© Cahokia State Agricultural Extension Office. Occaisional Papers, No. 3. 1992




Abstract:
The sites which originally defined the Cambria Focus are located along the Minnesota River on the eastern edge of the prairie. The inhabitants augmented fishing and hunting with the cultivation of corn, pumpkins, and sunflowers. Bison scapula hoes and grass-lined, bell-shaped storage pits were integral to their horticultural system. Their ceramics showed a mix influences from the Middle Missouri, Mill Creek, the Red Wing locale, and Cahokia. Rolled rim Ramey (eastern) ceramics are considerably more common than S-shaped rim forms (western). These Cambria sites may well be part of the Initial Middle Missouri cultural system, but cultural ties to the "Eastern Establishment" were strong.

To begin with some not so idle speculations. Perhaps not all twelfth century roads led to the city of Cahokia, but a great many well traveled routes in the Midwest did. Just why this should be the case has been the source of a variety of hypotheses over the past half century ranging from migration and invasion to resource and energy acquisition. With Cahokia's population at 30,000 or more and including the surrounding settlements of Mitchell, Pulcher, East Saint Louis and St.Louis and the multitude of smaller towns and hamlets documented by the FAI 270 project (Bareis and Porter 1984), the entire American Bottom area may, I would estimate, have been occupied by as many as 100,000 individuals. If that number seems high try 80,000. 80,000 individuals, had they consumed a half a pound of corn daily would have consumed 40,000 pounds of corn per day (20 tons) or 14,600,000 pounds of corn per year (7300 tons). If twelfth century yields were anything like twentieth century estimates then an acre could have produced on the order of 20 bushels per acre. One bushel is equal to 59 pounds of corn and therefore an acre would have yielded 1180 pounds of corn under ordinary conditions. Therefore at least something on the order of 12,400 acres of corn would have been necessary to feed the population of American Bottom - about 20 square miles of corn fields during any given year. Did they fallow? Did they till the bluff tops? Did the harvest fluctuate from year to year? Did they eat less corn? More corn? How much land did they have available for tillage? Corn doesn't like to have its feet wet any more than humans do. Could American Bottom have produced enough corn to have fed the population residing there? I don't know, but I don't think so.

What about protein? People cannot live by maize alone. Did they combine their daily maize with enough beans to provide all the amino acids a human needs? Who knows? Did they fish? Did they eat venison? Bison? If they ate venison where did it come from? If they ate bison where did it come from? Did they wear clothes? Having lived in central Illinois I know they wore clothes. Clothes of what? Deer skin? How many deer hides does it take to clothe a human? Three? Four? Five? Five is the number given to me by a man who makes buckskin clothing. If five then 80,000 humans would require about a 400,000 deer hides for just one outfit each. How long would an outfit of clothing made from deer hide last? A year? Where did all the leather come from? American Bottom? Deer love corn. Raising maize and maintaining a sizable deer herd are incompatible activities. If every person had a quarter pound Big-Buck venison burger every day then 20,000 pounds of deer would be consumed every day. If it were possible to extract 100 pounds of meat from a deer carcass (that would be a large deer) then 200 deer per day would have to be divided up for 80,000 people. Throw in some catfish and clams. And, by the way, what did they wear in winter?

No matter how the numbers are manipulated the logistics remain staggering. There must have been a tremendous demand for corn, meat, and hides (not to mention wood). Cahokia was an energy and resource sink of enormous proportions. Where did this all come from? Elden Johnson (1986) and Anderson (1987) have suggested that Cambria and Mill Creek occupations and perhaps some of those Oneota sites scattered across Iowa and adjacent areas were sources of corn, hides, and meat. Cahokians had plenty of reasons to tap into the energy rich, relatively wide open spaces of the Upper Midwest. But why should people in such far-flung, out of the way places as Cambria and Cherokee be drawn into the Cahokian sink (or sphere of influence). What was in it for them? Prestige?

Maybe.

