Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Danielle Benden An Early Cahokian Colony in Wisconsin  March 21, 2012 UP702   cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome, everyone to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those organizations and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you Danielle Benden. She has served as the curator of anthropology here at UW-Madison in the Department of Anthropology. She manages the anthropological collection holdings, provides teaching support for faculty and graduate students, facilitates research for visiting scholars, and designs and installs exhibits. Danielle also oversees the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act compliance here at UW Madison. She teaches and archeological curation methods course to undergraduate students, and she conducts here own archeological research focused in southwestern Wisconsin, which is also where she's from. 

She received a bachelor's of science in archeology from the University of Wisconsin La Crosse and a master's of science in museum and field studies with an archeology emphasis from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Currently, she's co-directing a three-year research project sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This project focuses on the presence of Mississippian peoples in the upper Mississippi River Valley prior to what's called the big bang at Cahokia about a thousand years ago, and that's where we get tonight's title: "A Thousand Years Ago in Trempealeau." [LAUGHTER] Danielle is a member of several professional organizations including the American Association of Museums, the Association of Midwest Museums, the Society for American Archeology, the Wisconsin Archeological Survey, and the Wisconsin Archeological Society. She is currently serving a three-year term on the Society for American Archeology Committee on Museums' Collections and Curation. Thank you for laughing. I appreciate that. [LAUGHTER] You're from La Crosse? >> I am. >> Please join me in welcoming Danielle Benden to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]  >> Well, thank you very much. [INAUDIBLE] >> Your mic is not on. 

 >> Should we try that again? Okay. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. I'm pleased to be here tonight to talk about a National Science Foundation sponsored project that I and two of my colleagues, Ernie Boszhardt and Tim Pauketat, have been working on in Trempealeau. And for those of you who aren't familiar, Trempealeau is in the southwestern part of the state in the unglaciated driftless region. You can come, apparently, next week and learn all about that. A thousand years ago in Trempealeau there were a group of local late Woodland effigy mound builders living in the area. The whole part of the southern part of Wisconsin was actually filled with effigy mound builders. So most of you are familiar with these animal-shaped mounds. We had quite a few of them here in Madison. And about a thousand years ago there were a group of foreigners that came up from Cahokia, and these people are called Mississippians. 

And they interacted with the local late Woodland population. And so Cahokia is the largest pre-Columbian site north of Mexico. It is, essentially, America's first city. So anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 people were living at this city a thousand years ago. It's really an incredible place. You can go visit it today. It's near present day East St. Louis. And it's a World Heritage site actually. Cahokia is known for its pyramid-shaped mounds. So the largest is Monks Mound here. 

100 feet tall, 15 acres at its base, and what it is, is it's constructed with basket loads of earth. It's really an incredible feat. And there's hundreds of these platform mounds that surround Cahokia and the American Bottom. And Mississippian people were living in a society that was highly stratified. So there's craft specialists, there's a chiefly elite that's residing potentially on one of these mounds that is overseeing the population. There's a complex religion associated with this group of people. And they were large-scale agriculturalists. So we find evidence of their farm fields, but we also find these stone hoes that you see on the bottom on your left. These are made out of a kind of material, a flint called Mill Creek chert. We find these quite often. 

There's also a distinctive kind of pottery that Mississippian people make, and it's called Ramey Incised. There is an example of it in the second one here. Let's see if I can get the cursor. And it's this scrolled motif. It's very elaborate. Very beautiful. This photograph shows evidence of that craft specialization I was talking about. Finely made projectile points and chunky stones. These are these chunky stones here. Here's figurine depicting the game of chunky being played. 

Another term for this, it's a discoidal. And, essentially, the game of chunky was played up until the French get here in the 1600s. People are playing it in the southeast. Native people are playing it all the way out to the plains. It's a very important game, and it was a thousand years ago for Mississippians as well. The essence of the game is this: the game is played on a ball court, the chunky stone is rolled down the court, and at the same time the stone is rolled, two men are launching poles toward the rolling stone, and whose ever pole lands closest to the stone wins that round. That's essentially a very short description of the game. It's an incredibly important game that's played, again, up through contact. So I guess I won't spend a whole lot time here, but, briefly, there's three periods of time that are really important to understand at Cahokia in order to understand what we're finding up in Trempealeau. So the first period of time is called the Edelhart phase. 

