Project to chart UW effigy mounds, archaeology
For at least 6,000 years, the elegant stone tool — the size and shape of a small, fat cigar — lay in obscurity on Picnic Point.
The loss of the black basalt adze, as the tool is known to archaeologists, was no doubt mourned by its owner, who likely used the finely edged tool to shape wood into the necessities of everyday existence. Its discovery on the campus, however, was but one more shred of evidence that the shores of Lake Mendota have long been a popular place to live and work.
The map above shows the location of effigy mounds on campus.
The 900-acre campus is a trove of history, says Daniel Einstein, the university’s environmental management coordinator and a leader of a new effort to help UW–Madison get a better bearing on a legacy of human habitation that predates Moses by thousands of years.
The area the university now encompasses, according to Einstein, has probably been visited and inhabited by humans since the end of the last ice age, when a shifting climate forced the retreat of the vast sheets of ice that covered much of the continent.
Evidence abounds that what is now UW–Madison occupied an important place in history. Effigy mounds, cemeteries and ancient camps make up no fewer than 22 archaeological sites on campus and in the Arboretum. The area around Picnic Point alone has five known sites. And, according to Einstein, no other university in the world has the number and variety of effigy mounds and earthworks found here.
Funded by a $10,000 Evjue Foundation grant, the project that Einstein directs is surveying the university’s archaeological heritage. It is developing signs and an interpretive map so that the legacy can be more accessible to campus visitors and the university community.
The goal is to develop an interpretive package that provides a feel for the ancient landscape and how it was peopled, Einstein says. “There is this larger historical context that we want to share,” he says.
For example, an interpretive sign would be posted on Observatory Hill, near the campus’s best-known effigy mounds. From that vantage point, says Einstein, is a clear view across University Bay to Picnic Point.
“People can try to visualize what made this landscape attractive for human habitation and how that changed over 12,000 years,” Einstein explains, noting that for much of its existence, Picnic Point was part of a vast oak savanna. “One of the things we want to point out to people is that what you see now isn’t what it looked like in the past.”
What it did look like to humans during thousands of years was an ideal place to camp. “This is a unique feature. There is nothing else like this (peninsula) in the Four Lakes area,” observes George Christiansen, the project archaeologist from Great Lakes Archaeological Research Center. “There was plenty of room to set up camp. It is an eminently defendable position, and it was a good place to be in the event of a prairie fire, a not uncommon occurrence in pre-Columbian North America.
“Based on what we’ve seen so far archaeologically, this was a very attractive place for people to live,” Christiansen adds.
Christiansen, a doctoral dissertator in the Department of Anthropology, has conducted several surveys of archaeological sites and mound systems on campus. As the campus continues to grow and develop, the surveys will help planners work around these culturally important features.
Expected to be completed this fall, the project may be woven into a larger effort to create an “effigy mound grand tour” in southeastern and western Wisconsin. That effort is being coordinated through a private not-for-profit group, Cultural Landscape Legacies, with representatives from state, federal and private organizations including the Ho-Chunk Nation, the National Park Service, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the Lower Wisconsin Riverway Board and private citizens.
“We are in a unique position to preserve some of this history,” says Einstein. “At some level, there is a connection between the way others have made monuments and used this land, and the way we use it now.”
It is this common thread, he suggests, that will provide a much more visceral link between the distant past and the present.
Tags: research