
things for our students to do and we kept them shovel testing.
[LAUGHTER]
recovering all these artifacts And, sure enough, they're
So we then opened up these block out of their shovel tests.
with a total station. exHere's a map of the area.ped
And what we uncovered were a
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.
going on that we found a little So evidence of at Pelkey.on
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.
remember, here's that extant The Stull site, you might
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
was these darker stained soil, lucky because what we uncovered
That darker stain? can you all see that?
house. That represents the edge of a
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 the basin of a house Here'right here.ench.
And so in this little trench we recovered all sorts of things,
but two of probably the most
pottery. important were this kind of
Its normal area is the Lower It's called Coles Creek Incised.
south, south of Cahokia. Mississippi Valley, like south,
called Hartley Crosshatch that's There's this variety of pottery
bit later period of time, about u50 to 100 years later, and itle
comes form a site called the
northeastern Iowa. Hartley Fort site in Iowa,
back in 2011 to come back an So, it was enough to bring us
expose more area, basically. chase those two houses and
going to come here and by hand So we were thinking we were just
But we thought what are the kinchances if we just ask theh.
landowner if we can just tear up
[LAUGHTER] his front yard for the summer.
[LAUGHTER] And he said yes.
we put it back pretty well. And so we brought in a small
little backhoe and, again,
did, this is what became removed the topsoil, and when we
That lighter soil here, that's exposed.
from 2010. our one-by-four-meter trench
edge of two houses. You can't see the break in it
yet.
actually a third house we Underneauncovered.arps is
And then there's these series of
pits, that wound up being associated with what we call
the Oneota Culture. It's about a couple of hundred
years later.
densely by people through time. SHere's a look at a map of that
block excavation. So here's one of the houses.
Here's a second one.
whole bunch of buried cables And, unfortunately, there's a
we couldn't get the edge of along teither of these.course,
And then here's that third house
We didn't get a complete house, but we got a good look at three
of them.
hearth here that I'll show you. THere is the basin in profile.e
Here's that fire hearth, and out
not, was this section of a of this hearth, believe it or
This vessel is about this big. vessel.
pot. It's a huge utilitarian cooking
It's what we would refer to as It's not very fancy.
that we use at home. our sort of every day dishware
fine China. TThis is what we bring out when
people come over, very important
And we found quite a bit of this people come over for company.
red slipped both interior red,and exterior.shed,
These are smaller vessels.
sizes. They're like individual serving
in places where some You find them at Cahokia
activity is going on. Everybody doesn't have access to
these.
the third house. This darker stained soil here is
disturbance that kind of cut This lighter stuff is a historic
This is getting down to the base through the top of it.
All these little blotches are of tposts.or.
Actually, this is a wall
see the individual posts stuck trenched structure but you can
This is interesting. into the ground.
and we found a series of these We go to the base of the floor
And this probably represents, at burned logs.
at some point. some point, the structure burned
Wiemann at the Forest Products We took these logs to Michael
and he identified them as being Laboratorred pine. Madison,
And that's a species you
the uplands on top of Little probably could have gotten in
Trempealeau. Bluff nearby Cahokia, or nearby
examples of kinds of artifacts Okay, now to the fun stuff, the
These are lithics or stone tool wmaterial recovered from thes.
Squier Garden site. This is a kind of material
called Crescent Hills.
earlier. Burlington Chert I showed you
So you use these cores, or large These are cores.
flakes to make a series of nodules, to knock off individual
These are little flake tools tools.
This is a kind of Burlington that are very common.
It's really quite beautiful. called High Ridge.
Pinks and blues and kind of It's this bangrays.lored chert.
And then we did find just a little bit of evidence of
locally made material.
made out of Hixton silicified So this issandstone.ile point
It's a common material type for stone tools that you get in
Wisconsin.
material recovered from the These are Pelkey site.stone tool
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
Bottom. yThis is a really beautifuln
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
Another projectile point made tout 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.
material. >> Do you know where the
locations are for the formation names?
I think Fort Payne is Alabama,
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.
flake tools. Another nice core of expedient
These are all, again, with the This is another micro drill.
they're all imported material. exception of these two images,
varieties of silicified These two asandstone. available
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.
recovered from those houses. These are just side notch points
these two are paper-thin. JuIncredible, incredible,
craftsmanship in making these,
them in any other context except but also you usually don't find
These are not meant to be used. These are meant to be offered.
And, interestingly enough, these
of the houses at the Uhl site. were found on the floor of two
recovered besides ceramics and Some other kinds of materials
and this is hematite. lThese two kind of materialse
commonly found at Cahokia.
up and they're used for What they apigments. grind them
We also recovered this tablet from one of the houses.
There's a famous tablet called
down at Cahokia. the Birdman Tablet that you get
and the other side has this Onimage of a birdman on it.gn
Ours was not quite that elaborate but we do have some
sort of etching on one side.
heavily smoothed. TSo I'm not sure if they justt
didn't finish it or what, but it's clearly a Mississippian
artifact. Again, more just of these really
beautifully finely made vessels,
Some of these have these, this red slipped.
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
who came up here. These are people who had access
to some pretty high quality goods.
Beautifully red slipped.
little bowl. This is a section of a small
and the exterior. More of this early Powell Plain.
Again, this is all Lohmann
It's all very, very early. phase.
the Ramey Incised pottery, none Noneof that present at all. with
More examples from the houses at Uhl site.
A lot of red slipping going on
And then something, just another thing
just kind of blew our minds.
recovered from the houses at the There are pottery shards
This is a type called French Fork Incised.
Again, this is a type that comes
Valley. So to give you an idea of what
we're talking about here, here's Cahokia.
Here's Trempealeau
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.
all the way down to Tennessee. And then you've got Fort Payne
region. That's where that French Forke
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
people from the Coles Creek culture came up to Cahokia when
Cahokia was becoming a city.
most northern expression of any Bof 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
On average, 12- to 13-mile the other Rock Island Rapids.
They're probably going through stretches of rapids to get here.
get along with. teThey almost certainly don'tnot
speak the same language.
accounts of journeys upstream, We have played with historical
it's really hard to find data to not many people go upstream, so
would have been about a 30-day compare this to, but we think it
They really wanted to come to jTrempealeau..
[LAUGHTER]
why Trempealeau? So just to wrap this all up,
So, we think that Trempealeau, And what does this all mean?
on the landscape, because it is a landmark, and if you look back
at historic accounts and
the northland ethnoghas magical powers. north,
There's lots of stories about going north.
That's sort of where we came
comes from. And so it could be something as
simple this is a known landmark.
north to enter into this sort of Mississippian people are going
unglaciated driftless region and mystical landscape of the
it is such a unique spot. theThis probably has not justuse
geological uniqueness to it as a
a lot of religious, and it landmark, but it probably held
thing in terms of religion too. The overwhelming majority of the
material recovered that I showed
tool material, is imported. yThat is, all the stuff wase
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 watching the heavens and their solstitial
alignments. And this, to us,
says colonization.
that Europeans land at Plymouth If yRock, what do they do?time
They bring everything with them.
And that's exactly what these Mississippian people are doing
when they come into effigy mound
Certainly, the lack of evidence for habitation on top of Little
Bluff and that careful planning,
tells us that there's some the marking of the solstices,
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,
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
to Wisconsin. MississSo thank you.come up
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