University Place History Sandwiched In Robert Birmingham, "Effigy Mounds of Madison and the Four Lakes" 8/3/2010  UP 463   cc >> Good afternoon, and welcome, everybody, to another edition of History Sandwiched In at the Wisconsin Historical Museum. Today we're especially lucky, and that's why we have such a big crowd here, to have Bob Birmingham come back to the museum. He's going to be talking about some of the mounds and mound culture of Wisconsin and it's great because much of the knowledge we have came from the work he's done. So without further delay, please welcome Bob Birmingham. (applause) >> (inaudible)  >> Your mic's off.  >> (inaudible)  (laughter) I knew that this day was not going to go well. (laughter)  >> So we're going to show some pictures to accompany this presentation, I guess a little bit later because of that problem, but that's okay. You can look at cows in the meanwhile. The topic of today is essentially the effigy mound landscape of Wisconsin, specifically focuses on this area, Madison area and generally the four lakes. And while I'm talking, for those of you that need visual stimulation, I'll just pass along the book and you can look at pictures, okay? And in fact, maybe you can get a couple books and just pass them around. 

Also, the Indian mounds book, which has many, many pictures of mounds. But for the time being, we'll just pass around that "Spirits of Earth." I assume that most people are generally familiar with the concept or the identity of Indian mounds, right? For those of us who grew up in Wisconsin, Indian mounds are everywhere and they are, generally speaking, recognized as burial places, although there's a lot of myths associated with them. And for the last couple of decades, I've taken a particular interest in the Indian mounds in general for what they can tell us about ancient Indian civilizations. One of the things to recognize right off the bat is that Indian people did not always make "Indian mounds." This is not a part of the continuous Indian mound culture. In fact, people have lived here for 11,000 years and it wasn't until about 2,000 that we see people building rather large earthen mounds that were burial places. And then, and this is the topic I'll be getting into here, about 1300 years ago, about 700 AD or so, the whole concept of Indian mounds changed radically and the people here, especially in southern Wisconsin, began to make mounds that were also burial places in many cases, but making mounds in the shape of animals and birds and other creatures. And then about 1200 AD, it stopped. Period. And when the first Europeans and Americans came in to this land, the Indian people here, many tribes and so on, were not making Indian mounds, basically, as burial places. This is a custom that had already disappeared hundreds of years before that. 

So again, Indian mounds, only during a limited time. Over the years, I've become completely fascinated and in fact blown away by these effigy mounds. These mounds, "effigy" means "made in the shape of." But made in the shape of animals and birds and so on. And through years of study and reflection, hit upon some things here that really are astounding. One is that these effigy mounds, which at one time had been found just everywhere along these four lakes areas. Any high spot, practically, you'd find clusters of these. And at one time, from Lake Mendota all the way down to Lake Waubesa, every high spot had clusters of mounds continuing in that principle I put in the book. A continuous landscape, not just discrete clusters, but we're talking about hundreds of square miles. A landscape of hundreds of square miles consisted of these effigy mounds. So what occurred to me is that first of all, these effigy mounds are really not mysterious, in a sense. 

The landscape, why they did a landscape like this is still pretty, requires a great deal more thought, but the types of effigies are not mysterious. These are the same spirit beings that Native people, traditional Native people, believe today. They're huge thunderbirds. A thunderbird, it flaps its wings and causes thunder. And lightning flashes from its eyes. And the thunderbirds are very beneficial to human beings and we've had a lot of thunderbird action this summer. They come with the storms, the thunder and so on. Powerful, powerful beings. And they represent the powers of the air and so on. At the opposite end, many Native peoples believed in a world that was underlain by a watery underworld and there are spirit forces there, too. 

And one of the principal spirit forces, well, it's variously called. Ho-Chunk call them "water spirits." Menominee call them "underwater panthers." Underwater panthers, great underwater panthers. That is, they're perceived to have a panther shape, but they live underwater and they have horns. And they represent the powers of the beneath world, the underworld, the watery underworld. And many, many Indian people have these traditions and all these water spirits have similar characteristics. Some horn, they're generally panther shaped, but they aren't panthers because they are underwater creatures. In fact, just like the thunderbirds, they're invisible. These aren't animals you see every day. Thunderbirds you don't see unless you're a very special person. Water spirits you don't see unless you're very special people. 