It's between 1000 to 1050 AD. This is when people are living in small hamlets, probably the beginning of mound construction. So those flattop, pyramid-shaped mounds, probably the beginning of that occurring. The pottery type during this time is very distinctive. It's red slipped and it's shell tempered. The predominate chert type, or flint material, used to make stone tools is called St. Genevieve. We also call it root beer chert because of the color. The architectural style at this time is predominately this rectangular what we call single-post construction. So, essentially, you can see the small little circular areas in here. Let's see if I can get the cursor to come up again. 

These all represent where posts used to be. So single posts were stuck into the ground, and then this would have been thatched over like you see in this upper corner here. That's what it would have looked like. That's an artist rendition. Okay? During the Lohmann phase, AD 1050 to 1100, this is what we call the big bang in the American Bottom. It's when Cahokia coalesces. It's becoming a city. People are coming in from miles and miles away. They're drawn into this new city, and there's massive construction going on during this time. That's when Monks Mound was built, that large mound I showed you earlier. 

The predominate pottery type at that time is called Powell Plain. It's this really plain, but highly burnished kind of black looking pottery. You still do get a little bit of this red slip pottery but mostly they're moving towards this Powell Plain-like ware. The chert types become heavily Burlington and Mill Creek. These are two different kinds of flint that are available near Cahokia. They are using a little bit of St. Genevieve, but it drops off dramatically during the Lohmann period. There's also quite a change in the architectural style as well. So the house shape is still rectangular, but instead of putting individual posts in the ground, they're building trenches, four trenches for walls. We think they're actually pre-fabbing walls and then sinking the walls down into the trench. Again, thatching over very similar to what you see in this photograph depicted up here. 

Okay? Finally, during the Sterling phase, 1100 to 1175, this is really what we call the Cahokian climax. This is when the city of Cahokia is at its height, its power, and what we find there is the pottery type moves from Powell Plain to this Ramey Incised, this highly beautifully decorated and scrolled design you see on the pots. You get a very angular shoulder with this pottery type, and the rims are what we call rolled rims. Okay? During Sterling you see the same use of this Mill Creek and Burlington chert, and the architectural style stays the same as the wall trench structures. That's kind of a lot of information, but it's really important to understand these time periods so that we can understand what's happening in Trempealeau and place it into time. By the Sterling phase, Mississippian people and/or ideas are everywhere. So here we have the site of Cahokia, and there is this explosion into northern Illinois, into Wisconsin, Minnesota, even out into western Iowa. During the Lohmann phase, which again is really when Cahokia is coalescing as a city, there's a little bit of evidence of some material culture from the Lohmann phase recovered from the site of Aztalan, which is right here. Some of you may be familiar with that site. But the only two other locations where you see this early presence of Mississippian people outside of the American Bottom is at Trempealeau and another site called Fisher Mounds. 

Fisher Mounds is a small circular site, and Trempealeau is the rectangular site. I'm only going to really focus on Trempealeau tonight because it's just too much information to get into one talk here. Just a few words about Aztalan before I move into Trempealeau. Aztalan was first documented by Nathan Hyer in the 1830s, and he, of course, named it Aztalan because he thought it was affiliated with the Aztec people. And of course we now know that not to be true. In the 1850s, Increase Lapham, a really important figure in Wisconsin archeology, came to Aztalan and made this map in the upper left. And, basically, if you haven't visited the site, I highly recommend it. It's a state park, and Aztalan is near Lake Mills. It's tucked way back into the hills, and it's on the Crawfish River. The Crawfish River is a very small stream. 

This is a really defensive posturing. This is a chosen location that is extremely defensive. It is fortified or palisaded. This picture in the middle shows the reconstruction of a palisade. When you go there today, you'll still see that. Estimates of 10,000 trees to construct this palisade. A foot in diameter. We estimate them to be about 14 feet tall. They're sunken down about four feet into the ground. It's an incredible amount of labor to make this. 

