Wisconsin Public Television University Place History Sandwiched In  Norm Meinholz "An Ancient Settlement in Brown County"  May 17, 2011 UP589   cc >> Dale Rogovich: Okay, this afternoon we will be hearing about the precontact settlement in Brown County, Wisconsin. This is archaeology month and Mr. Norm Meinholz will be presenting. And at the end of the speech, at the end of the program, there will be some time for questions if you have any. Thank you. >> Norm Meinholz: Thanks, Dale. And that's for everybody who came today on such a nice day. So it's nice to see everybody. Let me start.  In 2010, the museum archaeology program, there it is, of the Wisconsin Historical Society conducted archaeological excavations at the Pamperin Park North site in Brown County, Wisconsin. These investigations were conducted on behalf of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation of a proposed highway construction project of State Highway 29 and US Highway 41. 

The project plans in the site area include the construction of a frontage road, an underpass, and roundabout at the intersection of County Highway J and State Highway 29, as well as utility construction. The site was discovered in 1998 during a phase one survey conducted by the museum archaeology program. This survey identified Native American artifacts that included pottery, chipped stone tools, chipping debris for making stone tools, and fire-cracked rocks. The site was determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places following a phase two evaluation conducted in 2000. These investigations included the hand excavation of 26 one-by-one meter units. The Pamperin Park North site is located along and north of Duck Creek, approximately three miles southwest of the outlet into Green Bay. Duck Creek forms a series of meanders and oxbow lakes along its northeasterly course with Pamperin Park North site located along one of the bends in the creek. While the Pamperin Park North site is one of many sites recorded along the creek, it represents one of the few that provides direct evidence of precontact settlement and subsistence through excavation. Duck Creek has been a focus of Native American settlement for thousands of years. The stream has served as a transportation corridor, a source of sustenance and other key resources, a geographic and political landmark, and a focus for important social memories and identities. 

The Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin has called Duck Creek their home since some of their first settlers arrived in the area from New York state in the 1820s.  The site is defined by the distribution of artifacts that extends from the uplands along the golf course north of State Highway 29, south to Duck Creek. And from the uplands along County Highway J at the left side of the slide, east across foot slopes, the second terrace and the first terrace next to Duck Creek. Prior to the construction of State Highway 29, the creek flowed to the north at the east end of the site. And that channel of the creek has been filled in. So when the site was occupied, the creek had a different configuration. Here's a view of the site from Duck Creek. The site measures approximately 260 by 140 meters, or nine acres in size. The site has been adversely impacted by a long history of land use. The site became a source of road fill, and there you can see the borrow pit area of the site. 

When Highway 29 was built a large area of the site was used for fill to construct the highway. That was in the late '50s, 1950s. And there's the highway as it crosses the north end of the site currently. In the 1980s and 1990s construction of State Highway 29 and J disturbed a large portion of the north and northwest areas of the site. The previous use of the area as a plowed field also destroyed the integrity of the upper 30 centimeters or so because of plowing of the site. And the construction of the golf course at the north side of 29 also impacted the site in that area, as well as the installation of all kinds of utilities, electrical, gas lines, etc. Landscaping associated with all of these activities have left a layer of fill across much of the site. But despite all these disturbances, the correct archaeological investigations were able to uncover significant information on the prehistory of the area. This area of slide shows some of the investigations that we conducted at the site. The larger trenches extend from the upland area at the west side, and a lot of work was done in this area of the site right in here. 

That's referred to as the foot slope area. And then towards the east is the lower terrace and much flatter ground. We began our work by clearing all this vegetation that had grown up since our work in the year 2000. So there was a lot of vegetation to clear and we began excavations at that lower terrace. In total we excavated 248 one- by one-meter units by hand at the site. Shows a few slides of us excavating on that lower terrace by hand and skim shoveling the soil looking for any anomalies.  We were able to push the excavations further west from that lower terrace through the woods and open up units up in the uplands through all this wooded area as well.  I'll give you some idea of, lots of sumac growing up on that ridge. As well as some work on the golf course as well. So we did some work up there. 