The Cambria Site (21BE2) is located on a terrace near the Minnesota River about fifteen miles upstream from the Minnesota's juncture with the Blue Earth River (at Mankato, Minnesota). It also is situated just about on the border of what was probably the border between the "Big Woods" to the east and north and the tall grass prairie to the west and south. Whether Grimm (1985) is correct in his interpretation of the "Big Woods" as being a recent phenomenon the change in soil is apparent to anyone driving across the county in the spring. Where the Big Woods may have been the soil is thin and brown. Where the prairie was the soil is black and deep. Where the Big Woods may have been the topography is rolling and filled with numerous lakes. Where the prairie was it is flat and lakes are far fewer in number. There was a distinctive change in vegetation starting right about at the juncture of the Minnesota and the Blue Earth Rivers and I'm inclined to think that this had something to do with the decision of the inhabitants of the Cambria Focus to settle where they did.

The Minnesota flows in the channel of the old glacial River Warren which drained Lake Agassiz. The river today is but a trickle compared to the River Warren, but it is still considerably more than the "stream" it is characterized as by some writers. At times in the recent past it has pretty well inundated much of the downtown areas of Mankato and North Mankato and at other times (1988) it has registered less than two feet deep at the gage in Mankato. What it has done in the past century it undoubtedly has done in the past millennium. Because the river valley was created by a far larger river the valley provided plenty of room in which the present river can maneuver. The result is numerous marshes, ox-bow lakes, sand bars and a constantly shifting channel. Ascending from the floodplain one encounters several old terraces -- the number depending on where one happens to be but there are usually at least two. The terraces were usually covered with burr oaks and prairie. The north facing bank is relatively cool and damp and covered with maples, basswood, ash, elm and red oaks. The south facing bank is dry and supports some juniper, burr oak, and prairie grasses. There are abundant thickets of plums, thousands of choke cherry trees, and millions of raspberries wherever they get a chance to grow. On top was the prairie stretching as far as they eye could see. Bison bones and teeth turn up on the gravel bars in the local rivers in sometimes astonishing abundance. When Swan Lake, the largest lake in south central Minnesota, dried up during the 1930s farmers drove their teams onto the lake bottom and picked up wagon loads of bison bones.

Subsistence then, for the inhabitants of the Cambrian sites, could be drawn from five sources: 1) the prairie, 2) the north and south banks of the river valley, 3) the terraces, 4) the floodplain, and 5) the river. It was an ideal setup. Furthermore land tillable with digging sticks and bison-scapula hoes was particularly accessible because of the width of the valley in the vicinity of the sites. The numerous storage pits (usually bell-shaped) and charred corn kernels are testimony to maize cultivation, augmented with squash and sunflowers (no beans have been identified).

The faunal remains from Price, 21BE36, (the only Cambrian site for which a thorough faunal analysis has been done) would lead one to believe that the river was a major source of protein (lots of fish and turtles). Bison bones are actually fairly scarce at the site, a small outlier a couple miles upstream from the main village (the Cambria Site, 21BE2). There may be good reasons for this if butchering practices were in any way similar to those described to Gilbert Wilson for the Hidatsa (1924). Meat was stripped from the carcass at the kill site and wrapped in the hide for transport home. Even if the Hidatsa did butcher in the manner described anyone who has walked through the Knife River villages (and almost any Middle Missouri village) knows the ground is filled with bison bone. Not at Cambria. Not at Price. The Cambrians seem to have hunted substantial numbers of deer which are less than one tenth the size of bison but which were probably as plentiful then as they are now. Bison bones may actually be over-represented because of their utility for hoes, squash knives, and other tools.

