Identity, Ideology, and the Effigy Mound–Oneota Transformation

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Volume 95, Number 2July–December 2014

THE WISCONSINARCHEOLOGIST

ISSN 0043-6364

ContentsEditors’ Corner

Constance M. Arzigian, Katherine P. Stevenson, and Vicki L. Twinde-Javner ................................................................................................ 3

Archaeology, Zooarchaeology, and Malacology: A Festschrift for James L. ThelerGuest Editor, Matthew G. Hill

A Festschrift for James L. Theler: An Introduction Matthew G. Hill .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 4

Mentoring Jim: David A. Baerreis from an Oklahoma PerspectiveDon G. Wyckoff ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 18

Lunch with JTRobert F. (Ernie) Boszhardt .............................................................................................................................................................................. 31

Identity, Ideology, and the Effi gy Mound–Oneota TransformationWilliam Green ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 44

Dating the Nebraska Variant of the Central Plains Tradition Joseph A. Tiffany and Stephen C. Lensink ....................................................................................................................................................... 73

The Swennes Site: A Winter Oneota Occupation in La Crosse, Wisconsin Constance Arzigian ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 125

Upper Valley Dalton at the Sucices Site in Northwest WisconsonJohn M. Lambert ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 152

Changing Narratives at Perrot’s Post near Trempealeau, WisconsinJeremy L. Nienow............................................................................................................................................................................................ 158

The Theler Approach to Faunal Analysis, and Its Application to Oneota ResearchKatherine P. Stevenson ................................................................................................................................................................................... 166

Review of Bison Remains at Wisconsin Oneota SitesRobert F. Sasso ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 173

Bison Scapulae from Hoxie Farm, Illinois: Perspectives on Upper Mississippian Subsistence and Regional InteractionTerrance J. Martin .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 185

A Sandhill Crane Eggshell Fragment from Brogley Rockshelter, Grant County, WisconsinJanet M. Speth and Thomas Erdman .............................................................................................................................................................. 197

The Nye Site, Wisconsin: The Search for Early Man in the Upper Midwest, Investigative Incursions, and PaleozoologyMatthew G. Hill, Marlin F. Hawley, Christopher C. Widga, Laura A. Halverson Monahan, and Alan D. Wanamaker, Jr. ...................... 200

Alluvial Stratigraphy in an Unnamed Western Tributary, Ash Hollow State Park, NebraskaDavid W. May, David J. Rapson, and Matthew G. Hill ................................................................................................................................ 239

Ecology and Environmental Degradation of Two Little Ice Age Earthlodge Villages in North Dakota: The Micromammal EvidenceHolmes A. Semken, Jr., and Carl R. Falk ....................................................................................................................................................... 249

Holocene Range Extension of Pronghorn into the Southern Prairie PeninsulaR. Bruce McMillan ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 269

Freshwater Mussels from the Liverpool Landing Site, Illinois: Paleoenvironmental Modeling, Community Dynamics, and Novel Ideas for Home Decor Robert E. Warren ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 284

CommentJean Nicolet (Again): Comment on Ronald J. Mason’s “Where Nicolet and Winnebagoes First Met”

Nancy Oestreich Lurie and Patrick J. Jung .................................................................................................................................................... 303

THE WISCONSIN ARCHEOLOGISTVolume 95, Number 2 July–December 2014

Copyright © 2014 by the Wisconsin Archeological Society. All rights reserved.Published by the Wisconsin Archeological Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Archaeology, Zooarchaeology, and Malacology:A Festschrift for James L. Theler

Guest EditorMatthew G. Hill

Abstract

The ages and cultural affi liations of the effi gy mounds of the Upper Midwest have been pondered and discussed for nearly 200 years. Effi gy Mound culture history and eco-nomic strategies are fairly well understood, but the nature of the connections between Effi gy Mound and succeeding groups is clouded. Oral traditions of some of the presumed descendants—Ho-Chunk and Chiwere people—seem in-compatible with both Effi gy Mound and Oneota archaeol-ogy. The demise of effi gy mound building was coeval with the spread of Mississippian ideology via ritual adoption into fi ctive-kin networks and connection to the Cahokian “found-ers cult.” This process fostered appropriation of Mississip-pian mythology and accounts for the seeming incongruity between oral traditions and archaeology. It also shows that the cultural affi liation of the effi gy mound builders cannot be determined because the Effi gy Mound–Oneota transfor-mation involved establishment of new ideologies, relations of production, and identities.