So the identity and how they look kind of varies from tribe to tribe, but all have similar concepts. And these, again, sort of the yin and yang. The beneficial water spirit and then the underwater spirit that's sort of menacing in a way, but still has a great deal of power. In fact, here, in the early days, Ho-Chunk people used to advise people that worked for the state historical society that there are water spirits off of Governor Island, if you know where that is. It's on the north shore of Lake Mendota. That's where the water spirits, that's where their dens were. They lived in dens of clay under the water. And if you don't throw tobacco in the water, they're going to come up and drown you. They're going to take you down to their dens. So any of you boaters haven't been putting tobacco in the water are playing with some danger here. 

But you see that system, some very powerful spirits. In the middle, you have earth spirits, very commonly among many tribes, bears are especially important as sort of earth representations. Among the Ho-Chunk, for example, many people today who are given a responsibility of dealing with the earth in whatever matters, even archaeology, are selected from the bear clan, because that's their area. And there are other figures as well, as I point out in the book. One thing that's overlooked is the role of snakes. Snakes are also part of this underworld and also, as it turns out, to be very common effigy mounds. So we take a look at Native American belief systems, both generally speaking and even specifically tribes here in Wisconsin and we see a belief system that incorporates many, many spirits and very powerful spirits that have specific roles in the world. And we also find that many of these groups, all of them, in fact, living in Wisconsin, these powerful spirits are regarded as the ancestors of humans. If you're a bear clan member, this is not just a symbol, you are a bear. You are descended from bears. 

If you're a thunderbird clan, you are a thunderbird. You're descended from thunderbirds. One of my friends, a Potawatomi friend, who is thunderbird clan, said, "I feel sorry for you white people. I'm descended from thunderbirds. You think you're descended from monkeys." (laughs) So we have the spirits that are very important in life and so on, but also there's an ancestry. And so we take a look at both of these into related concepts and then we take a look at the effigy mounds. And what do we find? We find birds, and especially in the four lakes area, lots and lots of long-tailed panther-like animals that are undoubtedly water spirits as perceived a thousand years ago. And many of them have the same form as more modern Indian people would draw them and so on. So again, this is not a mystery in what they mean. These are the belief systems and even the social systems of people who lived here a thousand years ago. 

And there are many examples in this area. So I've become sort of fascinated with that point, that these are amazing, extraordinary, but the meaning is pretty clear, if you know something about Native American. And in archaeology, that's really what you have to do. You have to look, in order to understand past civilizations, you have to look at the world through their eyes, through their beliefs, and then you understand. Things clear up. As soon as we sort of try to understand it through our eyes, then it's all mystery. You hear that a lot. "It's all mystery." Well, it's all a mystery because in our minds we can't figure this out, but as soon as you put religious beliefs, everything clears up. I often tell my classes, even when talking about places like Egypt and Peru and other places with monuments of early civilizations, and effigy mounds, in order to understand what they built, that is, people in the past, you have to understand what they believed. And then a lot of the mystery goes away. 

So that was an important understanding here, is that these represent basically the religious and social beliefs, the cosmology, as I put it, of Indian people, as it existed a thousand years ago, spread visibly on the landscape. A second important aspect that has struck me through the years is, these huge landscapes occur no place else in the world. This is unique. Southern Wisconsin and so on, this is a world wonder. This is like the pyramids. This is like the Nazca Lines down in Peru. This is like other world wonders. It occurs, there are effigy mounds elsewhere in North America, a few here and there. Out in Ohio, for example, there's a big snake mound. But no place else did they build all of these forms in these vast landscapes. 

So we here are literally surrounded by a world wonder and something which I beat the drum loudly in my book, saying, "This is a world wonder." We're surrounded by something that's equivalent to anything archaeological in the world. And so we should start recognizing that. Unfortunately, it's human nature to think that something's in your backyard, it can't be that important, right? In my neighborhood, for example, despite my whining, we have some effigy mounds and the city, they look like overgrown weed lots. The city refuses to mow them, because it's too painful, and I keep thinking to myself, this is a world wonder! This is not just a significant site, these are incredibly over the top. To the extent now that we get a lot of tours, foreign people and people from other states, and I can't take them to Madison sites because there's nothing to see, because they're all weed lots. So petition the city to start taking care of these world wonders. But these, again, are no place else in the world. And because of that, it does have some interesting things to tell us about the people that lived here, obviously, but also about humans in general. For example, why would they do this and only for a short length of time? And why would they stop? Well, to start answering those questions, we go to other cultures. Why did the Egyptians build pyramids for a short period of time and then stop? Down in Peru are huge lines of Nazca Lines, you're familiar with those, built for a short time and they stopped. 