Twenty miles southeast on a terrace about twenty feet above the Blue Earth River is the Nelson Site (21BE24). The ceramics are predominantly of the Madison series with a variety of cord impressed rims, folded rims, notched rims, cogged rims, and even some plain rims with what appear to be Great Oasis or Great Oasis like designs incised on them. Projectile points are unnotched triangles. These ceramics are quite outside the range mapped in Anfinson's Handbook of Prehistoric Ceramics of Minnesota (1979), but what is perhaps most interesting is the presence of twelve-rowed maize (Blake and Cutler 1974). There were no storage facilities identified although there were shallow, sand and charcoal filled pits in which the corn kernels and two cob fragments were found. The pits are interpreted as being roasting pits for green maize. Partial ovals of post holes suggest the construction of wigwam-like structures on the site. There was an almost complete absence of faunal material. I interpret Nelson as a garden site at which a group of people grew a small amount of corn for the sole purpose of consuming it in the milk or green stage (as sweet corn). Perhaps seed was saved from year to year or perhaps seed supplies were renewed annually from culture sharers to the southeast. The important point is the contact, as evidenced in both the ceramics and the corn, with people as far east as the Mississippi River and southwestern Wisconsin. Nelson body sherds are frequently thin, smoothed, and tempered with finely broken granitic grit. These could easily be taken for Cambria body sherds.

Were the Nelson Site inhabitants the predecessors of the Cambrians? This is an idea that has been kicking around in my thinking for better than a decade. If this is the case then there must be some site or sites where the Late-Woodland-Madison people became the Emerging-Mississippianizing-Cambrian people. Despite ten years of hopeful looking I have no such site. What happened to the Nelson occupants and where did the Cambrians come from? Were the Cambrians Emerging Mississippian Initial Middle Missourians? I think they were. In other words I think that Cambria evolved from a local Late Woodland culture. A point to bear in mind is that the Cambria Site is far closer to the Mississippi and the Red Wing locale than it is to the Missouri.

My work (Scullin 1979/1990) has been entirely at Price (now known as 21BE36 although originally designated 21BE25). Price, as noted, is about two miles upstream from the main site of Cambria on a terrace of heavy, black loam which probably was an oak savanna in the 12th century. It was not fortified and not fortifiable. Johnson's suggestion that Cambria may have been fortified (1986) is not borne out by any of the aerial photographs of the site (the earliest of which date back to 1937) nor by any surface indications. The third Cambrian site, the Jones Site (21BE5) could easily have been fortified by no more than a pile of brush, and, given the topography of the site, may well have been chosen for that purpose. My best guess is that Price was occupied by no more than a half dozen families for a period of no more than five years. This is purely speculative but it seems to fit the size of the site and the density of features. No features have ever been found to intrude on any other features. The paucity of ground stone tools (two broken celts) and worked bone is also suggestive to me of a short-term occupation (few heavy tools were worn out and discarded). For a comprehensive accounting of Cambria Focus sites see Gibbon (1990, 1991) and Johnson (1986).

When looking at Cambria ceramics one sees material which is stylistically similar to some of the Red Wing inventory (see Gibbon 1979) and there is even some apparent Cambria material at Silvernale (or was it locally made and grit-tempered?). Then there is the Ramey/Powell Plain material at Cambria and Price which accounted for between a sixth and a seventh of all rims. Although Cambrian materials are found all the way up the Minnesota to Big Stone Lake (Johnson 1986, Gibbon 1991, Anfinson 1979) and even into eastern North Dakota where some new twists like castellations are added (Thompson 1983), the Ramey/Powell Plain component disappears completely outside the Cambria area. Why? The comparatively large numbers of rolled rim ceramics including a striking series of three identical Ramey vessels from Price, all apparently made by the same person at about the same time and possibly destroyed for some specific purpose, suggest to me the considerable importance of this form at Cambria/Price. Whatever this importance may have been it ceased when the Cambrians went west. Why?

Given that Ramey or Ramey-like vessels link the Cambria Focus with the Red Wing locale, Aztalan, and Cahokia it strikes me that this is a defining feature of those Cambria sites between the Little Cottonwood and the Blue Earth Rivers. Scott Anfinson has suggested that those sites upstream from the Cambria locale are a "Big Stone" variant (1987). This, to me, seems to be the point at which the Cambrians "joined" the Initial Middle Missouri. They dropped the feature which best defined their associations with Cahokia and began looking westward, even to the point of building a fortified site at Gillingham (21YM3). Ramey ceramics are what I call symmemes, (symmemes are the shared units of information defining a culture and allomemes are the differing units of information by which a culture - or an anthropologist - defines other cultures). These synchronizing symbols provided a bond with the Ramey source at Cahokia. No more Ramey, no more ties that bind.

