- Today, we are pleased to introduce
Robert A. Birmingham
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter
and are not necessarily those
of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the museum's employees.
Now retired, Robert Birmingham served
as the State Archaeologist of Wisconsin for many years
and received the Increase Lapham Research Medal
from the Wisconsin Archeological Society.
He's the author of "Spirits of Earth:
"The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison
"and the Four Lakes,"
and "Skunk Hill: A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin,"
among other books.
His book, "Indian Mounds of Wisconsin,"
coauthored with Wisconsin Historical Society
archeologist, Amy Rosebrough,
was recently released in a second edition.
So now please join me in welcoming Robert Birmingham.
[audience applauding]
- Well, thank you.
And it's that time of year
when for Wisconsinites,
temperature doesn't make any difference.
The sun's out, it's a nice day, beautiful day.
You can tell, you know?
So, thank you very much
for coming out today.
I'm gonna talk about my book, or the book that I wrote
along with Amy Rosebrough
of the Wisconsin Historical Society,
and the new edition.
But I wanna go back to the first edition,
and that which was published in 2000,
and why a second edition was necessary.
Back in the 1990s,
when I was State Archaeologist,
this was a time when mound preservation began.
New laws had been passed,
starting in '89 or so,
that protected burial places
of all people and no matter how old they were.
Before that, interestingly,
Native American graves were not protected by law,
cemeteries and ancient ones.
So this law sought to correct that
and included mounds
because so-called Indian mounds
are burial sites.
So this created a great deal of public interest.
And constantly, I was getting calls
asking a few questions.
And that was,
those were,
"So, how old are these mounds?"
"Who made the mounds?"
"What do they mean?" "What were they used for?"
Every day, [chuckles]
asking the same questions.
"How old are these mounds?" "Who made them?"
"What were they used for?" You know, and so on.
So I was giving the answers.
We were all giving the answers as best we knew, but it occurred to me,
I should write this down, you know?
There's so much interest
that what we need to do is
to put this together in book form.
And the first edition of Indian Mounds of Wisconsin
in fact turned out to be the first synthesis
of Indian mounds published
in 150 years.
No one had put together the complete story before.
And that was, of course, very popular.
Now, since then, and I think because of the book,
there has been a great deal of additional research.
Not archeological excavations, 'cause mounds are protected,
but people are going back, developing new hypotheses,
looking at new angles.
For example, universities, Madison, Milwaukee, and so on,
they assign their graduate students
who are looking for topics
to go back and look at excavations
that took place
50, 60 years beforehand,
but now with fresh eyes
and now with new insights and so on.
So, dozens of theses
and publications are derived
by just going and looking at old data,
but with new insights.
My coauthor, 2010,
wrote the encyclopedia of effigy mounds.
They literally looked at every single mound group.
Thousands of mound groups
ever recorded and compiled all the data
on each one.
And again, for the first time,
we had the full record
in which you could go back,
whereas before, you really had to search and scratch
and do that, which has been an unbelievable boon.
New technologies have developed,
which I'll be showing you in a few minutes,
that have given us incredible insights.
So basically, Indian Mounds of Wisconsin,
number one, is out of date.
And it was important to keep it updated,
not just for the public interest,
but this is being used as a textbook.
You want students to always be having
the most current information.
So that led to
Indian Mounds of Wisconsin II,
with all of this new information,
some of it quite exciting.
Now so, first of all,
let's talk about what we mean by Indian mounds.
Everybody is familiar
with big, round mounds.
These are burial places.
And these kind of huge mounds
were built very early,
probably starting about 500 BC,
800 BC.
These are the first burial.
Native people lived here for 13,000 years,
but didn't start building mounds
until way late,
which is interesting.
So why did they start building mounds
when they hadn't before?
And, in fact, by 1200 AD, they stopped building mounds
even though they continued to occupy here.
So one of the things that we're very interested in is,
so what's this about?