A few test units. It was previously a plowed field. Yeah? >> That previous site, now where would that be in relation to this picture? >> This is right across just south of the highway. >> Okay. >> So it's just to the right of this image.  And we had to dodge some golf balls too. [LAUGHTER] So that was kind of exciting.  >> How did the golfers take that? Were they curious? >> Most of them were curious, yeah. I think they saw it as another hazard. [LAUGHTER] And it was late in the year, so nobody's real serious about golf, I don't think anyway. 

We investigated larger areas of the site. We brought in the Brown County Highway Department, and they brought a large backhoe to strip off the plow zone and fill from the total of eight trenches totaled 860 square meters. The underlying soil was examined for any kind of anomalies or artifacts that might have escaped the ravages of plowing. And so we're stripping off these large areas of the fill and the plow zone and just seeing if we can find any intact features, meaning pit features or structures that contain artifacts below all this disturbed soil. And it certainly speeded up our work. And we examined the ground. As you can see, we examined the ground for any features that might be there. These investigations identified a total of 79 cultural features, meaning pit features, again, that might have been where they cooked food, stored resources in a pit in the ground, structures and posts that may have survived plowing. And the evidence we see of that are, let me see, well, there's the distribution of the 79 features at the site, and most of them are located along this foot slope area at the east end of the site here. There were a few up on the uplands and a few down near the creek area. 

You have to remember, a lot of this area is disturbed by the previous borrow pit as well as just inaccessible due to slope and trees and everything else. So we're limited to exactly where we can excavate. And a few of the features, most of the features are these small, dark stains in the ground. Again, they've removed, we've taken off the plow zone which has mixed all these upper part of the feature and destroyed it, really. So we're only seeing the very bottoms of features that are deep enough to escape plowing. And you can see a plan and profile, a view of that feature. It's just a small little pit feature. And it's dark because of all the organic matter that's trash and artifacts that are thrown back in the pit. Or it might be dark based on how it was used. And here's another example of a pit feature. 

The problem with the features is to identify exactly how they functioned, it's difficult because if they dug a pit out to cook in, they may have removed all the evidence of that cooking that went on, and the artifacts that get dumped back in may not always be intentional even. And so it's not always clear that just by finding artifacts in this pit it determines exactly how it functioned. And we may never know exactly how all these pits functioned. It's only when you have a layer of burned rock or direct evidence of burning in the pit that you might have a good idea that it was used as a hearth, and then you can hopefully find some charred food remains that might tell you what was cooked in the pit. We did have, well, we also removed a sample of dirt from each of these features and processed them for ethnobotanical remains. So the sample of dirt was floated in the lab and charcoal and any seeds that might be in that pit feature were retained as well as charcoal for radiocarbon dating.  And we spent a lot of time mapping all these features so we know exactly where everything is located. And photographing.  We had our tough days out there, too, in this last summer some very hot days trying to find some shade under some plywood. And then we had some just terrible flooding. 

I think it was record floods for Brown County. So we dug all those trenches open, and then like the next day it just filled all up with water. So it was pretty depressing. But luckily, it's summer, a couple days, a week, you're back in it. It does drain away. So it did work. Yeah? >> Is it useful in a place like that to use pumps? >> Yeah, it's a possibility, yeah. Here it did drain eventually so the pumps weren't needed. But, yeah, there are times when a pump could be handy. >> What did you do? >> Well, we had other things to do. 

There was plenty of other work to do and the uplands weren't flooded so we had some excavations up on the uplands. And we, again, had little structures built to kind of keep us out of the rain while we're mapping. It all helps. The results of those excavations were that these are all features found in that foot slope area. Each one of these represents a pit feature or a larger feature, a structure or hearth. And I'm going to highlight a couple of the features. The large feature here, 75, and the large feature, 39, up there are both interesting and large features. Feature 39 is this hearth, and you can see the concentration of burned rock there that we're excavating. It's about half excavated at the moment. It had about 600 pieces of burned rock weighing about over a hundred pounds. 

