S. MN Prehistory 980108

Although archaeologists have a multitude of names for the prehistoric cultures of Minnesota there were some broad patterns which describe the 10,000 years we know as prehistory. The archaeological record, by no means complete, can provide reasonably accurate accounts of what the people who lived here ate and what types of tools they used. Beyond that we can only make educated guesses (hypotheses) about their lives.

The lives of individuals can never be known, although sometimes details of an individual's life can be. The collective lives of groups of people are better known. There are patterns which a repeated over and over again across the entire Earth. Hunters and gatherers tend to live in small groups with a minimum of political structure and a maximum of equality. They tend to move around at fairly regular intervals to utilize resources as they become available throughout the year. Group size varies as resource availability varies. A lake full of wild rice can support a large group (maybe hundreds) for a few weeks. A buffalo kill site at which several dozen bison may have been killed by driving them off a cliff may support two or three small groups for several weeks. The keys to survival are flexibility and mobility. And this is (or was) true all over the world despite the considerable variability in hunting techniques and varieties of edible plants. This pattern characterized the PaleoIndian period but persisted into historic times in some regions including parts of Minnesota.

Once populations begin to rise to the point that the land can no longer provide an adequate living there are two choices. One is to move on - as long as this is possible. Exploit new resources until there are no more new resources. Sooner or later most populations ran into the problem of being unable to move on because someone was already there before them. At this point people tend to "dig in" and work harder and eat things they were never prone to eat before. More work is expended to make a living from a smaller piece of land. New technologies are developed or borrowed to process both plants and animals to maximize their food value. At this point groups tend to become larger and more structured. In the archaeological record this was the story of the Archaic.

Again, if a system is working well, populations tend to rise. This, in turn, leads to the need for even more structuring simply to maintain order within the group and to get increasingly more complex jobs done. Some groups may start growing some of their own food or at least managing areas in which wild foods grow - by burning an area to maximize blue berry production for example (and deer production because deer thrive on areas recovering from fires). Managing your own or growing your own food creates an entirely different way of thinking about the land and resources. Distinctions between "what is yours" and "what is mine" become increasingly important. It is extremely irritating to have someone help themselves to a resource which you have nurtured. Competition between groups (and competition within the group) creates an even greater need for centralization of decision making. The end result is that the relative equality of hunters and gatherers is replaced by some people making decisions for other people. Decision makers are both important and tend to see themselves as being important - something easily enough seen in our lives. These more complex communities with larger numbers of people, living lives coordinated to some extent by "important people" characterized the Middle Woodland.

An extremely important point to consider is that the changes described here did not take place in a stepping stone fashion but generally developed rather slowly over a long period of time. Different groups might be living rather different lifestyles simply because they were living in different environments. Some environments can be manipulated to support large numbers of people and other environments cannot.

Climatic variability can have profound impacts on peoples' lives and certain changes in technologies may make a world of difference. The domestication of plants meant that a lot of hard work had to be expended on the gardens, but that the returns were very much higher than could be expected from most natural environments. This in turn meant, among other things, that land upon which people were living as hunters and gatherers might support only one person per square mile or less. If a shift to agriculture were possible the land might support several hundred people per square mile when corn, for example, was being grown. Again the picture is complex but communities which grow their own food are generally much larger than those which do not. With more people the problems of maintaining order and of getting things done become much greater. Larger communities have more structure - political, economic, social, and ceremonial - than small communities. Again this is something readily seen by looking around the world in which we live and comparing the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis with the many smaller and smallest communities in the state. The smallest communities may not even have a school (although they probably have a church) let alone a hospital. In the communities of Minnesota prehistory the larger towns might have several ceremonial centers (churches) as well as a range of social positions. Some communities were fortified against attack by other groups. All communities had ties with other communities and thus access to a vast information network that may have been slow by modern standards but which served exactly the same functions as ours. Information networks were also economic networks and the archaeologist can reconstruct some of the networks by means of studying the materials being exchanged even though the information they carried cannot be known. Here in Minnesota, from the earliest times, information and trade items were exchanged over extensive networks which became increasingly complex and long-ranging as societies became more complex. From people sitting around a campfire and exchanging information to one another to trade and information networks extending to the Gulf of Mexico the story of people is always the story of information exchange.