Why do people make monuments
during only some periods of time,
and afterwards don't? Beforehand, don't?
So these are familiar round mounds.
The most interesting, at least from my account,
are the so-called effigy mounds
that we now know were built
in the form of
animals important to Native American belief systems
and supernatural beings.
Many of these are not animals
seen in the woods when you go out walking.
They aren't visible.
And so on.
This is an image.
Can you see the bears there?
The bears, and then there's birds right there.
This image kind of looks kind of weird,
but it's a cool image
in that this is a part of this new technology called LiDAR.
LiDAR.
And as most of our technologies,
it actually came from military use.
They needed to make 3-D pictures
of your enemy installations.
So, basically how LiDAR works is
an aircraft or satellite
sends down a laser
that hits something solid and then it pops back
and it makes a map.
It's gotta hit something really solid,
like the ground.
Not like a bush, not like a tree,
not like high grass.
So for the first time, we can see the effigy mounds
without the obscuring vegetation,
which has led to...
And in three dimensions, in three dimensions.
As you can see here,
this is the Effigy Mounds National Monument.
Can you see how the bears march,
following the contours
of the topography?
The birds, which are probably peregrine falcons,
are on the slope,
as though diving down for the kill.
So these were produced
to conform to the national environment
and to animate the mounds themselves.
That is, we believe
that when people made these mounds,
they believed that they were ceremonially giving life
to the spirits themselves.
These are spirits.
They're not statues of spirits.
These are spirits.
And the use of the environment
gives that motion,
and we can study it so easy now
with the LiDAR, again, because of the
lack of obscuring vegetation.
I'll just mention one thing local.
Oops.
Oh, before I go to that, another group of effigy mounds.
Aerial photography is often good here too.
But this gives you an idea
of what effigy mound lines look like.
This is a bird and a bear
shown here, among other mounds.
Both of these animals,
very important in religious beliefs
of Native American society.
Now going back to LiDAR,
and again,
we're seeing a map made by lasers,
so it's not crystal clear,
but you can see in three dimensions, right?
Can you see a ridge running down here?
Okay, so this is an effigy mound group I discovered
last month,
[audience chuckling]
near Madison,
in a woodlot.
I had been consulting
with the Bishops Bay development people,
and there had been mounds recorded
a hundred years ago, somewhere in the vicinity,
that we were looking for.
And so in previous days,
I spent some time
just walking around, doing the searching,
beating down the bushes, looking for mounds.
But in 15 minutes, I just went on the website,
Dane County LiDAR website,
it's publicly accessible,
pulled up the map, and bingo!
There was a round mound, just like I showed you before,
an effigy mound, and something like we call a linear mound.
And this has been happening almost every week, new mounds,
or mounds that we thought were destroyed
all of a sudden appear,
maybe in a slightly different location.
And unfortunately, this gets to be like a web search.
You know how you go in, when you get on the web
and then it's almost midnight. [chuckles]
And you spent all the day getting distracted, you know?
Effigy mound LiDAR is exact, oh, look at this,
look at this, stuff like that.
So I gotta start
ridding myself of the addiction here,
the science addiction to do that.
Leave it up to the younger people
who like sitting in front of devices all day long.
I seem to have lost my one image here.
But a third type of mound
that we'll talk a little bit later
are platform mounds,
big bases
for buildings that were introduced to the area
about 1050 AD
by a group of people we call the Mississippians.
How many people have been to Aztalan?
Well, great, yeah.
So you saw the platform mounds there.
These are bases. These aren't burial mounds.
These are bases for buildings.
And we only have a couple examples.
One spectacular example is Aztalan itself,
a large fortified town that's 1,000 years old
and a part of this Mississippian society
that expanded in the area
and then disappeared.
Another group of platform mounds
is up in Trempealeau, Wisconsin,
which has been a subject of very new research
described in the book,
because to everyone's surprise,
they found a village area
associated with the mounds
of people who were directly from
an ancient city we call Cahokia.
