The Middleton, Wis. salvage archeology site. In background, U.S. Highway 12, whose expansion will run through this area.
You
may know Wisconsin as America's Dairyland, or the home of the cheesehead.
But it's also ground zero for a strange, evocative tradition of working
the Earth into mounds with ceremonial or religious significance.
Between 15,000 and 20,000 mounds survived when the Europeans reached Wisconsin; most have since been destroyed by the plow or bulldozer. They were made roughly 1,000 years ago, most likely by ancestors of today's Native Americans, although the precise tribal identity is uncertain.
Bird effigy mound courtesy Wisconsin Stories
Many of the mounds were shaped like animals. These "effigy mounds" often contained human remains and were typically built on lakeshores, hills or bluffs.
Since white people began surveying them more than 150 years ago, the mounds have aroused mystery and myth. Now, they are getting intensified scrutiny with the techniques of modern archaeology -- and of salvage archaeologists.
On
the road again
Erin
Schneider sifts dirt, looking for artifacts. On a good day, she may find
a couple...
Work at the 4-acre site in Middleton, Wis. is funded by the state Department of Transportation, in preparation for the hotly contested expansion of U.S. Highway 12. To find the dig, archeologists searched the corn rows for tools or pottery that would signify human inhabitation.
The
diggers hired a backhoe to scrape off the topsoil, which had been disturbed
by more than a century of farming, then marked "features" in the subsoil.
Features are any discoloration or other indication of a hole, house or
structure, explains archeologist Marlin Hawley, who supervises the site
for the Museum Archaeology Program of the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin.
The work is hot and slow, and demands considerable crouching and patience. The diggers are summer workers, often with degrees in geology or anthropology.
Working
in a coal mine, going down down...
The first
evidence of inhabitation -- two projectile points -- dated to about 8,000
years ago. Unfortunately, the acidic soil destroys bone and thus the recoveries
are mainly pottery fragments, stone scrapers and cutting tools, and rocks
cracked by fire.
Archeologist
Marlin Hawley surveys a keyhole-shaped house that was built between 1,000
and 1,200 AD and excavated last year.
The largest occupation, during a period called the late woodland, from 500 to 1200 AD, included four houses, three of which had the peculiar keyhole shape seen in the photo.
Winter,
spring, summer or fall, all you gotta do is call
The keyhole houses were partly subterranean, and that, combined with the
remains of fall-fruiting crops found from the same time, suggests to Hawley
that the site was likely inhabited during fall and winter.
Flakes left over from making stone tools, and a hunk of fire-cracked rock.
Why here? Today, the dig adjoins a cornfield and overlooks a highway. But 11,000 years ago, it bordered a lake that was gradually becoming a marsh. Both bodies of water presumably supplied the inhabitants with fish and shellfish.
Although the site may have been repeatedly inhabited and abandoned, Hawley says he has "no problem believing" that relatively long-lived oral traditions -- what he calls a "generational memory," caused people to return to the mini-village. But as he acknowledges, archeologists "get real squeamish" about that kind of unprovable assertion.
Don't get squeamish on us -- the late woodland period was the heyday of effigy-mound building.
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