So, clearly, there's some conflict going on, but what we find at Aztalan is this mix of these local late Woodland people and Mississippian people or ideas kind of intermixing. So, for example, we might find pottery there that is locally made but has stylistic attributes that are Mississippian and vice versa. So we do find some evidence of things being imported directly up from Cahokia. Here is one of those Sterling phase Ramey Incised pots found at Cahokia. Here's one of those chunky stones or discoidals. So, clearly, there is at least a very strong Mississippian influence here, probably Wisconsin's most famous Mississippian site. Moving on, of course, to Trempealeau, and Trempealeau, as I mentioned, is in the unglaciated driftless region of Wisconsin on the Mississippi River. This is the modern day village of Trempealeau here. These are the Trempealeau Bluffs, which I'll talk about in a minute. But Trempealeau is most famous for Trempealeau Mountain that you see here, and it's this little remnant bluff system that the arrow is pointing to right here. 

So this is a unique geologic landmark. As a matter of fact, it's a unique landmark in the entire 124-mile stretch of the river. You do not get this phenomenon happening anywhere else except for right here. So, undoubtedly, this point on the landscape is important, and it has been for thousands of years. It's a landmark. And I'll just say that Trempealeau gets its name from when the French get there. It's a French word and they called Trempealeau Mountain la montagne qui Trempealeau, that's the mountain whose foot is bathed in water, and it makes a lot of sense because, of course, Trempealeau Mountain is surrounded by water on all sides. So what did we know about Mississippian in Trempealeau before we started our excavations there? We knew a little bit. We knew about a map that was made by T.H. Lewis, a pretty famous mound surveyor, and he created this map in 1884. Lewis mapped thousands of mounds up and down the river, but he stopped in Trempealeau and he mapped these three platform mounds. 

So these are, if you recall back to the site of Cahokia, these are very common down there, but very uncommon in Wisconsin. So here's one mound. Here's a second mound. He mapped a ramp going down to a third mound. There's a small little, what we call a ridge top mound that he mapped on top of this third mound, and then there's another ramp going off the edge of Little Bluff. This is on top of Little Bluff which is about a 100-foot-tall natural bluff. He also mapped these borrow pits. This is where the dirt was removed from the ground to build up the mounds. So they were these very, very large, now gaping holes in the landscape. They're still there today. 

In the early 1900s, there's another character that enters the story, and his name is George Squier. He was trained as an avocational geologist. He's an avocational archeologist but he was trained as a geologist at Harvard. He returns to Trempealeau to help with farming his family's dairy farm which happens to be the property of Little Bluff. And so Squier also makes a map of Little Bluff. He shows the borrow pits back here. He shows the largest mound one, mound two leading down into mound three. He even does some good by taking some photographs of the mounds. You can see them in profile here. There's one, there's two, and then there's a third one off the tip. 

This is standing back and this one is standing in the borrow pits right here looking back toward mound one. So this is the base of mound one. It's pretty large. This one is standing right between two and three looking back up towards mound two and mound one. You'll see in a minute that the vegetation pattern looks nothing like this now. It's completely different. This is about a hundred years ago, and now it's pretty heavily forested. So flash forward to the 1990s. There were some archeologists, mainly Bill Green and Rollie Rodell, from the Mississippi Valley Archeology Center, that went back to a couple of maps that Squier had made. Squier made this additional map in 1921. 

So, again, here's Little Bluff. Here's his sketch of it. Here is what's called we now know as Squier's Garden. He recorded in this little area, this is his garden plot, he recorded while gardening finding this red painted pottery. He didn't know exactly what it was, but he knew it wasn't local. He did a lot of archeology around the area, and he knew it not to be from locally made by the native people that had been living in Wisconsin. So he didn't know exactly what it was but he knew it was rare and he knew he was fascinated by it. So he did another really good thing too. He put the street names on his map. So what that did is it allowed Bill Green and Rollie Rodell to go back to his garden plot and put a couple of test units in, and indeed they recovered more of this red slipped pottery and just verified that there is more material that hasn't yet been uncovered. 