And all the stuff is from Cahokia in southern Illinois.
There's no local stuff.
People just brought all their stuff and their religious beliefs.
They built the temp
and maybe stayed for two decades and left.
All right, so with mound building,
in order to put this in context,
I just briefly wanted to run through
what was happening before that.
Again, mounds were not built until about 500 AD,
as you can see, went through changes.
So, the book
goes through sort of the trajectory
of changing Native cultures.
And what we see starting 13,000 years ago
is that populations grew
through time
and populations became more complex.
In the whole Midwestern area,
as a result, a city was made,
an actual Native American city.
Again, Cahokia.
So we see this trajectory of complexity.
And many of these Native cultures
are as every bit sophisticated and complex
as equivalent societies anywhere in the world
for their time.
So we always struggle with the stereotype,
at least the older people do, of sort of the savage,
the primitive people,
when in the archeological record shows quite the opposite
in many, in all cases.
So but,
going back 13,000 years,
we have people
who came into the area,
small bands at the end of the glaciers.
And when our lakes here
were in fact all a part of one giant lake
because they, you know about this?
Yeah.
You remember the name of the lake?
- [Audience Member] No. - Glacial Lake Yahara. Yeah.
But the glaciers are melting and so on.
And people started moving in the area,
and they made
some artifacts that are pretty spectacular
and pretty special, like these.
These are projectile points used to
hunt extinct game.
Probably these were used
to hunt woodland caribou.
And they come from the largest site,
we call these Paleo-Indian sites,
in the whole Midwest,
if not whole North America,
which is on the Yahara River near McFarland,
another thing that makes this whole area special.
This in fact shows you, these little triangles
are where the earliest people live,
these Paleo-Indians live.
And as you can see,
that white area is Glacial Lake Yahara.
It's all on the shores there; they were living on the shores
of this great glacial lake.
Through time, the climate warmed,
population grew,
and with them again
becoming a great deal of complexity.
For example, trade
for exotic items developed,
already starting about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago,
often bringing in, again,
very exotic and symbolic items
to the people themselves.
About 5,000 years ago, in fact,
the people started to trade copper,
especially in Wisconsin, which is bizarre
because there's no copper deposits in Wisconsin.
They were getting the copper
from Lake Superior.
But as I pointed out in the book,
the copper items that are being traded are almost identical.
I mean, they're trading similar objects
for similar objects, basically.
But when you think about it, if you're giving a gift,
it doesn't matter what it is.
And in fact,
again, I pointed out in the book,
in Native American belief systems,
copper is a source of power.
Great power, great supernatural power.
In fact, some of the water spirits
in the Great Lakes, monsters,
are known for their copper tails.
But these are powerful.
So people were exchanging gifts of power
and therefore, binding people together.
So this theme religious beliefs
keeps moving right down the line.
The first mounds occur, as I mentioned,
about 500 or 600 AD
and are associated with other developments.
For example, the first pottery.
Now,
they've been around for thousands of years.
Why would pottery,
as for cooking and other containers,
only come now?
Well, the answer is because before that,
they're very mobile.
And what's the last thing you wanna have
when you're moving?
And that is something you could break.
Alright, everybody stop. Gotta make some new pottery.
So it was only when people started to
live in more permanent communities,
and then bingo, pottery starts.
But, as I point out in the book and other works,
they're decorated with special designs
that relate to the powers of the earth,
air, and the underworld and so on.
So we see these themes keep being elaborated on.
And at the same time,
we see these first mounds,
these conical mounds that I talked about.
People were buried in pits below the mounds.
People weren't buried in the mounds.
Starting about 300 BC,
we see a great influence
in the cultures here
in Wisconsin from Ohio.
In Ohio, about 300 BC
and going to about 200 AD,
we have the development of a very complex culture
that is called Hopewell.
And Hopewell people had,
again, a very complex society,
but most visibly built huge earthworks
in circles and in squares,
along with mounds
and sacred roads leading to these.