It is that information, which anthropologists call culture, and our ability to receive it, to retain it, to process it, and to transmit it which makes us human.

At the top is a bone awl made from a leg bone (ulna) and used for working leather or making baskets. Below is a bone needle. Each of these is about three inches long.

Between ten to twelve thousand years ago the Ice Age was ending in Minnesota, and, as the glacier retreated and the forests and prairies returned, the first Indians began settling in this area. Relatively little is known of these people and that period. For one thing the people lived in small groups which seldom stayed in any one place for long, and, for another, there were not very many people. This is a far from ideal situation for the archaeologist whose work is further complicated by ten thousand years of erosion from the higher ground and deposition in the low spots. Thus hilltop sites are apt to be eliminated and camps in the valleys deeply buried under many feet of sediment.

A spear-thrower or atlatl was used to kill bison and other animals throughout the Americas.

Still, it is possible to present a reasonably accurate picture of life during that period which is known to archaeologists as the PaleoIndian Period, or more simply, as the Paleo. Although evidence from Minnesota is scarce, more is known about the PaleoIndians from neighboring states, and it is reasonable to assume that life was not particularly different here.

During the last Ice Age and immediately thereafter North America was well stocked with large animals such as the mammoth and mastodon as well as giant bison, horses, cameloids (animals related to camels), and a host of others now extinct. People first arrived in North America between twenty and thirty thousand years ago when, because so much of Earth's water was locked up in glaciers, ocean levels were as much as three hundred feet lower than they are today. Asia and North America were, in effect, one continent. People just walked in totally unaware that they were entering what was one day to become a separate continent.

What they did know was that there was excellent hunting, and hunting characterizes this entire period. Most sites which have been excavated from this era (none in Minnesota) are "kill sites" at which the PaleoIndians killed, butchered and consumed the animals which were their prey. Mammoths seem to have been a favorite, but then mammoth bones are, well, mammoth and more easily found by archaeologists and others. A PaleoIndian dinner of rabbit is not apt to attract anyone's attention.

This figure is a petroglyph (a figure pecked into a rock surface) from Jeffers, Minnesota and represents a bison being killed by a spear hurled from an atlatl.

Still the tools of their trade were designed for killing large animals. The trademark of these people is a projectile point, grooved on each side to facilitate hafting to a spear, which in turn was hurled by means of a spear thrower known to archaeologists by its Aztec name of atlatl. This arrangement enabled the hunters to strike an animal with considerable force and accuracy, and importantly, to keep some distance between themselves and what were some extremely dangerous animals.

Many kill sites were boggy areas into which the prey had been driven, and many of the animals were relatively young. These people probably ate elephant until they couldn't stand it, and then moved on. It probably was not such a bad life as long as there were more elephants to be hunted, but all that changed about ten thousand years ago when many of the more common Pleistocene animals became extinct. Whether humans were in part responsible for these extinctions is a matter of considerable controversy amongst archaeologists and paleontologists. When the mammoths were gone so was the PaleoIndian way of life. On the Great Plains big game hunting continued as the Indians shifted the focus of their hunting to bison. Elsewhere some profound changes were inevitable.

The Archaic, which began about ten thousand years ago, is the period which might be known as "the great settling down" or even the period of "digging in and making do." Most of the large animals associated with the Ice Age were either extinct or on their way out. Whereas the Plains Indians could continue to hunt the smaller modern bison, these bison were by no means a localized resource. The bison herds tended to move more or less constantly as grasses were consumed and they also tended to move seasonally over distances of hundreds of miles. This meant that the Plains Indians had to be equally mobile. By this time horses had become extinct in the New World and were not known until reintroduced by Europeans in the sixteenth century. Therefore everything had to be carried by the people themselves from camp to camp perhaps assisted by dogs fitted with an "A" shaped device known as the travois which could be loaded with camping gear. Travel was slow, hunting was undoubtedly often uncertain, and populations tended to stay quite small.

In much of the east there were few or no bison at all. Minnesota, however, has been part of the prairie/woodland edge - especially that part of Minnesota south and west of a line drawn from the northwest corner of the state to the southeast corner. The northeastern half of the state was largely forested and supported substantial numbers of deer, elk and moose; as well as large populations of beaver, raccoons, muskrats and rabbits. This part of the state also provided an abundance of fish and many species of edible plants.