Introduction

Cultural affi liation—defi ned in federal statute as “a relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced historically or prehistorically between a present day Indian tribe… and an identifi -able earlier group” (25 USC 3001 (2))—has long been a focus of study in North American archaeology. For instance, Strong (1935) and Wedel (1938) developed and applied the Direct Historical Approach for the express purpose of linking known tribal groups to archaeological complexes. Yet even earlier, archaeolo-gists and antiquarians attempted to understand the historical meanings of North American mounds and other ancient features by assessing their apparent links

to the Indian peoples of the day. Those early efforts at making historical connections are of importance to current work on cultural affi liation because they have set the conscious and unconscious frameworks within or against which we develop our current approaches.

In this article, I review past and current interpre-tations of the ages and cultural affi liations of the effi gy mounds of the Upper Midwest. I address some prob-lems associated with establishing direct historical rela-tionships between the effi gy mound builders and suc-ceeding groups. I then examine ideology, ritual, and oral tradition as a way of attaining an understanding of these relationships and as a contribution to research on Effi gy Mound cultural affi liations.

The Nineteenth Century

Throughout the nineteenth century, debates fl ared regarding the builders of the North American mounds: were the mound builders ancestors of the Indians or were they members of a lost race, perhaps driven to extinction by the Indians (Birmingham and Eisenberg 2000; Kennedy 1994; Mallam 1976a; Silver-berg 1968)? This was, of course, a critical question, but Western thinkers had to resolve a more signifi cant conceptual dilemma even before questions of mound authorship arose. In the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-turies, Europeans struggled to reconcile the cultural and geographical facts of the New World with an epis-temology that precluded non-Biblical explanations of natural and human phenomena (Huddleston 1967). Those fi rst centuries of contact saw perhaps “the most signifi cant clash of Long-Held and Cherished Beliefs with the Inexplicable and Unwelcome New in human history”—on both the European and Native sides (Henige 1982:398). By the nineteenth century, the facts

The Wisconsin Archeologist, 2014, 95(2):44–72

William Green, Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin

William Green

Identity, Ideology, and theEffi gy Mound–Oneota Transformation

of Indian existence had been explained by a variety of means, including common attribution to the Lost Tribes of Israel (Wauchope 1962). Therefore, when confronted with the extensive time depth suggested by the mounds, many Americans, including the earli-est surveyors of effi gy mounds, were able to believe Indians had built the mounds, although they believed the mound-building Indians clearly belonged to antiq-uity and probably were not directly related to the con-temporary Indians of the region. Because many writ-ers saw the Indians as descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, mound-building was viewed as compatible with those ancient societies’ undoubted sophistica-tion, even though the practice had been abandoned by nearly all contemporary Indians.

During much of the nineteenth century, how-ever, the question of mound-builder identity became too important to be answered by vague allusions to long-gone Indians. The issue of who had occupied and modifi ed the ancient American landscape—Indian or non-Indian, and if non-Indian, then who?—developed into a national debate that spurred intense study of mounds as well as much speculation. Some writers believed in the mounds’ Indian origin. But in an atmo-sphere shaped by the ideology of Manifest Destiny and the practice of Indian removal, a non-Indian ori-gin of the mounds constituted an appealing national myth. If the Indians had driven the Mound Builders to extinction, so much the better, for it proved the incom-patibility of Indians with “civilized” society (e.g., Mal-lam 1976a; Silverberg 1968).