And what you're seeing right here
covers many square miles.
I mean, these are huge.
This covers 18 acres. This covers 20.
This is a huge ceremonial center,
but earthen ceremonial center.
Hopewell was, in fact,
like this exchanging of copper,
a religious movement.
But a part of that religious movement also
included the trade
for exotic items
from throughout Eastern North America. So, trade.
This is from a mound in Wisconsin
that was built because the Hopewell influence
reached into Wisconsin at the time.
People here did not build these giant earthworks,
but they did build burial mounds.
Basically, the mounds were covered,
covered a mausoleum.
The idea here would be to dig a big pit,
or if the bedrock was too close to the surface,
make a room out of stones.
And that became a family mausoleum.
And as people died, they're put in the pit
or in the enclosure.
Somebody else died, they'd open it up again.
And then when it needed to be abandoned,
when they left or it was filled,
they put a mound over it.
So these are mausoleum mounds.
But in many cases, huge offerings,
very important offerings
that show this Hopewell influence.
This is, again, from one mound
near Trempealeau, actually.
And these are the grave goods that accompanied
these people that were buried in the mounds.
Obsidian from out west.
Copper, again, from Lake Superior.
Other blades from other areas.
These beads are wood
that was covered with silver,
with a silver coating.
And the silver, again, is from distance.
So they're bringing in,
but these items obviously had symbolic value,
but they also seemed to mark
the status of one group of people
who were buried in the mounds that was different than others.
Archeological excavations,
inadvertently in fact, found some years ago
where other people were buried.
Near Prairie du Chien, there's an island,
and archeologists in Madison
were excavating to get the history of the region
and came across a huge pit
with over 60 people
that had not been mounded
and very few grave goods.
But the mound with the grave goods
was in the high bluff area,
and this was near the water,
showing a division between upper world
and a lower world.
And the people in the upper world
were at that society,
or in that time,
the nobles, the leaders.
And they got the burial
with the treasures, basically, in the high bluffs,
whereas the others represented a lower world
where more people were represented.
Now,
the Hopewell collapsed
for reasons we're still trying to figure out.
But about 600 AD,
we see a new movement taking place.
Similar to the extent
it was not purely economic.
I'm sorry, when I stand in the way,
please. [audience laughing]
'Cause I tend to roam here.
But another movement that was,
again, not totally economic,
but may be called religious.
And that is when these effigy mounds were being built,
that I talked about before, into vast landscapes.
Between 600 and about 1100 AD, here in Wisconsin,
15,000 to 20,000 mounds
were built during that time period,
which in itself are more mounds
than any equivalent area
of North America,
and I suppose, by extension, in the world.
Wisconsin, always been a really popular place to live.
But this is correlated
by a climatic shift.
We call it the Medieval Warm Climate,
which made things even warmer and more productive.
It was rainy and warm.
And so we see people population,
in southern Wisconsin especially,
growing extraordinarily larger
than surrounding populations
because the resources were so good.
Now that
population growth, huge.
Here in Madison, people are all over the place.
Madison was packed with people.
They were living in uplands, little upland ponds
and lakeshores and prairie.
They were living everywhere.
And so this is a recipe for friction.
So many people competing.
But just like the copper I mentioned before,
they develop a system of bonding together
in a common religious or world view.
Instead of making war,
they're all participating in a religious movement
that probably emphasized values
and included a common ancestry.
The effigy mounds themselves are important spirit beings,
but for example, among the Ho-Chunk today,
these same beings
are literally their ancestors.
If you're a Bear Clan member,
it is because you are bear
in that your ancestor was a bear that became human.
If you're a Thunderbird Clan member,
it is because you are a thunderbird.
That is, your thunderbird ancestor
came from the sky, lit in a tree,
and became human, and then goes down here.
So by expressing themselves this way,
they're relating their ancestry
and claims to the land.
Many different forms of effigy mounds.