 In 1867, there was a judge by the name of George Gale. Galesville, the town of Galesville, is named after him. He recorded a reference to a mound we now know as the Third Street Mound that happens to be in this person's front yard. There's a remnant mound right here. And this is in the property of Terry Uhl, hence the name of the site as the Uhl Site. And on the other side of the house here, if this were to extend, this it towards the other side of the house, this area was under construction in the 1960s, and a construction worker came and walked the back dirt piles, and he found these red slipped cherts in the back dirt pile. And he brought it to the attention of Bill Green. And it was just another indication that there's just a little bit there. So just to sort of summarize, what did we know before we started our excavations here? We knew about Little Bluff and the temple mound complex on top of it because of Lewis' map and because of Squier's maps. We knew about Squier's garden because of his maps and his descriptions of the pottery he was finding and because of the work that Bill Green and Rollie Rodell had been doing. 

We knew about the Stull site or the Uhl site because of the Third Street Mound mapped in 1867 by George Gale and because the construction worker in the 1960s had found those few pieces of pottery. We also knew about one little, tiny red slipped chert that was recovered from, believe it or not, Central Park in Trempealeau. It's nothing like the real Central Park. [LAUGHTER] And we knew about a silt, or a very finely made wood-working tool, Mississippian style, that came just a block from the Mississippi River, right in front of the Trempealeau Hotel if anybody is familiar with the area. We did not know about a site we now call Pelkey after the landowners. So now I'm just going to take you on a virtual tour of our excavations. I'm going to start first with Little Bluff. We're going to then move to Squier Garden, Pelkey, and then end up at Stull. So off we go with Little Bluff. In 2010, we had two main questions we wanted to answer. 

First, we wanted to excavate into the borrow pits. That's this area highlighted back here. And we thought that if people are living up on these mounds, or on Little Bluff itself, we should find evidence of that because people have to throw their garbage somewhere. And this is a common phenomenon you find down at Cahokia. The borrow pits are full of garbage. So our goal was to put several test units into the borrow pits. [INAUDIBLE] A borrow pit, so the dirt is borrowed from the earth. The other goal was to map the site. So you can see here in the center we brought a total station out and mapped the site as well. You can look at the vegetation on the site. 

It looks very, very different than it did when Squier had taken his photographs in the early 1900s. We spent a lot of time clearing off the vegetation. And also, I just want to point out, there are two what are called lidar images. We got really, really lucky because at the same time we were doing our work, the government was doing a lidar survey of the Upper Mississippi River Valley. And what this does, this imagery is amazing. It allows you to sort of paint out the vegetation and see the natural landscape. So you can see in these lidar images, you can see the borrow pits pretty well in this contour map on the left. You can see, here's another view of it topographically as well. Pretty, pretty great. One of the things, probably one of the most amazing things we uncovered through our mapping, was that there are all sorts of alignments going on. 

And so this is highly geared towards the summer solstice. So the borrow pits, the mounds, all line up to the summer solstice. This is something that George Squier had alluded to in his notes. I really, this would be a perfect place to watch the summer solstice sunrise come up. And he was right. We have this science to prove it now with the total station work that we've done. This ramp coming off the third mound is aligned to the winter solstice, and then the second mound we think has some tie to the equinox as well. So this is really exciting for us because this is exactly what you find down at Cahokia. There are all sorts of alignments going on. These people are watching the heavens, and just like we have mathematicians and engineers today, they knew exactly what they were doing a thousand years ago. 

So here's our excavations into the borrow pits. We put a total of 21 one-by-two-meter units into the borrow pits, and we recovered two pieces of pottery. [LAUGHTER] Well, that sort of blew our theory of the borrow pits being full of garbage. And this is a good lesson because sometimes the absence of material culture can tell you just as much as the presence. And what that told us was people were not living up here. They're just not. There's some other kind of activity going on, but it's not habitation related. Probably the second greatest discovery in 2010 was that we realized that at one point the borrow pits, so there's one here and there's one here, two very large holes in the earth now, used to be connected. And what they did prehistorically, there's some historic rubble that's here which is common when you dig sites, but underneath here, all these splotchy areas, those are all basket loads. What we found working with a geomorphologist, a soil scientist, is that the Mississippian built back up what we call the causeway. 