Foreman rimmed vessels from the Cambria Site have Cambrian motifs on the shoulders and are rare at Price (only four rims). They are more common at the Cambria Site where they comprise about an eighth of all rims. Foreman rims (see Lehmer 1954), which are characterized as having an "S" shape, increase to the west (not surprisingly) and perhaps indicate a degree of intermarriage between Cambrians and more mainstream IMMers. Those who were making Foreman rimmed ceramics at Cambria seem to have been trying to make the rest of the pot look Cambrian.

Linden Everted Rim is really more diverse than the names imply. Linden Linden is truly Cambrian and definitive. When a sherd is described as being Cambrian Linden Linden is usually what is meant. Polished or highly smoothed, usually tan to brown vessels (often with "fire clouds") with broad trailed designs of chevrons and parallel lines on the shoulders and undecorated rims these sherds very clearly say Cambrian. Linden Nicollet is more ambiguous. With variously decorated rims, incising or tool impressions on the lips, and shoulder designs of parallel incised lines they have a strong Mill Creek or Sanford like appearance (see Ives 1962). About half of the rims at Price and a quarter at Cambria are Linden Linden (46 to 28 percent using figures from Knutson [1967] and my excavations at Price in 1974-75). About a third of the sherds at Price and Cambria are Linden Nicollet (31 and 28 percent). I can hardly be sure, but it seems likely to me that any differential may simply be a function of the small group of families who settled at Price, that is, individual or group preference or memetic drift, a cultural version of genetic drift.

Only Mankato Incised ceramics bear any sort of resemblance to Oneota material (precious little) and here the resemblance may be more to a common Late Woodland base than to Oneota. Mankato Incised has everted rims which, despite Knudson's (1967) definition, may be undecorated as well as decorated. Shoulders have incised triangles and parallel lines as well as rows of punctates. The result is very striking and distinctive. Mankato Incised is, like Linden Linden, Cambria specific. It is usually a very well made ware with thin walls and carefully executed designs.

After vacillating many times about the Initial Middle Missouri labeling of Cambria I'm still not sure. The Cambria Focus sites have a significant eastern caste because of the careful replication of both Silvernale and Ramey forms. Cambria Ramey is considerably more true to the Cahokian/Aztalanian model than are Mill Creek Ramey or Mitchell Broad Trailed. Just why there should be so much diversity in shoulder design is a matter for conjecture. Ramey strikes me as being a very special ware symbolizing a particular set of relationships. Once the Cambria area was left behind apparently those relationships were left behind as well. Perhaps, as noted, with the departure from the Cambria locale, the Cambria people could be said to be joining the IMM. Perhaps the demise of Cahokia coincided with the demise of the Cambria Focus. Without Cahokia there may have been no need of Cambria. Perhaps climatic conditions which seem to have contributed to the decline and fall of Cahokia had a similar effect on some peoples living in Minnesota.

Bison shoulder-blade hoes and grass-lined, bell-shaped storage pits may be western or may be Oneotan or, more likely, all are from some other common source. Bell-shaped pits at Vosburg (21FA2), an Oneota site some thirty miles to the south, are identical to those found at Price. To all extents and purposes Oneota ceramics do not turn up at Cambria. The same thing can be said for Cambria ceramics at Vosburg where an occasional grit tempered sherd does turn up but is probably Late Woodland. Ceramics with some shell temper from Price do not appear to be Oneotan but either from Silvernale or a local emulation of Silvernale technique.