During the search for the mound builders, effi gy mounds of the Upper Midwest received nearly as much attention as the geometric earthworks and mon-umental earthen architecture of the Ohio Valley. Their “emblematic” shapes begged for interpretation, and nineteenth-century authors embraced the challenge. A sampling of this literature shows that attempts at understanding the origins and meanings of effi gy mounds ranged from the rational to the bizarre and racist. Despite the prevailing and profound uncertain-ty of the possible antiquity of the human presence in North America and thus of the ages of the mounds, the more serious of the mid-nineteenth century think-ers still attempted to address the question in ways we would deem thoughtful or scientifi c.

Many authors sought native viewpoints on the mounds. Perhaps the earliest recorded native explana-tion of Wisconsin mounds was that reported by fron-tier traveler Pliny Warriner. Finding himself among a small group of Ho-Chunks1 in 1828, Warriner watched them ascend the highest mound of a “series of regu-larly ranged mounds, conveying to a distant eye the appearance of a formal town” (Warriner 1855:88). This

mound group was situated along the shore of a lake, probably Lake Butte des Morts in eastern Wisconsin. The elderly Ho-Chunk leader reportedly told War-riner that no Ho-Chunk had “ever disclosed to the whites the origin of the mounds you see around us” (Warriner 1855:88). After describing a battle between the Ho-Chunks and the Meskwakis, he said, “The mounds you see were raised, each over the grave of some renowned chief, who fell in the great battle here” (Warriner 1855:92). The battle to which the Ho-Chunk elder referred probably occurred in the 1600s or early 1700s (Zimmerman et al. 2001:50–51), and the tradition is responsible for the lake’s toponym. A similar tradition stated that the two large mounds at Butte des Morts “were erected over the bodies of Fox warriors who had been killed in a battle with the Iro-quois” (West 1907:177), probably in the 1600s or 1700s. Indians therefore reportedly attributed these eastern Wisconsin conical mounds to historical events of the preceding 100–200 years and, at least in part, to non-Ho-Chunks. (See Hawley 2014 for site details.)

The Ioway Indians supplied another of the very few recorded early-nineteenth-century native descrip-tions of midwestern mounds. An 1836 Ioway land claim petition stated, as proof that the tribe had lived in the region for hundreds of years:

Search at the mouth of the Upper Ioway Riv-er, (which has been the name of their Nation time out of mind) there see their dirt lodges, or Houses, the Mounds and remains of which are all plain to be seen, even at this day… [Blaine 1979:164].

Large, conical burial mounds resemble earth lodg-es of the Plains in outward form. The Ioway statement thus seems to identify conical mounds as earth lodge locations. Yet archaeological evidence shows that (1) conical mounds served mortuary, not domestic, func-tions, and (2) the Ioways lived in longhouses, not earth lodges, when they lived in the Upper Mississippi Val-ley (Hollinger 1997). Interestingly, the Ho-Chunks claim to have built earth lodges in Wisconsin as late as 1860 (Radin 1911:531–532), although no archaeologi-cal evidence has been found, and the Ioways lived in the 1830s in the Missouri Valley among tribes who had built earth lodges for many generations, and they may have built such dwellings themselves at that time. Both the 1828 Ho-Chunk explanation and the 1836 Ioway petition thus indicate that mounds, particu-larly conical mounds, fostered Ho-Chunk–Chiwere2 identifi cation with signifi cant landscape features and events, even though the actual ages and functions of the mounds were interpreted in recent and familiar terms.