The thing I point out in my book, and this is where I received an epiphany of sorts, I was visiting Ireland, going to a lot of archaeological sites and so on, and just having fun, drinking Guinness and all the other things that you do in Ireland. (laughs) Visiting pubs in archaeological sites. And saw a lot of these megaliths, like Stonehenge and so on, which were built, again, for a short time. And all over the place, and it really hit me, this is sort of like the effigy mounds. These people are participating in a ritual that's marking visibly something and then so it really started to cause me to see what the similarity was. What's going on in their culture? Well, in Ireland and England when they're building megaliths and these tombs of big rocks, putting a lot of time and attention, they were in the process of becoming agricultural. The society was beginning to evolve from one of sort of roaming hunters and gatherers, and they started to settle down a little more. Domesticated crops like wheat and barley and so on became important. Cattle. And comparing to here, the effigy mound people, same thing. 

Corn agriculture had started to come into the Midwest and we find the effigy mound people in the midst of becoming agricultural. So there's a similarity there. Both are making monuments to draw people together in new complex societies required by corn agriculture. So that's one thing that the study of the mounds can tell us in comparison with other archaeological things. And we're lucky, and this brings me to a third major point, to have so much information, therefore, about these effigy mounds. What struck me is that despite the fact that 80% of our mounds have been destroyed, mostly by farming, interestingly, but have been destroyed, quite a number of effigy mounds and effigy mound landscapes exist today that allow for the study of the formation of these particular groups. And this is why for my book I selected Madison and the four lakes. Because of all the areas in southern Wisconsin where these mounds were built, we have the best information and they are best preserved in Madison and the four lakes area. This is due to a number of facts. It all has to do with history, but early on, already in the mid 19th century, the mounds here, and really we're talking about huge landscapes. 

The settlers were coming in, and that's the first thing they noticed. They see beautiful lakes and so on, but all of these mounds all over the place. This is something that really struck them. At the time, the settlers did not believe that the Indians made these mounds. These spoke of, in the early settlers' eyes, of a complex society. And of course, the people coming in had learned that the Indians were stupid and primitive, and that's why we're taking the land from them. So it took a lot of years for white people to figure out that these are in fact Indian mounds, but before that people were looking elsewhere for the origin of the mounds. Europeans or other folks, a lost race. Until the 20th century, until about 1900, most white people believed that these ancient monuments built around North America were built by some "lost race." A race of sophisticated, complex people, probably white, who had been killed off by the brutish Indians, you know. And that really did not come to a rest until, interestingly, the Smithsonian Institution published a big study that proved beyond doubt that these were of Indian origin. 

And when that study came out, everybody kind of yawned and said, "That's nice." Because why? It was no longer a moral issue. We had taken all the land and put all the Indians on reservations, so now we could give them a complex society. But until that point, it was a moral issue. If these were Indian made, that makes them civilized, and so that created a little problem there. So we have a great idea of complexity, but more to the point is that because of these debates and because of the numbers of mounds here in the four lakes area, a lot of folks were coming in and mapping them and reporting them. Folks you might have heard of, Increase Lapham, Wisconsin's first scientist. He was a land surveyor from Ohio, came in to Wisconsin to work, was laying out the streets of a new city, Milwaukee, and came across long-tailed water panthers. And this just, he was hooked, and he spent the rest of his life studying these and published the first book on Wisconsin archaeology, I think they sell it here, called "Antiquities of Wisconsin," in which he shows all these mound groups for the first time. And including areas around the four lakes here, many which are now gone, unfortunately. He mapped one, he got a map from one of the early settlers of Madison and it was a small mound group located right in front of the Monona Terrace. 

That street leading right down there had been a long-tailed water panther oriented right down to the lake. But he mapped other places. In the 1870s, a guy name TH Lewis came through. TH Lewis was working with a businessman in Minneapolis, and they were struck with how many mounds there were in this area. And TH Lewis's benefactor was very interested in this lost race debate. And so he wanted to get more information about this and TH Lewis was a land surveyor, so he hired this guy, basically, to spend years just traveling around mapping the mounds. He came to Madison and in the 1870s made lots and lots of maps. Again, of mounds that have since disappeared, including the ones, and they're still here, but he mapped the Observatory Hill mounds, if you've been up there, and other prominent mounds. Again, many which have disappeared, but between Increase Lapham and especially TH Lewis, we have these wonderful maps. And then in the early 20th century, a guy came to the Wisconsin Historical Society named Charles E Brown. 