And there was some small amount of nut shell recovered in pottery in this feature as well. So it certainly suggests that it was a hearth used for cooking. And maybe there was some roasting going on. There's quite a platform of rocks that maybe some roasts and if you find nut shells maybe the nuts were being roasted. It's one possibility anyway. Another feature we had was this large feature 75. It was identified on the second terrace. It measured four and a half by three and a half meters in area and had a depth of about 60 centimeters. And there it gives you kind of a scale of this feature as we're excavating the half of it and scribed the lines on there to kind of show the limits of this feature. It's quite large and it's interpreted as a structure, a pit house. 

There's a drawing of it. And in profile, we draw all these profiles to try and explain how these features were constructed and here's a profile of that basin structure 75 and the profile drawing of it. [INAUDIBLE]  Oh, that's just a color. That's just a color coding of, it describes the color of the soil. It's using the Munsell scheme for describing soil colors. And here's one possible reconstruction of what a structure might have looked like. We didn't really find this extended entryway at all. But they would have built an arbor or a bent pole structure above this basin and had kind of a sunken floor in it. A lot of them a interpreted as winter houses since you're down in the ground it will be a little warmer than if you're unprotected by the weather, by the wind. We also had two oval post mold patterns. 

These are just up slope from that feature 75, and they consist of these patterns of post molds, just small post molds that we can still map and they appear to represent single post structures. Again, the arbor-type superstructure but no basin associated. So maybe a summer house. It's been found at other sites where they've been identified as maybe summer houses. And there were two of these. This other one kind of, I didn't mark it in, but you can sort of see the open pattern here that may represent an opening in the features and where a structure may have been. Excavation resulted in a recovery of a large number of artifacts, over 12,000 artifacts at last count, I guess. Including pottery, a variety of chipped stone tools, and all the debris from making stone tools, the flakes, and --, as we call it, and fire cracked rocks, as well as 18th and 19th century Euro-American artifacts. These are some of the pottery rim shards. These are just the fragments from the pottery vessels themselves. 

We weren't able to reconstruct a complete pot from the work we have done. But it shows some of the variety of pottery styles at the site. Some with these plain, just a plain rim and others with a lot of cord impressed, cord decorated by impressing in the clay twisted cords in all kinds of patterns.  And some of them are quite decorated by these cord impressions. The collaring is that thickened area at the top of the vessel, and we found at least over 60% of the vessels from the site had this collar on the upper rim, which is decorated then with a lot of cord impressions and cord wrapped stick impressions.  The tempering of these vessels is primarily grit tempered so they would crush up igneous rock and use it as a temper to hold the pot together as it was fired. So these are grit tempered pottery. And the collaring, here's an example of a complete vessel, not from the site, unfortunately, but it gives you an idea of that collar, that thick area at the top of the vessel that some suggest may be an idea that you could then suspend the pot over a fire by having that collar.  And others suspect it has to do simply with a decorative style added to a vessel or a jar because so much of the pottery from the Pamperin Park North site is just incredibly decorated on that upper collar. So I'm sure it had all kinds of meanings to the people who lived there. 

 We also had a total of 36 projectile points were recovered. The majority are these small triangular points. They're typical of late Woodland and Oneota times. It might be roughly 800 AD to even as recent as 1650 AD. So a long period of time when bow and arrow was used and these styles of points were used, both during the late Woodland and during the succeeding Oneota period. Some of these are very nicely flaked. Others are simply a small flake that's been retouched into a point.  We also a variety of these small notched points. And you can see one complete one. Most of them are just the bases, the stems of the broken points as well as small stem points. 

Some of these are just flakes as well that are just minimally retouched into a point. And the third one there is real tiny, small stem chipped on there.  There's also evidence of an earlier occupation. These points are, the triangular points are mainly late prehistoric. But we also have these slightly larger stem points that suggest late archaic to early Woodland times. And late archaic would be 3,000 BC to 1,000 BC and early Woodland up to about AD 100. So there was an earlier occupation at the site with using these types of points but we were not able to associate them with any kind of features that we could tell much more about what was going on at this time.  Several drills. Other bifaces. These are just shaped pieces that are earlier stages in making stone tools. 