What seems to have been happening was that people began to settle down in particular places for longer periods of time. They began to diversify their habits according to the availability of various resources. Some Archaic sites in the state contain large quantities of stone tools and the stone flakes which are associated with the manufacture of these tools - projectile points, knives, scrapers, drills and axes. The sheer quantity alone suggests prolonged occupation of certain favored sites, which, not surprisingly, were often near a body of water of some sort.

Despite the fact that people were probably somewhat less mobile they had contact with peoples living quite some distance away - often hundreds of miles. This we know because some of the stone used for various tools could only have come from specific areas. Hixton quartzite was mined at a quarry in Wisconsin and Knife River chalcedony was imported from west central North Dakota. Occasionally copper tools turn up in Minnesota, and these too were probably traded in from northern Wisconsin or the Upper Michigan Peninsula. Traded items of whatever kind represent not only the movement of goods from one place to another but also the transfer of information. In historic times trading was a very social occasion accompanied by lots of feasting and conversation, and there is no reason to think that it was any different back them.

The Archaic lasted until about three thousand years ago which means that for six to seven thousand years people pursued a hunting and gathering economy, and that during that time they became quite proficient in exploiting whatever resources might have been available in the areas in which they lived. They also maintained contacts with the outside world, so to speak, and as new ways of doing things were developed in one part of the country they might very well be tried out here. If the new way worked then it became part of the prevailing culture.

About three thousand years ago a cultural revolution which was taking place in the Ohio River valley began to make its presence felt in Minnesota. Indian populations along the Ohio had already begun to practice a home-grown form of gardening, called horticulture by archaeologists. What they were doing was developing some of the local plants and refining them - making them more productive. These were weedy species (such as rag weed, marsh elder, sunflowers, May grass and lambs-quarters), and they produced great quantities of seeds. Seeds, of course, equal energy, and more energy often means more people - who in turn need more energy. Among other things more people require more complex forms of governance, and this is usually associated with the development of ever more complex ceremonialism and craft forms. Some people become more influential than others, acquire more goods, require more services, and are accorded greater deference.

All of this is demonstrated clearly in the burials from this period as they become increasingly more complex. The more important members of the group were given elaborate funerals, and were buried with quantities of what must have been very expensive materials, often brought in from distant places, and placed in mounds of various sizes and shapes.

Some of this worked its way up the Mississippi and into Minnesota. Most notable from the point of view of the archaeologist was the introduction of pottery. Pottery is a tool used to make what might otherwise be inedible edible by cooking. Ceramics themselves probably did little to change existing lifestyles immediately, but as with many cultural elements the element exists only as part of a "cultural package." The ideas involved with pottery were accompanied by a host of other ideas - most of which will not turn up in an archaeologist's screen. Whereas people living further down the Mississippi were practicing gardening the people in Minnesota most assuredly were not. On the other hand the first mounds in Minnesota date from this time.

Woodland pottery was typically "conoidal" and finished with a surface roughened by means of a cord wrapped paddle.

Because ceramic forms tend to change from time to time and place to place, ceramics are invaluable to archaeologists who use them to attempt to identify particular cultures and to define the time periods during which they existed. Thus archaeologists have named one of the earlier cultures, which manufactured a distinctive form of ceramics, Fox Lake. Fox Lake ceramics are usually found near lakes in southern Minnesota.

The transition from Early to Middle Woodland is subtle, and is defined in terms of changes in ceramic forms and projectile point forms. The Ohio River Valley cultures, most notably the Hopewell, were still, in a sense, setting the pace. In Minnesota this shows up in ever more complex ceramics. Still there is little sign of gardening here, but traded items come from a wide variety of sources, and if goods were flowing fairly freely then so were ideas. The distinctive high mounds in St. Paul date to this period. Despite the complex cultural developments taking place from Illinois to Ohio, Minnesota was distinctively a hinterland. Large villages, complex mound groups, and a great elaboration of crafts were characteristic of the Ohio River peoples who were also developing a far greater dependence on agriculture. Corn was an increasingly important item in the Middle Woodland diet. Minnesota, like most areas north of the Ohio River, continued to maintain a less specialized set of cultures.

