The Upper Midwest—for our purposes all of Minnesota,
eastern Iowa, northwestern Illinois, and all of Wisconsin—has seen human
habitation for over 12,000 years, arriving in the region not long after
the glaciers retreated. Modern scholars term this ear as Paleo-Indian,
tying the period to the dates of 10,000 to 6,500 B.C, a time of the mastodons
and the woolly mammoths. Though we have little evidence of these
peoples, we know they made tools, gathered vegetation for food and for
healing, and lived in large extended families that traded widely with other
groups.
In the Early, Middle and Late-Archaic eras the hunting districts
of these groups became more settled and efforts to raise crops are known
to have begun some time around 3,000 B.C. Over the ensuing era we
know that ceremony and ritual began to surround the most basic of human
functions, including the gathering and raising of food, and the event of
birth and of death. Burial mound building is evidence of this change.
It is known that small round and conical burial mounds first appeared
in Wisconsin during the Early Woodland phase, dated from 800 B.C. to as
late as 100 A.D. This group was the first to use pottery for cooking
and the storing of grains, to collect wild grasses and nuts, cultivated
some crops, and to establish semi-permanent territorial camps in season for
hunting and fishing.
The Middle Woodland era saw an increase in mound-building and those
that lived in this time of 100 B.C. to about 500 A.D. began to build much
larger mounds and to set them in groups, employing rock, ash, clays and
special soils that would have provided protection for the rebirth of the
soul. Sometimes only one body was buried in the depth of the mounds,
sometimes many were interred.
The period of time from 650 A.D. to about 1,200 A.D., called the
Late Woodland time, saw a tremendous increase in mound building, influenced
to some extent by more complex societies, the Hopewell and Mississippian
cultures, in the south along the Mississippi River who traded with the Woodland
people. Mounds were now often raised near village sites where permanent
crop fields were established. It was during this era, also, that
the Oneota, an agricultural group, flourished after 1,000 A.D. primarily
in what is now present-day Wisconsin.
A spectacular outcome of the Late Woodland culture was effigy mound
building, using earthen piles to create animal and geometric forms, often
in mixed groups, and placed on high levels above water. Several schools
of thought exist about the meaning of the mounds, the most common now being
the representation of clans tied to elements: Earth, Water, Air.
The animal forms especially can be tied to ancient legends of spirit beings,
and many of the mound groups are now considered to be celestial markers
as well. The effigy mounds do at times contain burials, but not
always.
These effigies, generally built in the time between 650 and 1,200
A.D., reflect recurrent themes that can be seen in the many archaeological
parks that today shelter the few remaining effigy mounds that escaped destruction
by plow or development since European settlement in the Upper Midwest:
Panther (Water Spirit), Thunderbird, Turtle (or Lizard), Bear, Deer, Snake,
Human, Linear, Oval, and Conical.
The many rock art (petroglyph and pictograph) sites known throughout
the Upper Midwest, which span many of the above-mentioned eras, also
carry many of these same symbols, plus the classic celestial
symbols of sun, moon, and stars. Other common rock art motifs
are spears (atlatls), hands, bird's feet (turkey tracks), shields, and
The Underworld.
The first European settlers arrived just five hundred years after
the end of the effigy mound era, a mere heartbeat in time, and the interest
in these 'antiquities' which we know to be the last vestiges of a living
culture began in earnest. By the early 1800s surveyors were making
notes and sketches of the mounds and the rock carvings, and formal commissioned
surveys began in the 1850s. We are, in our time, indebted to the efforts
of these skilled engineers—in particular T.H. Lewis, Increase Lapham and
Jacob Brower—for highly detailed drawings and maps of mound and rock art
sites that have long been lost to modern development.
Today's Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Dakota (Sioux), Ojibwe, and Iowa tribal
nations have long cultural memories of the meaning and sacredness of these
sites and may truly be considered the modern inheritors of these ancient
peoples. It is with their support and their generosity that we can
know so much about the meaning and place of the effigies and carvings of
another people long departed and, combined with the considerable skills
and the new sensibilities of our archaeologists, sociologists and ethnographers,
we find ourselves the collective inheritors of a great culture past.