It's this area leading from the back side of the mounds all the way up to the mounds on the back side. So think of this in terms of a procession, maybe in a church, the aisle that leads up to the alter. Same kind of concept. Well, we returned in 2011 with a couple of other questions to answer. And in the 1930s, unfortunately, the village of Trempealeau put a water tower right into the center of the largest mound, mound one. And it was at the absolute abhorrence of the state archeologist Charlie Brown at the time. He wrote several letters trying to stop them and trying to preserve this mound, and they went ahead with it, unfortunately. Here's a look at that water tower in 1990. It's a pretty big, kind of ugly-looking thing. Shortly after this photograph was taken, it was demolished. 

So, again, we're talking about this mound right here, the largest of the mounds. But we wanted to do was we wanted to look to see how much damage has been done because of that water tower building, and is there intact soil remaining that we can see how the Mississippians constructed the mound. So those were sort of our two major questions for this project. So what we did was, here's the water tower, we put a T-shaped trenched going down the north flank of mound one. Here's our field school students helping to lay out the trench and us beginning to excavate it. What we found was just so exciting for us, and that was that, yes, indeed, there was a historic fill zone with concrete and rubble and rebar. Unfortunately, that's probably all due to the demolition of the water tower, but, happily, there is still quite a bit of intact mound building that we can see. We can see this sequence of mound building. So, basically, what we have is this black silt cap, and underneath that is a pretty large zone of yellow silt, and then under that is this red-brown silt that they're probably getting from the borrow pits. This is exactly the same kind of mound construction you get down in the American Bottom at sites like Cahokia, both in mounds and also in really special buildings, what we call buildings that have a religious nature or some kind of ritual feature associated with them. 

This intentional light and dark banding is something that is, like I said, it's intentional. And they're doing this exactly the same way up here. So for us to see this is really pretty incredible. We also learned that this was all done in one mound-building episode. Here's a look at distinctive individual basket loads. So all these little splotches of different colored soils, those all represent individual basket loads of people building this mound together. What we find sometimes in them are bits of shell, sometimes a broken piece of pottery, sometimes a piece of stone tool. Not a lot of stuff up here. It's pretty clean, but it was enough to verify that these mounds are, indeed, Mississippian and that they were made about a thousand years ago. We also uncovered a hearth. 

This red kind of circular feature in plan view. Here it is in profile. And what this represents is a very intensive fire burning for a long period of time. This isn't a campfire that we normally find. A lot of times we excavate fire pits at sites, and they're usually full of charcoal. They're full of garbage. They're full of ash. But this was different. This was completely clean. This was burning so long and so hot that there were not artifacts in it. 

There was no ash. There was no charcoal. It was just brick, brick red. Very, very hard to even cut through with the trowel. So we think that this was intentionally cleaned at least one time during its use. Here's that hearth I just showed you moving over to the east. This darker stain in the soil here, and then the edge of it is right here, is a building. Here it is in profile. So this darker stain coming down here, oops, and then on this side here. Again, we have layers of this darker black, yellow, and then a thin layer of black. 

That's the house floor or the building floor, and then there was an interior hearth in there as well. That was really, really outstanding to find. Again, no artifacts in it. These are just, this is intentionally kept clean. We also did a similar thing on mound three. So here we are off the edge of Little Bluff. Here is an up-close view of that. And, like mound one, there was some historic disturbance. There's siren pole sunk right into, unfortunately, into mound three. The village of Trempealeau used to light off fireworks from this area. 

So there was definitely some disturbance going on, and we decided to put a trench through this area to, again, what kind of damage has been done and what remains. Is there anything intact and what can we learn about the activity if there is something intact. And what we found was this pretty large post-pit. Or a stain where a pit used to be. The center part of the pit was this burned area that was full of mammal bone, it was full of charcoal, and what this represents, we also, by the way, this is an elk antler that was off to the side that was kind of interesting, but what this represents is a pit where a large post would have stood. And these posts you find down at Cahokia, and they're marker posts. You set these up to align the whole site around these posts so you can then mark solstitial alignments and things like that. This is an example of one down at Cahokia. This is the summer solstice coming up, and these are like calendar sticks. Think of them like that. 