The Middle Woodland in the Ohio River Valley ended in disaster. Between 500 and 600 A.D. the entire system collapsed for reasons still being debated by archaeologists. What seems to have happened was that the climate took a turn for the worse and the agricultural economy could no longer support the larger and growing populations. Minnesota Indians, with smaller populations and little to no dependence on agriculture, suffered no such dramatic trauma. Instead the basic hunting and gathering economies had far greater resilience. Apparently the bow and arrow were added to the technological repertoire towards the end of the Middle Woodland. Thus sites from this period have not only more complex ceramics but also smaller, triangular projectile points which are the first true arrowheads. Because these arrowheads are considerably smaller than most of the preceding spear points sometimes they are erroneously referred to as "bird points." This they are not. They were used for all forms of hunting - including bison and for warfare.

Cultures further down the Mississippi were once again on the ascendancy. A multitude of cultural influences from Mexico and a return of a more benign climate resulted in the formation of a series of cultures known to archaeologists as Mississippian. Just as earlier cultures to the south had various impacts on the Indians in Minnesota so the story was repeated, and just as these earlier changes were muted by the comparative remoteness of this area so were these changes.

By 900 A.D., however, some Indians in southern Minnesota were beginning to plant corn - a variety which seems to have come from the south and may not have been very hardy in the often less hospitable Minnesota climate. Change was coming though, and from a number of different directions. The Late Woodland never disappeared from Minnesota until the area was overrun by EuroAmericans starting in the seventeenth century, but the Mississippian filtered in from a number of different directions. (The first corn in Minnesota)

At Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from present day St. Louis, a significant city was well established by about 1050 A.D.. At its peak it had a population of at least 30,000 people and perhaps as many as 40,000. It covered at least six square miles and had approximately one hundred mounds. The largest of these is now known as Monk's Mound and measures 700 by 1000 feet and is 100 feet tall. At one time Monk's Mound had a temple on its flat top and overlooked a large, palisaded plaza. Cahokia's influence extended from the East Coast to the Gulf Coast to the Plains and up the Missouri River to what is now the North Dakota and Montana border. Cahokia's economy was firmly based on agriculture - corn, beans and squashes. Although whether Cahokia was or was not a political capital (a source of considerable and often contentious debate among archaeologists) it was certainly a cultural capital, and events at Cahokia often had far reaching consequences. Many, many of the details of Cahokia's influences are still the subjects of intensive and extensive scholarship.

From central Wisconsin, across most of Iowa, and into eastern Nebraska a culture influenced by and related to the Cahokians has been given the name Oneota by modern archaeologists. There were once Oneota settlements in southeastern Minnesota, near the mouth of the Cannon River, and in the vicinity of Winnebago in south central Minnesota. These people were corn farmers, hunters and fishermen. They often lived in fairly large villages, and made a distinctive variety of pottery which instantly says "Oneota" to any archaeologist at all familiar with the culture. The earliest sites seem to date back to about a thousand years ago, and the latest may be as late as the sixteenth century. In Iowa and Missouri some of the sites were occupied by historic tribes, and it is generally agreed that the Oneota were ancestral to the Ioway and Oto.

The Oneota were not alone by any means. In western Iowa and southwestern Minnesota a culture known as the Great Oasis seems to have been transitional between Late Woodland and Mississippian. These Indians lived by hunting, gathering, fishing and farming. They also made pottery, which with its rounded forms and flaring rims, looks somewhat like Mississippian pottery, but in the grit mixed with the clay and the designs cut into the soft clay prior to firing it seems rooted in Woodland traditions. Most Mississippian pottery has a shell "temper" which means that the potters mixed ground mussel shells with the clay to reduce shrinkage and breaking as the vessels dried prior to firing. Woodland potters used grit made from pulverized granite and sometimes sand. The Indians of the Great Oasis culture (named, as is so often the case, for the name of the site at which the culture was first identified) raised enough corn to warrant the construction of "bell shaped" storage pits for their crops. These storage pits, narrower at the top than at the bottom, often served as garbage receptacles when they could no longer be used to store food. This makes such pits particularly interesting to archaeologists trying to understand the way of life of a culture which disappeared centuries ago.