My personal hero. Charles E Brown was a hugely energetic and enthusiastic guy who came to Madison and he, like everybody else, was just stunned by all of these mounds, some of them huge. Some of the mounds that he mapped were, like, 600, 700 feet long. And one bird effigy he mapped on Lake Mendota, or helped record, is still there, probably a thunderbird or an eagle of some sort. It has a wingspan of 634 feet, the largest bird effigy left right now in the effigy mound area, and therefore the world. And that's right on the north shore. But he was stunned by this, but also was faced with the issue that Madison was developing very fast and so he basically developed Wisconsin's first historic preservation program. Period. And it wasn't about old houses. It was about mounds. 

And he helped form the Wisconsin Archaeological Society and one of their goals was to preserve these mounds, not just here, but elsewhere in the state. Charlie Brown went down. He came to Madison in 1908 and then in 1910, 1912 was fortunate enough to be in a progressive political environment. Anybody know who was governor at the time? Huh? La Follette, the La Follette era. So Charlie Brown went down from one end of State Street to the other end of State Street in 1911 and asked the legislature for money to map the mounds and to preserve the mounds. I mean, this is unheard of to ask money for cultural things in 1911. And the legislature said, fine. And they gave Charlie Brown and the Wisconsin Archaeological Society money for years in order to map the mounds, do something about preserving them. He made the case about, these are disappearing, and so on, but again had there been another governor and another kind of era, this would have been considered nonsense. I mean, we're talking about within memory of Little Bighorn. 

So that sort of Indian stereotype still is - but here in Madison, it's, well, Madison's Madison, right? (laughs) Everybody said, "Great idea!" (laughs) And he set up preservation programs, I could go on and on about that. He got a lot of people involved, but without him, we would not have the parks with the Indian mounds that we have today. And in the four lakes area and in the Madison area we have something like 22 parks with effigy mounds and mounds. 22 parks. Not just 22 mounds, but parks. Now, Charlie Brown was taken by the Wisconsin Historical Society from the Milwaukee Public Museum. He had distinguished himself there as a curator and so Wisconsin Archaeological Society was interested in more public outreach and so on. So they nabbed him and brought him up to Madison.  And then he set all these programs in motion. To Milwaukee's detriment, Milwaukee also had lots of effigy mounds. 

Huge landscapes. And now in the city of Milwaukee, now, as I said, we have 22 parks. In the city of Milwaukee, which also had a large cluster of effigy mounds, there is exactly one mound left. One mound. Now that shows you the difference that one person made in terms of that issue. Sort of the ending of these points here is that because of all this mapping, because of the preservation and the fact the mounds, we can go out there today, this is the area in which the effigy mound landscape is best preserved, either in the records or physically. And so the effigy mound landscape can be reconstructed, and that's what I do in the book, is to show where all the mounds were and then also to study the distribution of the mounds. What kinds of mounds were there here in the Madison area? What did they reflect? What kinds of local environments reflect? And through this study, we find that the mounds were built in ways that exquisitely describe the relationship between the spirits, the local landscape, and the people. We find bird mounds in high places. Water spirit mounds, where do you think? Right next to water. 

Sometimes literally oriented toward the water. Oftentimes associated with springs, which, we again find out from Native American beliefs, are the entrance ways to water spirits and to the underworld. Through the study we also find that one of the greatest concentrations of mounds had been and is still pretty apparent is the tiniest lake in the so-called four lakes. It's actually five lakes. But the tiniest lake in this area is Lake Wingra. Everybody knows where that is? Lake Wingra? And Charlie Brown wrote a long time ago, and I looked at the data again and he was right. He pointed out that Lake Wingra, around Lake Wingra had the highest density of mounds per acre anywhere in the effigy mound area and therefore the world. So something was going on with Lake Wingra, this tiny little lake, it's like a pond. It became a very sacred place. In the book I give a possible explanation for that and that is, Lake Wingra, as some of you may well know, is not a part of the Yahara River. 