And again, many of these are clans,
of Native American clans that is.
In modern times, Native people had
these forms as clans.
But again, also ancestors,
and also these spirits,
played other roles in society.
For example, thunderbirds
are known because they give incredible blessings
to human beings and so on.
Bears are associated with earth,
and in many Native traditions,
are associated with healing
and curing and so on.
So there's many different roles that these spirits play,
but as I emphasized,
I and others have emphasized,
mounds are often made to be animated
or the earth itself
animates these creatures.
They all have burials in them.
But it is my belief
that through ceremonial rituals,
the people, probably medicine people,
are actually bringing the spirits to life
at the places where they dwell.
So these aren't statues. These aren't symbols.
These aren't simply clan totems.
These are living spirits that are brought up.
And once they're brought to life,
that's where they are. That's where the spirit is.
No need to bother it anymore.
And again, people were buried in this,
probably with the thought
that they're being buried with their ancestor,
and that their ancestor is taking them,
is now carrying them.
So you have this merging
of the generations
that they become cyclical, right?
You know?
And these effigy mounds were built
in vast landscapes.
These black dots are all the places where
mound groups have been recorded, not just individual mounds.
And you can see Southern Wisconsin is lit.
So we are the heartland of this amazing effigy mound,
what we call now the Effigy Mound Ceremonial Complex.
And we characterize it as
an international world wonder.
And the center of it, look at where the center is.
Madison. [chuckles]
The Four Lakes area is the central part of this.
So the Madison area did play a major role
in the development and continuation
of this ceremonial complex.
But associated with the ceremonial complex
were new types of pottery,
sometimes very, very intricate.
These are all made with corded designs.
You see the bird? Thunderbird.
So the pottery itself
is not just simply utilitarian,
but also has religious connotations.
Look at the cordage on this.
Very time-consuming.
Women made pottery in Native American cultures.
So the women themselves
were spending as much time making pottery
as the people were, in general, making mounds.
So somehow, this fits in
to what was going on
in terms of the ceremonial complex's religious movement.
The pottery made here in Southern Wisconsin
and elsewhere in the effigy mound region
is simply the most complex pottery
ever made in ancient Midwest.
And again, highly symbolic,
has great deal to do with this effigy mound complex.
And what was going on in terms of economy
was that the people were making a transition
from hunting and gathering
to growing crops.
Corn and so on
is introduced during this time.
So that is a clue
to increasing complexity.
For example, during that time,
we see the first evidence of fortified villages.
And the best example is here in the Madison area.
At Governor Nelson Park,
an archaeologist found
a fortified village very near
to where effigy mounds were.
New types of housing.
These are like earth lodges, except made by bark,
but they're semi-subterranean.
They dug two or three-foot basements,
and then made these small structures.
Best known of these in the Upper Midwest
is again in this area.
Several sites have been found
in the footprints of these particular pictures.
So there's a great deal of change going on in this time.
Here's a LiDAR picture of one of the vast landscapes.
This is from Southwestern Wisconsin.
It's called a [unintelligible] site.
Birds, animals of various sorts.
All have the special symbolism
and are considered to be powerful.
Again, in this case here,
I see a lot of what I think are peregrine falcons.
At the Effigy Mound National Monument,
the peregrine falcons that I pointed out before are logical
because that stretch of the Mississippi River
is known to be the roosting ground
of peregrine falcons,
to the extent that the National Park Service
is reintroducing falcons to the park and elsewhere.
And here, 1,000 years ago,
they're building peregrine falcons
because this is where they live,
this is where their spirits are, right here.
And so obviously, that influences,
the habitat of important spirit beings
influences where they're made.
In the Madison area, this is Lake Mendota.
All these black dots are effigy mound groups
or had been effigy mound groups.
Many of them survive, but about 80% of all effigy mounds have been,
80% have been destroyed.
Even so, there are many thousands left.
Gives you an idea on the extent of the ceremonial complex.