Very common in the Mississippian world. >> Are those the original ones or reproductions? >> The ones at Cahokia, some are reproductions, some are originals. Okay, that wraps up Little Bluff. We're moving now in our tour to the eastern edge of Little Bluff to a site called Squier Garden. So I showed you some photographs before or in a map of Squier's where Squier's Garden was. Since his garden, in the early 1900s, it has now become a church property. So it's this pretty large grassy area. And what we do in areas like this is we use a method called shovel testing. And shovel testing is like exploratory surgery for archeologists. That's the best way I can put it. 

Every 10 feet or so we dig a foot and a half wide hole about three feet deep, and we screen all the dirt, and we just get an idea of what's down there. Are there artifacts? Are there not? And then it allows us to open up larger areas over the most productive shovel tests. So here's an example. Here's a shovel test. There's some pottery coming out. So we would mark this as a positive shovel test, and we would just keep doing this. And then what we do, like I said, is open up larger areas around the densest shovel test. So sometimes we bring in little backhoes, in this case we did, to strip off the plow zone and the disturbed historic overburden, and it gets us down to the prehistoric surface. So here's one of those wall trenched structures. It's this one right here with an interior hearth. 

In all at Squier we found three of these wall trenched structures. That puts a marker in time. So this is affiliated with the Lohmann phase in the American Bottom right when Cahokia's becoming a city, about 1050 AD or so. This is just kind of fun to think about. Little Bluff is, I think I might have said, it's 100 feet tall naturally, and then you've got these mounds on top. You've got people living below at Squier Garden. This is a rendition, artist rendition, of Cahokia with Monks Mound, which is about 100 feet tall, and people living below. And might this not be what's happening right here at Trempealeau looks incredibly similar. Moving on to the site of Pelkey, which is just off the toe of Little Bluff. Pelkey is kind of an interesting site. 

It's what we call a downslope midden. So normally we don't test slopes because people don't live on slopes. So this was kind of, we found this in part by luck, I have to say. But, basically, we ran out of things for our students to do and we kept them shovel testing. [LAUGHTER] And, sure enough, they're recovering all these artifacts out of their shovel tests. So we then opened up these block excavations and, again, mapped with a total station. Here's a map of the area. And what we uncovered were a series of these pits. And this one is capped with clay, and there's a burn zone. And inside this pit we did find a couple of interesting things. 

One being that there's this Powell Plain pottery that's Mississippian, but there's also this local what's called Angelo Punctated pottery. That's what the local effigy mound people make. So there's this interaction going on that we found a little evidence of at Pelkey. Mostly what we found at Pelkey, though, was probably a result of people just living on top and throwing garbage off the edge. Moving on then to Stull. The Stull site, you might remember, here's that extant Third Street mound. Here's Terry Uhl's house. This is Jay Street. This is where that construction had occurred in the 1960s. What we did is we put a one-by-four-meter test trench in this guy's front yard, and that was, of course, over positive shovel tests. 

And so we put this test trench in, and we, again, got kind of lucky because what we uncovered was these darker stained soil, can you all see that? That darker stain? That represents the edge of a house. This is a wall trench coming down right here, and then there's a second house, we call it the edge of a second house coming that way. This is it in profile. Here's a wall trench. Here's the basin of a house right here. And so in this little trench we recovered all sorts of things, but two of probably the most important were this kind of pottery. It's called Coles Creek Incised. Its normal area is the Lower Mississippi Valley, like south, south, south of Cahokia. There's this variety of pottery called Hartley Crosshatch that's usually associated with a little bit later period of time, about 50 to 100 years later, and it comes form a site called the Hartley Fort site in Iowa, northeastern Iowa. So, it was enough to bring us back in 2011 to come back an chase those two houses and expose more area, basically. 

So we were thinking we were just going to come here and by hand kind of open up off the trench. But we thought what are the chances if we just ask the landowner if we can just tear up his front yard for the summer. [LAUGHTER] And he said yes. [LAUGHTER] But we put it back, we put it back pretty well. And so we brought in a small little backhoe and, again, removed the topsoil, and when we did, this is what became exposed. That lighter soil here, that's our one-by-four-meter trench from 2010. This darker soil, that's the edge of two houses. You can't see the break in it yet. Underneath these tarps is actually a third house we uncovered. And then there's these series of storage pits, these circular pits, that wound up being associated with what we call the Oneota Culture. 

