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2. The Ancient Mound Builders
- University of Wisconsin Press
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2 The Ancient Mound Builders 42 N A first came to the Four Lakes thirteen thousand years ago. Like the lakes themselves, populations subsequently ebbed and flowed, leaving behind many traces of their existence. Archaeologists have outlined this human history based on more than a century of research, and studies by a variety of other specialists have reconstructed broad climatic and environmental changes that many times directly affected the lives of the people. The landscape sculpted by the effigy mound people is the most visible vestige of pre-Columbian life in this area and certainly the most amazing. The explosion of effigy mound building across the Upper Midwest is unique in North American prehistory and reflected general social, economic , and even climatic changes taking place across the mid-continent during the first millennium A.D. While the making of effigy mounds departed from earlier mound building customs, it had its origins in much earlier customs and beliefs. Ancient Hunters Mound building did not begin in the Four Lakes until 2,500 years ago, but the ancestors of the mound builders were here some 11,000 years earlier. Before that time, the land was covered by mountainous glaciers, which would have prevented settlement. One glacial lobe covered Table 2.1. Cultural and Environmental Chronology of the Four Lakes through Pre-Columbian Abandonment Tradition/stage Time Climate Environment Characteristics Paleo-Indian 11,000–8000 B.C. Cold and snowy Glacial Lake Yahara, Small bands of hunters spruce forest, swamps Archaic 8000–500 B.C. Cool early; warm Hardwood forests and Hunters and gatherers, long-distance and dry middle; wetlands early; spread of trade, population increase at end, first fluctuating wet and prairies and oak savanna; cemeteries, first mounds at very end dry at end increasing oak forest late Early Woodland 500 B.C.–A.D. 100 Cooler and wet Oak forest dominant Hunters and gatherers, first pottery, long-distance trade, longer warm weather settlements, mound building Middle Woodland A.D. 100–500 Cool and wet, sharp Oak forest dominant Hunters and gatherers, long-distance drought near end trade, connections to Hopewell culture, large conical mounds, villages Late Woodland A.D. 500–1250 Warm, a bit dry, Oak savanna, some Bow and arrow, increasing corn drought after prairie and forest cultivation, population increase, A.D. 1100 effigy mounds, pit houses, fortified villages toward end [34.204.177.148] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:08 GMT) Figure 2.1. Above, the natural landscape of the western part of Dane County and Madison was molded by glacial action. The eastern part is an older, dissected landscape. Below, a drumlin and map showing glaciated landscape of western part of Dane County. the Four Lakes, and a high, long ridge, just west of Madison, marks its terminus ; a mile-thick sheet of ice covered the present site of Wisconsin’s state capitol (figure 2.1). As the ice age ended and the glaciers slowly melted, small bands of hunters followed game into the area, thus beginning the long Native American occupation of the Four Lakes. The first people, called Paleo-Indians by archaeologists, moved into a cold and wet environment. Torrents of water and dirt from the melting glaciers formed wide river channels, great and frigid lakes, and vast plains of sand, gravel, and rock. The glaciers scraped and gouged the countryside, leaving behind hills and ridges—drumlins, kames, eskers, moraines—as well as deep kettles created by large blocks of detached and wasting ice that would later become small lakes. Later mound builders gave cultural and spiritual meaning to the natural landscape the glaciers created. Southwest-trending drumlins, large oblong hills of sand and gravel deposited by one glacial lobe, would be especially important to the effigy mound people. The present lakes of the Four Lakes district are remnants of one huge body of water formed from glacial meltwater named Glacial Lake Yahara by geologists.1 The vast, cold lake covered much of what is now the Yahara river drainage basin (figure 2.2). Paleo-Indians lived along the shores of this immense lake between 11,000 and 8000 B.C., leaving behind distinctive spear points similar to those found at the time throughout North America. The earliest of these points, called Clovis, Gainey, and Folsom, can be easily identified because of distinctive grooves or flutes for securing these attachment to shafts (figure 2.3).2 Long, thin, and artistically made spear points later replaced the fluted...