45Vol. 95, No. 2 The Wisconsin Archeologist

Other early to mid-nineteenth century documents report no mound-related legends or native explana-tions of any kind for the mounds. William Keating, traveling just west of Chicago in 1823 with Major Ste-phen Long’s expedition into the upper Mississippi River, observed oval mounds on the bluffs overlooking the Fox River. He reported that the resident natives had no “recollection or tradition” of the mounds’ construc-tion. The expedition’s French guide, “who had lived for upwards of thirty years with the Indians, [and] had taken a wife among the Winnebagoes,” informed them that the Indians “believed, upon the authority of the missionaries, that these mounds were of antediluvian origin, and probably erected as places of retreat for their families in time of war” (Keating 1824:172, 177). In Wisconsin, and concerning the effi gy mounds in par-ticular, John Locke reported in 1839 that “the present aborigines are as ignorant as ourselves” in respect to the origin of those mounds (Locke 1844:168). Likewise, Richard Taylor quoted a published report, probably from 1837 or early 1838, as stating that in regard to the mounds that resemble “lizards, turtles, buffaloes, and even human forms,” the present Indians are “entirely unable to give any account of these remains, or to fur-nish the slightest tradition regarding the ancient pos-sessors of the soil” (Taylor 1838:95–96).

Still, despite their inability to fi nd Indian tradi-tions regarding the mounds, Taylor and others (e.g., Keating 1824:185) referred to Midwestern mounds as “Indian mounds,” although they believed the mounds were built in an ancient era by Indians not directly related to those who still lived in the region. Taylor saw in the effi gy mounds a refl ection of the tendency among Indians and, indeed, all peoples, to use animals and animal shapes as badges or symbols of achieve-ment or, more commonly, of group identity. View-ing “these ancient memorials of a by-gone people” as “commemorative of the dead,” Taylor thought that effi gy mounds “may have served in some way to des-ignate the respective tribes or branches to which the deceased, in whose honor the structures were reared, belonged” (Taylor 1838:100). Admitting that he had no “positive evidence to show, that any existing tribes or branches… actually did erect monuments of earth in the shape of animals whose names they bear,” he noted that the widespread Indian use of animals such as the fox, turtle, bear, and birds to designate subdivisions (“branches”: bands or clans), could be found among “the Winnebagos, like the Algonquin, and other tribes” (Taylor 1838:104). Taylor believed the “ancient” and “by-gone” Indians who built the mounds also maintained such tribal subdivisions and that the burial mounds “which resemble certain ani-mal fi gures, were in fact designed as representations

of those national or family badges, and consequently pointed out the burial place of the members of those particular tribes” (Taylor 1838:104).

Several other writers of the era also espoused this viewpoint. For example, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who conducted decades of research among and about Indians, believed fi rmly that the ancient American mounds had been built by ancestors of the Indians, not by a lost race (Silverberg 1968:105). Schoolcraft knew of no Indian traditions regarding the effi gy mounds specifi cally, but he endorsed the essential commem-orative-totemic interpretation Taylor had expressed. Regarding the purpose of effi gy mounds, Schoolcraft wrote:

Their connection with the existing Totemic system of the Indians who are yet on the fi eld of action is too strong to escape attention…. A tribe could leave no more permanent trace of an esteemed sachem or honored individual than by the erection of one of these monuments. They are clearly sepulchural, and have no other object, but to preserve the names of distinguished actors in their history. The FOX, the BEAR, the WOLF, and the EAGLE, are clearly recognizable in the devices published [Schoolcraft 1851:52-53, emphasis in original].

Mound surveyor Stephen Taylor also asked Indians about the mounds. Receiving no satisfactory answers, he reported on

… the fact of the non-existence of tradition among the present generation of the Indian race, by which we can have the least hope of unrav-eling the mystery [of the mounds’ origin]. This matter I have made a subject of inquiry when-ever meeting with an intelligent, communicative Indian, and I have found that the various tribes which inhabit this section of country, express total ignorance on the subject of the origin of the mounds; some however are impressed with a belief, founded upon their superstitious notions, that those in the form of animals were construct-ed by the “great Manitou”—that they are indica-tive of plentiful supplies of game in the world of spirits; they are, therefore, looked upon with reverence, and are seldom molested by them. Tribes and even bands differ in their conjectures with regard to them [Taylor 1843:22].