It's about a couple of hundred years later. So this area is occupied fairly densely by people through time. Here's a look at a map of that block excavation. So here's one of the houses. Here's a second one. And, unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of buried cables along this area so, of course, we couldn't get the edge of either of these. And then here's that third house again. We didn't get a complete house, but we got a good look at three of them. There's a really beautiful fire hearth here that I'll show you. Here is the basin in profile. 

Here's that fire hearth, and out of this hearth, believe it or not, was this section of a vessel. This vessel is about this big. It's a huge utilitarian cooking pot. It's not very fancy. It's what we would refer to as our sort of every day dishware that we use at home. This, on the other hand, is the fine China. This is what we bring out when people come over, very important people come over for company. And we found quite a bit of this red, highly burnished, red slipped both interior and exterior. These are smaller vessels. They're like individual serving sizes. 

You find them at Cahokia in places where some kind of ritual or religious activity is going on. Everybody doesn't have access to these. This darker stained soil here is the third house. This lighter stuff is a historic disturbance that kind of cut through the top of it. This is getting down to the base of the floor. All these little blotches are posts. Actually, this is a wall trenched structure but you can see the individual posts stuck into the ground. This is interesting. We go to the base of the floor and we found a series of these burned logs. And this probably represents, at some point, the structure burned at some point. 

We took these logs to Michael Wiemann at the Forest Products Laboratory here in Madison, and he identified them as being red pine. And that's a species you probably could have gotten in the uplands on top of Little Bluff nearby Cahokia, or nearby Trempealeau. Okay, now to the fun stuff, the examples of kinds of artifacts we recovered from these sites. These are lithics or stone tool material recovered from the Squier Garden site. This is a kind of material called Crescent Hills. Burlington Chert I showed you earlier. These are cores. So you use these cores, or large nodules, to knock off individual flakes to make a series of tools. These are little flake tools that are very common. This is a kind of Burlington called High Ridge. 

It's really quite beautiful. It's this banded colored chert. Pinks and blues and kind of grays. And then we did find just a little bit of evidence of locally made material. So this is a projectile point made out of Hixton silicified sandstone. It's a common material type for stone tools that you get in Wisconsin. These are some of the stone tool material recovered from the Pelkey site. So, again, Burlington flake tools. We call these, this is called expedient flake tool technology, and it's something where take a large piece of flint, you knock off a couple of flakes to get a nice cutting edge, you use the tool and then you pitch the tool. It's the same exact technology you get down in the American Bottom. 

This is a really beautiful little micro drill. We find these in context where there's shell bead-making going on. We have not recovered any shell beads to date, but we certainly have quite few of these so that's interesting. Another projectile point made out of Burlington. Whole series of different kinds of variety of chert. This is High Ridge again, St. Genevieve or root beer chert, Fort Payne, Dover, and then Mill Creek chert. So the whole point of this is that all of this stuff is being imported up. This is mostly not local material. >> Do you know where the locations are for the formation names? I think Fort Payne is Alabama, isn't it? >> It's Tennessee and I have a map of that for you. I do. 

These are some lithics recovered from the houses at the Uhl site. Another nice core of expedient flake tools. This is another micro drill. These are all, again, with the exception of these two images, they're all imported material. These two are locally available varieties of silicified sandstone. It's not the Hixton, that's the higher grade. This is the lower quality silicified sandstone. Beautiful what are called Cahokia tri-notched points. They're notched in three places. These are just side notch points recovered from those houses. 

Just to give you an idea, these two are paper-thin. Incredible, incredible craftsmanship in making these, but also you usually don't find them in any other context except for some kind of offering. These are not meant to be used. These are meant to be offered. And, interestingly enough, these were found on the floor of two of the houses at the Uhl site. Some other kinds of materials recovered besides ceramics and lithics were, this Galena ore and this is hematite. These two kind of materials commonly found at Cahokia. What they are is you grind them up and they're used for pigments. We also recovered this tablet from one of the houses. There's a famous tablet called the Birdman Tablet that you get down at Cahokia. 