Point pre-forms, you might call them, or just the whole range in thickness and variety with about 40, let's see if I got it right, about 42 bifaces were found. [INAUDIBLE] Yes, most of it is what we call Silurian chert. So it's just a local chert from the area. Overwhelmingly. Some gravers. We also had couple of scrapers. Most of the tools are just edge modified or retouch flakes. So not a lot of real formal tools. We did have some historic items. Near the creek there's a pretty good dense area of 19th century artifacts. 

But we also had this Jesuit ring that we found. And here's a close-up of that Jesuit ring. It was found in disturbed context, unfortunately, but it's thought to date between 1710 and 1750. And it suggests that there was a French presence in the Duck Creek drainage. Calling it a Jesuit ring is kind of a misnomer in that doesn't necessarily mean there was a Jesuit priests at this site. It was used for many things, just as trade items or as gifts. But it certainly is a unique find and somebody lost their prized position, I guess. >> And when did you date that? >> 1710 to 1750 is what it's been suggested the dates on that.  This just shows you the 15 radiocarbon dates from the site. There's a cluster of dates in that late Woodland period, roughly AD 660 to 1030. 

And there's another cluster of radiocarbon dates that would date an Oneota component from about 1170 to 1400 AD. So those are the main occupations at the site. You can see there are some earlier dates and in all cases those dates were run on charcoal from features that we thought would be later in time. So there's something going on there that's not what we expect. It may be just old carbon that we're dating carbon that's old in much more recent features. But overall a nice group of dates that suggest a fairly substantial occupation during that late Woodland and Oneota period.  In summary, if I can summarize, the Pamperin Park North site was the location of a series of precontact settlements dating from at least the last 5,000 years. These settlements were not isolated but were part of a larger settlement pattern that focused on the resources of Duck Creek. The earliest evidence for occupation at the site was during the late archaic period between 3,000 and 1,000 BC. Recovery of several Durst stem-points and a radiocarbon date suggests limited short-term or hunting activity. 

And the similar activity is suggested for the subsequent early Woodland period from about 500 BC to 100 AD. And, again, unfortunately we were not able to find those diagnostic points within a context that can provide us with more information on exactly what life was like in that time. But it wasn't until the subsequent settlement of the site during the late Woodland period between 8500 and 1000 that a substantial settlement occurred at the site. And these inhabitants made and used a variety of pottery vessels including jars with collared rims, tempered with grit and decorated with a great variety and style of cord impressions. The bow and arrow is being used at this time and using small triangular points for tipping the arrows. The tool assemblage is not diverse and a majority are simply flaked tools. Floral remains suggest some use of wild plants and nuts, but no use of corn in the diet. The use of a pit house could indicate that the settlement was occupied during the cold winter season. Settlement conditioned into the emergent and developmental horizons of the Oneota tradition between AD 1000 and 1350. The community included two oval bent pole structures, a large hearth, and cooking and refuse pits. 

The inhabitants adopted crushed mussel shells for temper for the pottery vessels but continued to retain, through a large extent, the use of grit tempering, as was during the late Woodland. The pottery vessels were plain surfaced at this time and decorated --, unlike the cord impressions that we're seeing in the late Woodland period. The change in structure style may suggest that the late Woodland occupation reflected a warm season occupation. A small amount of corn was found in the diet, suggesting use at that time. During the fur trade era, in the 18th century, the sites only limited settlement reflected in scattered diagnostic artifacts. The use of the area increased during the 19th into the 20th century with settlement concentrated along Duck Creek with the building of several mills in the vicinity. When the land was included in Pamperin Park in the 1930s, the site once again returned to a more natural state, hiding a long and complex history of land use and settlement on Duck Creek. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]