He declined to give a “conclusive opinion” on the mounds, “as there have already been too many wild speculations” (Taylor 1843:40). He determined that the mound question, while one of “Indian archeology,” was a mystery: “We know not whence they came—we know not where nor how they have departed. A people has passed—a nation has gone away—their

46 GreenIdentity, Ideology, and the Effi gy Mound–Oneota Transformation

history we know not, nor the history of their works” (Taylor 1843:40).3

Pioneering Wisconsin scientist Increase Lapham likewise could obtain no answers from Indians regard-ing mound origins or meanings. However, he was not surprised that he encountered no evidence of tradi-tions regarding the mounds among Wisconsin Indians since he concluded they “had no traditions running back as far as” the 1600s (1855:90). Lapham perceived many types of links between the mound builders and the Indians of his era, convincing him that “the mound-builders of Wisconsin were none others than the ancestors of the present tribes of Indians” (Lapham 1855:90). Still, he believed a great span of time might have elapsed since most of the mounds were built, and he suggested that the Indians who built most of the mounds might “have emigrated, or been driven off by others having no veneration for their ancient monu-ments” (1855:89). This viewpoint, compatible with the interpretations of Keating, the Taylors, and School-craft, differs importantly from the Lost Race myth in its attribution of the mounds to Indians, albeit ancient or departed Indians. Lapham’s, Schoolcraft’s, and the Taylors’ conclusions are in fact compatible with cur-rent beliefs that mound-building societies of 1,000 or 2,000 years ago represent different Indian cultures than those of today’s Indian groups, even if ideologi-cal similarities or links of other kinds exist.

Soon after Lapham’s monograph was published, Samuel Haven (1856) considered the broad questions of the nature of North America’s prehistoric inhabit-ants and the authorship of American antiquities. His encyclopedic coverage of the literature led him to conclude that the ancient Americans had entered the continent from Asia in remote times, “before the exist-ing institutions and national divisions of the parent country were developed,” precluding the possibility that they could represent the Lost Tribes of Israel or some other Old World civilization. Archaeology as well as linguistics and physical anthropology (“philo-logical and physiological” investigations) proved to Haven that “the American races are of great antiquity. Their religious doctrines, their superstitions, both in their nature and in their modes of practice, and their arts, accord with those of the most primitive age of mankind” (Haven 1856:158, 159). To Haven, it was fully plausible to attribute the mounds in general to ancestors of Indians rather than to lost races (Mal-lam 1976a:158–159), although even he was baffl ed by the effi gy mounds, noting their origin was “involved in equal obscurity” as the Ohio earthworks (Haven 1856:158).

Haven’s, Lapham’s, and Schoolcraft’s works—thoroughly researched and thoughtful, cautious in

their conclusions, and disseminated by prestigious publishers—had little apparent effect on the national Mound Builder debate. Other mid-nineteenth century writers spun Lost Race yarns of great mass appeal during that era of Indian removal and Indian wars (Mallam 1976a; Silverberg 1968). The popular litera-ture abounded with Lost Race speculations. William Pidgeon’s Traditions of De-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Researches (1853) was especially infl uential and is of particular relevance to the effi gy mounds (see Sil-verberg 1968:135-151). Not only does Pidgeon’s book include ostensible maps of many effi gy mound sites, but it purports to interpret the history of the effi gy mound builders on the basis of oral tradition supplied directly to the author. Pidgeon believed that:

it does not appear possible that any better key [to the mound-builders’ history] can be obtained than that afforded by tradition. The successors of the mound-builders, either more or less remote-ly, were the North American Indians. Through them, it should be possible to discover any tra-ditionary history. There might be a dim and uncertain, but still a welcome light thrown into the darkness of that oblivion which has hitherto enveloped the men who built the great works of the Scioto, Miami, and Mississippi valleys. And such traditions do exist [Pidgeon 1853:5–6].