Although both Oneota and Late Woodland peoples used unnotched projectile points Cambrians used both side notched and unnotched. 28% of the projectile points were unnotched triangles and 40% were sidenotched (all data, unless otherwise noted, are from the 1974-75 seasons at Price). The Late Woodland points at Nelson are all unnotched. Of all the hundreds of points I have seen from the Winnebago area only a dozen or so were side notched. If the two peoples were contemporaneous, and the radio-carbon dates seem to argue for contemporaneity, they don't seem to have gotten along very well, if at all.

Unfortunately architectural information is all but nonexistent for the Cambria Focus consisting of a probable rectangular house floor at Cambria (Nickerson 1917:35). Nickerson also speculated, as have I, that house structures on these sites must have been made of lightweight materials (1917:36) perhaps structures similar to historic Dakota bark-houses. I have never been able to identify any discernible floors at Price despite almost six months of fieldwork on the site and the excavation of 19 storage pits. In 1992 we excavated a portion of what must have been a hearth. There was no discernible floor surrounding the hearth. There are ashes in abundance in some of the storage pits, but only one portion of one hearth. If home is where the hearth is, home is invisible. Certainly there are none of the easily detectable rectangular lodges characteristic of IMM sites.

Two further pieces of information from Price. Johnson (1986) and Gibbon (1990, 1991) comment on circular, flat-topped mounds associated with Mississippian sites including some sites with Cambrian affiliations. Approximately 150 meters to the south and east of the main occupation at Price is a low mound which the former owner of the site David Price assured us had been significantly higher in the early years of the century. This mound is now about a meter high and about 15 meters wide. Early in the 1975 season I decided to test this to determine whether it was indeed created by humans or was simply a natural rise in the field. Accordingly we cut a 75 centimeter trench into the mound. Although virtually all data relating to this excavation disappeared during a move of our lab from one building to another some notes and the photographs remain. What we found was that the mound was constructed of black soil from the A Horizon. There was no sign of lighter soil from the B or C Horizon which is usually the case when a natural knoll is flattened by farm equipment. At one point, 60 centimeters below the surface and at 0 centimeters below the datum point on the surface outside the periphery of the mound a cluster of fire cracked rock was encountered. At approximately the same spot a single, unworked flake was also recovered. Removal of the plow zone on the top of the mound revealed no evidence of post molds. My conclusion is that the "mound" was indeed a mound constructed by humans although for what purpose I don't know. No other artifacts were encountered. Whether this was originally a "flat topped circular mound" or not is impossible to say because of more than a century of tillage. It is now, however, flat topped and circular.

About 57 meters to the north and east of this mound was a circular discoloration of the field's surface which we first noticed in an aerial photograph. This area is scarcely visible from the ground and had been walked over many times. Testing here was confined to a transect of post holes dug with a clam-shell digger. Although not as conclusive as the evidence from the larger mound there was an increase in depth of the A Horizon across the surface of this area. It is circular and flat-topped but has no elevation these days.

Finally, along the northern edge of the terrace about 200 meters east of the main occupation, there was a dense accumulation of fire cracked rock on the surface. We established a small grid and excavated a layer of rock just at the bottom of the plow zone. Each pass from the plow was picking rock from the feature. 98 percent of the rock was granitic and had been placed in a basin shaped pit in which a fire had been built. This feature was essentially identical to similar features depicted in Barrett's report on Aztalan (1933) and described as a roasting pit. This was the only such feature found at Price.

In conclusion, although there are definitely Plains influences at Price/Cambria I remain convinced of the priority of eastern influences (or southeastern influences) on the inhabitants. I concur with Johnson (1986) and Anderson (1987) that Cambria (and Mill Creek and Great Oasis) were tied into a Cahokian "sphere of influence" involving the exchange of Plains resources for a system of allomemetic information which symbolically conferred status on those involved and served to synchronize, at least to some extent, world views. Archaeologically this means Ramey ceramics and whatever they symbolized for the manufacturers. For reasons unknown the Cambrians headed up river at a time unknown. At this point their lives and culture were redefined more in concordance with Initial Middle Missouri cultural systems. At yet another unknown time the Cambrians disappeared, either absorbed into an existing system or passing into oblivion.

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