All the rest of the lakes are widenings in the river, you know? Lake Wingra is actually a headwater area. It's spring fed. It's spring fed. And in fact, the outlet, there's a small outlet that leads to the Yahara River, but early settlers sometimes didn't notice the outlet and they thought it was a dead lake. They just called it a dead lake. And the Native Americans apparently saw it quite the opposite. The springs are the life itself. This was a source of life and there they put around all of these fantastic effigy mounds. And there are many, many other stories and differences that I point out in the book. One, another example is the huge eagle mounds up at Mendota State Hospital. 

If you haven't been there, you should visit these. These are fantastic. They are unbelievable. You have to tell them that you're coming, because it is a hospital. But they don't have any problems with people visiting. And there's a big cluster of birds that surround a blank area, sort of, and archaeologists some years ago actually identified a village. The mounds semi-circle a village, and they're all eagle mounds. They're all eagle or thunderbird mounds. Today, among the Ho-Chunk, the traditional leaders always come from the thunderbird clan, so we have to speculate at this point, is this the main village of the Four Lakes people? Is this the leader, the thunderbird village? And if so, it gives us a great deal of insight. And of course, we can go on and on. 

I guess our pictures didn't come up, but I hope at least you can mentally visualize some of these things, and in fact, had I shown some more slides we probably wouldn't have gotten as far as we have so far, but I notice we're starting to end up. Two of the big riddles is that, why did they do this? Again, I mentioned that this is actually pretty common, not the effigy mounds, but the building of monuments is pretty common with societies that are becoming agricultural. Now, why they took this form is still a puzzle. But there's some suggestions there. I should point out that with the megaliths, of course, same pattern, building these monuments and burial places and other sorts of things, people getting together. The megaliths, of course, you go there, and you look at the megaliths and you see big stones. What does that tell you? What do big stones mean? No idea. (laughs) The descendents are still around, but no one remembers what the stones mean. Come here to the effigy mounds, and as I said, you can look at an effigy mound, what does it mean? Oh, that's a thunderbird. You know, we have insight. 

We are lucky in that we have an insight into the meaning of these monuments, whereas in Europe, all of that information has been lost. Probably because culture has changed. People forgot. Whereas, in our society, we partitioned cultures. We pushed the Indians in a corner and they kept their traditions. Had they been assimilated very early, that might have been gone, too, just like the memories of Stonehenge. The descendants are still around, but no one remembers that because there's so much cultural change. Why did they stop? is a real interesting question, because it involves a very complex story that's beginning about 1000 AD and ending in 1200 AD, that involves two big things that affected the effigy mound people. One is the entrance of a very new, different society we call Mississippians. And we have an example of a Mississippian site at Aztolan. 

These people were from southern Illinois. They came into the area and changed life through hostility, assimilation and trade, changed the character of the indigenous people. That's a whole story in itself, but that's one major thing that's happening is, it was equivalent in impact, except for the disease, to the Europeans coming and changing the culture. A second thing, and this is real new, and I talk about it in the book, highlight it, in fact, is that recent evidence indicates that between 1100 and 1200 AD, throughout much of North America, not all, southwest for example, Arizona and so on, Midwest, including the areas where the Mississippians lived, were visited by a very long drought. And that drought hit Madison, also. First sort of evidence we have of global warming and its impact. After the drought, no one is living in Madison. No one. And people don't return for 400 years. So this drought is the same drought, by the way, that brought down the cliff dwellers in the southwest, the Anasazi, if people are familiar with that. 

Same drought, same drought. So now we have firm evidence of its impact and it killed the Mississippian civilization up here. At the same time, people stopped building Indian mounds and a third culture appears on the landscape in only certain parts of Wisconsin, but that's a different lecture for a different time. So the beginnings, we have some sort of idea. And the endings, but a lot more work and a lot more research needs to be done, but fortunately again, Madison and the four lakes has some of the best information to help us really solve that riddle and hopefully people will keep working on this. But in the meanwhile, just remember when you go out and visit these, these are extraordinary. These are not found everywhere. In fact, very few places. And this area has probably the best preserved examples. People at Effigy Mound National Monument want to argue with me about that, but that's also a beautiful area. 

That's on the western tip of that. But we are honored here to live among treasures and when you go to these mound groups, again, remember that these are only small bits of what had been a giant landscape that certainly was of great meaning to the builders and hopefully will continue to have meaning for us today. So with that, I'm going to have to close up here. And if you have any questions, I realize that many people have to go back to work, please don't feel like you're being rude by leaving. (applause)