Pidgeon reported that in the 1830s and 1840s he visited around 400 mounds in the Upper Mississippi Valley, digging into many mounds of all sorts in what is now Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. He appar-ently took no care to make accurate maps or descrip-tions of the sites or their contents. Nearly all of Pid-geon’s effi gy mound maps and site-specifi c data were discredited by subsequent workers who tried to but could not confi rm the existence of most of Pidgeon’s sites or who found Pidgeon’s maps and descrip-tions to be grossly inaccurate and misleading (Finney 2006:75–79, 2008; Lewis 1886; Peet 1893:xix).

It was the history of the mound-builders that Pidgeon supposedly obtained from De-coo-dah that formed the core of his book and the basis for his spec-ulations on effi gy mounds and on the ancient history of the Mississippi Valley. Pidgeon stated that he had recorded stories and obtained explanations of mound types from an individual named De-coo-dah, to whom he was introduced in 1840 by the notable Ho-Chunk leader Waukon Decorah near Capoli Bluff, in Allama-kee County, Iowa. De-coo-dah’s stories concerned an ancient mound-builder nation, the Elk Nation, and its migrations, battles with other peoples, spin-off groups, and ultimate demise. De-coo-dah reportedly identifi ed for Pidgeon various functions for mound building, including effi gy mound construction. As


Hoy, like Lapham and the Taylors before him, argued that “the ‘mound-builders’ were Indians and nothing but Indians, the immediate ancestors of the present tribes as well as many other Indians that formerly were scattered across this country” (Hoy 1885:100). Echoing Lapham, he reasoned that the lack of Indian tradition regarding the mounds did not mean the mounds must have been built by some lost race. Instead, the fact that Indians did not claim to have built the mounds dif-fered little from their reportedly widespread assertion that “they had never made fl int arrowheads, stone axes or pottery, and that these things must have been made by some one else” (Hoy 1885:90). To Hoy, such claims indicated simply the limits of oral tradition, not the presence of a former race of Mound Builders.

Ethnographic accounts of Sioux and Ho-Chunk ceremonies at this time, while revealing nothing spe-cifi cally about effi gy mounds, fueled later suggestions of a Ho-Chunk–effi gy mound connection. Working among Sioux and Ho-Chunk people in the early 1880s, Alice Fletcher recorded the construction of tiny fl at-topped mounds as part of sacred dances. Fletcher noted that the Buffalo dance of the Ho-Chunk, held during the War-bundle feast, was held within a long, narrow shelter or “dance tent.”

As the dancers enter, each woman brings in a handful of fi ne earth and in this way two mounds are raised in the centre at the east, that is between the eastern entrance and the fi re, which is about fi fteen feet from the eastern entrance. The mounds thus formed are truncated cones. An old man said to me “That is the way all mounds were built; that is why we build so for the buffalo.”

The mounds were about four inches high and not far from eighteen inches in diameter. On top of the two mounds were placed the head-gear worn by the men, the claws, tails and other articles used by the four leaders, or male dancers [Fletcher 1884:396].

Another small mound was created when the ashes from the fi re were “raised in a sharp conical mound.” To Fletcher, these small mounds “remind one of larger structures and suggest many speculations… suggest-ing hints of a peculiar past” (Fletcher 1884:397). Fletch-er never saw these mounds made in effi gy shapes, however (West 1907:251).

Stephen D. Peet not only saw direct links between Indians and mounds, he also argued in favor of a specifi c connection between Siouan peoples and effi gy mounds. Adapting Cyrus Thomas’s core ques-tion about mounds in general (Thomas 1887b:15), Peet asked, “Were the emblematic Mound Builders,

De-coo-dah (conveniently) was the only living person with traditions of the Elk Nation, it was not possible for any other researcher to contest the stories or the history.