How the Great Oasis peoples were related to the nearby Mill Creek Culture in northwestern Iowa is still a debated matter. There may well be some family connections there, but it will be a while before the matter is satisfactorily resolved. Mill Creek people lived in substantial villages and lived there long enough to leave some pretty substantial piles of earth and debris. These people were also gardeners as well as hunters, but were decidedly more influenced by the people living at Cahokia. This is reflected not only in the types of pottery and the designs used but also in some of the surviving artwork in shell and pipestone. Some of the shells came from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico and the pipestone from quarries in what is now Minnesota. Some time between 1300 and 1400 A.D. this culture seems to have left northwestern Iowa and taken up residence among the Missouri River in South Dakota. Here again details are hazy and more archaeology will provide more answers, but it seems that a long, droughty period set in and was influential in the abandonment of their villages.

Mississippian ceramic vessels. The vessel in the upper left corner is Oneota. the others are from the Cambria Focus in Blue Earth County, Minnesota. The vessel at the lower right is about ten inches wide.

On the Minnesota River between Mankato and New Ulm a group of Indians established one large village and at least two smaller ones at about the same time that Mill Creek Indians were living about a hundred miles to the west and south. These are called the Cambria Culture (or Cambria Focus) after the current village located near the sites. The inhabitants of these villages raised corn, sunflowers and squash. They also did a great deal of fishing in the river, gathered wild plants, and hunted along the river, in the nearby woods, and on the prairie. These people were in direct contact with the Mill Creek villagers and probably with Indians living in villages along the Missouri River in South Dakota. They also had contracts with the various people living at the mouth of the Cannon River near Red Wing.

Like the Great Oasis and Mill Creek people and their Woodland predecessors the Cambria potters used grit as temper, but Mississippian was clearly on their minds. Some pottery is clearly patterned after Cahokian design, much shows a Mill Creek influence and still otherpottery was patterned after that used by people living in the vicinity of Red Wing. Some designs, as might be expected, were unique to Cambria. As with the Oneota, some of whom were living just thirty miles or so to the south and with whom the Cambria people seemed to have little contact, Cambrians used flint from Grand Meadow (near Rochester) an chalcedony from North Dakota, but, for the most part, they used local stone - the oolitic chert found in the river gravels and in some of the bedrock exposed along the river. This stone is coarse but can be heat-treated to facilitate the manufacture of tools - primarily arrow heads and knives.

Why the proliferation of regional cultures during the Mississippian? Actually there had been many regional variations of Woodland cultures. Very possibly, as has been suggested, the Woodland cultures became "Mississippianized" just as previous Archaic cultures evolved into Woodland cultures. Certainly one of the elements that made the Mississippian possible in Minnesota was the introduction of a new type of corn, which we know today as Northern Flint. This corn grows more rapidly and matures earlier than southern flints. It also is tough enough to withstand a fair amount of drought - always a problem on the edge of the Great Plains. It was an unusually reliable crop and enabled populations to grow and proliferate. It also enabled people to settle down in villages or, perhaps it was the other way around, and it forced people to settle down so that they could better tend their gardens. Whatever process was occurring the result was that people did settle down, built villages which may have housed as many as a few hundred people, and stayed put for at least a couple hundred years in some areas.

Something happened, exactly what remains to be discovered, but when the first Europeans arrived in this area in the 18th century they found no Indians with gardens and villages in southern Minnesota. Climatic change - for the worse - may well have been a good part of the problem. Yet the Oneota and perhaps some others may have continued to live here until the 16th century and perhaps later. By the time the Europeans arrived the world of the Indians was undergoing the first of a series of shocks which would ultimately all but eliminate it. These shocks were caused by the Europeans themselves. Some were intentional, and others were inadvertent. Most deadly was disease. Epidemic diseases had raged, and would continue to rage, across the continent from the time of the arrival of the first Europeans. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Indians died as a result of these epidemics.

In Minnesota the Chippewa invaded the northern half of the state, having themselves been displaced by other Indians from their homeland generally north of the Great Lakes. The Dakota were driven from their territory around Mille Lacs Lake, and moved south and west from the area. Some moved into the northern Great Plains - the Lakota or Teton - and others into southern Minnesota - the Dakota or Santee.

Within a hundred years the entire region was being settled by people who were not Indians, and who practiced an entirely different way of life. Indian cultures were encapsulated on reservations and ways of life which had evolved over thousands of years were irrevocably changed. History records the tumultuous and lopsided demise of much of Indian culture. Prehistory records the more than ten thousand years during which these cultures developed.

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Michael Scullin, Professor of Anthropology
Mankato State University 1987/1990/1992/1996