One of my favorite places
is up at Mendota State Hospital.
How many people have been there?
Yeah, okay, great. It's extraordinary.
The whole complex, it basically explains to me
effigy mound ceremonialism and is right here.
When I have a question, I can just jump in a car and go visit.
I don't have to get a grant and go across the sea
and get permission to go, stuff like that.
But here is big birds. See those?
This is a LiDAR, but I filled in just for clarity.
Big birds
that are almost certainly thunderbirds.
And can you see?
They surround, arc around
what archaeologists found several decades ago
to be a village site.
So one interpretation now
that's interesting,
but doesn't relate to this,
among the Ho-Chunk,
traditional chiefs
of the Ho-Chunk
must come from the Thunderbird Clan.
Even today, traditional chiefs
come from the Thunderbird Clan.
Is this the village, the chief village
of the Four Lakes effigy mound people? I think so.
In this case, the thunderbirds, I believe,
were made to protect,
to protect the village, basically.
Effigy mounds are built for a variety of purposes.
But the primary idea here
was thunderbirds as the great protector
of the Thunderbird village.
Just makes logical sense and so on.
Over here,
off to the side is an effigy mound,
a group on private land that is most,
about 1/2 of it's there,
but we have plenty of good records.
And why I like this
juxtaposed on the village site
is that this is sort of a shorthand
of the underlying structure
of the belief system of the effigy mound people.
And that is a division
of the upper world
and the lower world
represented by great spirit beings,
and a subdivision of the lower world
into an earth
and a watery underworld.
But each one having different powers and so on.
And too bad you can't have a closeup,
but to explain that,
the line begins with
another form of thunderbirds.
This is how Native people make thunderbirds even today.
And then it goes into earth animals:
bears and a canine.
And then, all of a sudden,
the whole grouping switches orientation,
goes towards the water,
and this mound right here
is something called a water spirit,
common to this area and especially eastern part
of the effigy mound people.
Water spirits are powerful spirits that live in the water.
They have a very long tail.
They're sometimes imagined to be horned.
Okay?
They can be malicious.
They can be cranky.
Early Ho-Chunk people told Charles E. Brown
of the Wisconsin Historical Society a long time ago
that Governors Island,
if you know where that is in Lake Mendota,
is where the water spirits live.
And if you don't put tobacco in the water
when you go out in a boat,
they're gonna suck you down [chuckles]
into their habitats.
So how many people go out on a boat on Lake Mendota
without putting tobacco in the water?
[audience chuckling]
Well, now you know. [laughs]
You've got the warning now.
Yeah, but anyway, very important.
And some of these are colossal, by the way.
Water spirits
can have tails of 700, 800 feet.
The thunderbird there in the center
has a wingspan of 634 feet,
and a larger thunderbird existed,
once existed along the Wisconsin River
that was a quarter of a mile long.
So some of these were colossal mounds.
And I think you can understand why these are so interesting.
I mean, besides being just representations,
why archaeologists find these,
because there are so many clues
into their belief system,
how they lived, how they perceived the world.
The remaining question is
why did they build so many
during a certain time period?
They were calling upon blessings
of the spirits for various reasons,
but why in such a
extraordinary fashion, time-consuming fashion?
So if you wanna know the answer to that,
you're gonna have to wait for the third edition.
[Robert chuckling] [audience chuckling]
So the effigy mound comes--
Oh, I should mention that another,
to emphasize a ceremonial aspect
of the effigy mound cultures is the fact that
sometimes water spirits were not mounds,
but were water spirits.
They're called intaglios,
and the only one left is in Fort Atkinson.
And you can see head, feet,
and then what had been a very long tail.
Water spirits are known for their very long tails,
similar in form to like a panther
and so on.
And intaglio
is sort of the opposite of mound.
It's dug into the mound rather than being mounded up.
These were not burial sites.
And so the intaglios were always interesting to us.
And then several years ago,
remember when we had such huge rains?