The lesson Pidgeon drew from the Elk Nation’s history surely resonated with many Lost-Race enthusi-asts: he attributed “the extinction of the mound-build-ers” to “an unnatural amalgamation of distinct races” (Pidgeon 1853:325) and professed that similar results ensue from race-mixing everywhere. In a classic appli-cation of the Lost-Race ideology, Pidgeon was able to honor the ancient civilization that built the mounds by recording its history from its last surviving descen-dant. This history not only accounted for everything about the mounds but also ascribed the civilized Elk Nation’s passing to the Indians who had themselves just been removed from the mound district.

Although Pidgeon’s book was popular, it received no scholarly approbation for a generation. However, historians began citing it in the 1870s and 1880s, lead-ing T. H. Lewis to challenge and discount the stories De-coo-dah allegedly told to Pidgeon, just as he dis-puted Pidgeon’s archaeological information:

I have visited and critically examined other localities described by our author [Pidgeon] in south-western Wisconsin and north-eastern Iowa, and in addition have made many inqui-ries, of old settlers, concerning him and his claims. At Trempeleau [sic], Wisconsin, I talked with the daughter of his one-time host, the Ken-tuckian who had a squaw wife. The result of all my researches in this respect is to convince me that the Elk nation and its last prophet De-coo-dah are modern myths, which have never had any objective existence; and that, consequently, the ancient history in the volume is of no more account than that of the Lost Tribes in the Book of Mormon [Lewis 1886:69].

Lewis was among the most careful and consci-entious of the region’s nineteenth-century mound researchers. His inability to confi rm Pidgeon’s stories and mound data cast a signifi cant pall over any fur-ther scholarly use of Pidgeon’s work, including the interpretations of effi gy mounds as historical records of the Elk Nation.

“By 1880 the Mound Builder myth had reached its zenith” in popular American consciousness (Mal-lam 1976a:162; see also Silverberg 1968). But during the 1880s, with the Smithsonian Institution issuing preliminary reports on its mound survey (Thomas 1887a, 1887b), sober mound researchers reaffi rmed their belief in Indian authorship of the mounds, albeit Indians who were more industrious than the modern tribes. For example, Wisconsin antiquarian Philo R.


toward Indians, Peet did not shed his unwillingness to see any particular modern tribe or tribes within the Dakota “stock” as the effi gy mound builders:

We are convinced that great changes have occurred since the mound-building age. If the ancestors of the Indians were the Mound-build-ers, as many claim that they were [and as Peet argued in the preceding 23 pages of his book], the Indians have degenerated and their former state may be better learned from the study of the effi gies than from the tribes that are still living [Peet 1893:398].

Although Peet could not identify any specifi c descendants of the effi gy mound builders, he was able to recognize what he believed were particular clans and clan territories on the basis of the distribution of predominant mound forms. Using Thomas’s (1891) Wisconsin mound distribution map as a base map, Peet divided the effi gy mound region into 13 zones, each supposedly dominated by a particular mound form (Peet 1893:396–398). The southwestern Driftless Area and adjacent Clayton County, Iowa, for example, was deemed the Bear mound (and, thus, Bear clan) territory. North of the Wisconsin River, the Allama-kee, Crawford, and Vernon County region was identi-fi ed as that of the Swallow (swept-wing bird effi gy) mound and clan. Clan territories often coincided with river valleys. Peet recognized that the clan archetype was not the exclusive mound type within a territory, but he was convinced that through study of prevailing mound forms he had identifi ed the territories of each of the clans that composed the effi gy mound “tribe.” Subsequent research considering mound form and distribution as well as artifact style and raw material confi rms the existence of socially meaningful local and regional variability (Boszhardt and Goetz 2000; Claut-er 2012; Rosebrough 2010).