One side is crosshatch design and the other side has this image of a birdman on it. Ours was not quite that elaborate but we do have some sort of etching on one side. The other side of this is just heavily smoothed. So I'm not sure if they just didn't finish it or what, but it's clearly a Mississippian artifact. Again, more just of these really beautifully finely made vessels, red slipped. Some of these have these, this is called a seed jar with these small little punctates. Some of this early, early form, vessel forms of these Lohmann phase jars, and then some utilitarian ware as well. More of this, you can tell we've got quite a bit of this fine ware, what we call fine ware, so it tells us something about the group of people who came up here. These are people who had access to some pretty high quality goods. Beautifully red slipped. 

This is a section of a small little bowl. It's slipped red on the inside and the exterior. More of this early Powell Plain. Again, this is all Lohmann phase. It's all very, very early. None of that Sterling phase with the Ramey Incised pottery, none of that present at all. More examples from the houses at Uhl site. A lot of red slipping going on there. And then something, just another thing just kind of blew our minds. There are pottery shards recovered from the houses at the Uhl site. 

This is a type called French Fork Incised. Again, this is a type that comes from the Lower Mississippi Valley. So to give you an idea of what we're talking about here, here's Cahokia. Here's Trempealeau about 850 kilometers up river. Here are the locations of those sourcing materials where you can get that chert or flint to make stone tools. So Burlington, St. Genevieve, Mill Creek are all pretty close to Cahokia. And then you've got Fort Payne all the way down to Tennessee. Here's the Coles Creek culture region. That's where that French Fork Incised pottery and the Coles Creek Incised come from. This is its normal range. 

Now, sometimes you do find that kind of pottery type up at Cahokia because, undoubtedly, people from the Coles Creek culture came up to Cahokia when Cahokia was becoming a city. But Trempealeau is by far the most northern expression of any of these kinds of materials. It's really incredible in terms of the amount of miles this stuff traveled. Just to give you an idea of the journey from Cahokia to Trempealeau. About 530 miles upstream, presumably they're coming by way of the super highway, the Mississippi River, and in doing so they have to cross two major sets of rapids. One at the Des Moines Rapids and the other Rock Island Rapids. On average, 12- to 13-mile stretches of rapids to get here. They're probably going through territory of people they may not get along with. They almost certainly don't speak the same language. We have played with historical accounts of journeys upstream, not many people go upstream, so it's really hard to find data to compare this to, but we think it would have been about a 30-day journey or so. 

They really wanted to come to Trempealeau. [LAUGHTER] So just to wrap this all up, why Trempealeau? And what does this all mean? So, we think that Trempealeau, because it is such a unique spot on the landscape, because it is a landmark, and if you look back at historic accounts and ethnography, going to the north, the northland has magical powers. There's lots of stories about going north. That's sort of where we came from and that's where the river comes from. And so it could be something as simple this is a known landmark. Mississippian people are going north to enter into this sort of mystical landscape of the unglaciated driftless region and they happen to land here because it is such a unique spot. This probably has not just geological uniqueness to it as a landmark, but it probably held a lot of religious, and it probably was a very important thing in terms of religion too. The overwhelming majority of the material recovered that I showed you, the ceramics, the stone tool material, is imported. That is, all the stuff was almost, I would say more than 90% was brought with them. All their pots, all their stone tools. 

They brought their architecture. They brought their religion. They brought their watching the heavens and their solstitial alignments. And this, to us, says colonization. If you think of the first time that Europeans land at Plymouth Rock, what do they do? They bring everything with them. Everything. And that's exactly what these Mississippian people are doing when they come into effigy mound territory, into Wisconsin. Certainly, the lack of evidence for habitation on top of Little Bluff and that careful planning, the marking of the solstices, tells us that there's some religious activity going on up there. People are not living up there. They're living below. 

And then, finally, the early varieties of artifacts that we've recovered suggests that the occupation at Trempealeau is happening at exactly the same time that Cahokia is becoming a city. And so this is really writing a new chapter of prehistory in Wisconsin because prior to this, we've really focused on sites like Aztalan that are about 50 to 100 years later, and so I think that we've got this research project going and we hope to continue it and uncover even more to help us learn about this period of time when Mississippian first come up to Wisconsin. So thank you. [APPLAUSE]