Closed off everything?
The intaglio filled up with water
and became a water spirit.
So this lovely
sort of experience for us
really gave us the thought
that again, even intaglios were meant to be living,
but appropriately, not made of earth,
but of water itself.
All right, so effigy mounds culture came to end
about 1100 AD, and in part
because of the entrance of these people,
the Mississippians that I talked about before.
In Southern Illinois,
people down there
began growing corn,
and soon became intensive farmers
and built a city, a huge city
covering six square miles.
We now call it Cahokia.
Have you kids been to Cahokia?
Yeah, you should go down there. It's really...
It's climbing the mounds.
But Cahokia has
also the most wonderful museum
in the whole country.
Yeah, it's worth seeing the museum itself.
Isn't that great?
And these Mississippians,
as they grew,
expanded and came into Wisconsin eventually,
and again, creating a town
we now call Aztalan, which is only 30 miles away.
And at Aztalan, they moved in with these woodland people,
the former effigy mound people.
In other cases, we get the idea that there was conflict.
For example, I showed you the fortified village
that's here in Madison, right?
Well, that was there while Aztalan
was going, 30 miles away,
and yet there's no evidence of any kind of contact,
peaceful contact.
So it may be that Madison people were at war.
So the idea is that the Mississippians came in,
introduced some new ideas,
and had various relationships.
Some of them were trade relationships,
others were intermarriage.
Depended on the area.
But bottom line is that
the effigy mound people and woodland people
began to disappear, their traditions.
Effigy mounds, for example, were not built anymore.
But the Mississippian society,
Cahokia, and this whole complex
disappeared in the Upper Midwest at 1200 AD,
probably for climatic areas.
It persisted down south.
But after 1200 AD, we have no Mississippians
and we now have no effigy mound people.
What happened?
And this is where I'm gonna be ending up.
I'm not gonna tell you. You have to read the book.
[audience laughing]
A third new culture
springs to life after 1200 AD
that we believe to be a product
of the interaction of the Mississippians
with the effigy mound people.
They didn't build platform mounds.
They didn't build effigy mounds.
They had regular cemeteries that we kind of use today,
but it was a different,
it was a cultural expression
that we think derived
from this sort of interrelationship
between these two cultures.
We call it Oneota
when the standard, later on,
structures were longhouses
as compared to the smaller houses that we saw before.
We call Oneota,
and Oneota comes into the historic period.
That is, when the first Europeans came here,
we're positive
that it was the Oneota,
archeologically speaking,
who were the tribes that the Europeans met,
including the Ho-Chunk and others,
therefore giving us,
giving us a good idea
or showing us that the Ho-Chunk belief system
and other tribes are reflected.
Their ancient belief systems
go back to the effigy mound people, you know?
And they still have them in modern days,
but that's because there was a cultural condition.
We can't say that, for example,
the Ho-Chunk alone built the mounds
because we know that the Ho-Chunk
were one time, a part of a greater group
that included a group called the Iowa Indians who moved off.
They split off and moved on.
And the Ho-Chunk today
are not the same Ho-Chunk
that existed 1,000 years ago, you know?
Societies tend to split off
or attach each other
and become bigger and so on.
In talking, what people are really most interested in,
so which tribe made the mounds?
I say, well,
Ho-Chunk and other tribes
have mound-building in their ancestry.
But to say that Ho-Chunk made the mounds
is like saying the English built Stonehenge.
Well, yes and no. [chuckles]
English did not--
English was not an ethnic identity at the time.
But are the
ancestors of modern English, were they involved?
Oh, sure.
But the English did not exist,
'cause cultures tend to change.
So we cannot make a direct line,
but we can talk about common ancestries.
And all of these mounds that I talked about before,
even the Mississippians probably,
are in the cultural traditions of the people,
Native people that are with us today
here in Wisconsin.
And this is their story.
So with that, I'm going to end up my presentation.
[audience applauding]