The Smithsonian Institution’s mound survey report, compiled by Cyrus Thomas, was the most conclusive and infl uential of the nineteenth-century efforts to identify the mound builders. By conduct-ing his work expressly to test the Lost Race theory, by crushing that theory through amassing evidence of Indian authorship of the mounds, and by publishing his results widely (Thomas 1887a, 1887b, 1891, 1894), Thomas and his colleagues changed how most Ameri-cans thought about mounds and Indians: “The links directly connecting the Indians and mound-builders are so numerous and well established that archaeolo-gists are justifi ed in accepting the theory that they are one and the same people” (Thomas 1894:17). Tim-ing is everything, though. By 1890, the frontier was essentially closed and Indians “no longer represented

Indians?” and replied, “The answer to this depends upon the defi nition which we give to the terms… What Mound Builders and what Indians?” (Peet 1893:148–149). For example, Peet believed that the huge Ohio earthworks had been built by people unre-lated to the “rude, uncultivated people… incapable of erecting these works,” who lived in that area in recent times. But the same was not true of the effi gy mound builders:

…the people who erected them were so simi-lar in their habits and modes of life to the tribes which occupied the region at the opening of his-tory, that we have no hesitation in saying that they were hunters as well as agriculturalists, and that the hunting habits of the later races furnish good illustrations of the customs which pre-vailed among them [Peet 1893:149].

The effi gies were undoubtedly imitations of the wild animals which were once common in the region but they are at the same time totemic in their character and may be supposed to repre-sent many things in the clan life of the people [Peet 1893:vii].

Peet cited approvingly the clan-symbol (“totem”) theory of Richard Taylor for the effi gies (Peet 1893:xviii) and concluded his book on effi gy mounds with a “Comparison of the Effi gy-Builders with the Modern Indians.” This treatment considered: (1) the spatial extent of effi gy mounds and historic tribes, (2) the religious systems of the effi gy mound build-ers and historic tribes, (3) similarities between effi gies as “picture-writing” and historic tribes’ pictographic record-keeping, and (4) “clan habitats” of the effi gy mound builders in relation to those of modern tribes. Undoubtedly infl uenced by James Owen Dorsey’s arti-cles on Siouan languages, myths, and migrations he had published in his journal The American Antiquarian (e.g., Dorsey 1883), Peet concluded that the Ho-Chunk and other Dakota-related tribes evinced connections with the effi gy mound builders in all four respects. He distinguished the Dakota tribes’ history and practices from those of the Algonquian tribes, concluding that it is “probable that this wide-spread stock [i.e., Dakota] were the actual effi gy builders” (Peet 1893:376). Peet used the term Dakota to refer at least to people who spoke languages of the Chiwere-Winnebago, Dhegiha, and Mississippi Valley Sioux subgroups of the Siouan language group (Parks and Rankin 2001), which are among the apparent descendants of the Proto-Central Siouan language (Springer and Witkowski 1982; Syms 1982). Peet’s “Dakota” thus would include at least 14 Siouan-speaking tribes. Yet because of the mounds’ evident antiquity and because of prevailing attitudes


and his teams, and (2) heightened ethnographic inter-est in Wisconsin Indians. The consensus reached dur-ing that era was more specifi c than Peet’s and Thomas’ conclusions. Rather than attributing the effi gy mounds to the general Siouan “stock,” early twentieth-century researchers, most notably Paul Radin, favored specifi c identifi cation of the Ho-Chunks as the effi gy mound builders. Birmingham and Eisenberg (2000) provide details on the research and interpretations that led to these conclusions, so I supply only a brief summary here.

Publius V. Lawson’s comprehensive study of Ho-Chunk history, upon which Radin and others relied, had noted as late as 1907 that the Ho-Chunks and Dakotas apparently had no tradition of effi gy mound construction and that the Ho-Chunk “when questioned could give no information” concerning the effi gy mounds (Lawson 1907:160). Soon thereafter, however, other researchers published infl uential papers favoring Ho-Chunk authorship of the effi gy mounds (Brown 1911; Radin 1911, 1923; Stout 1910, 1911; West 1907). A later contribution by Densmore (1928) also belongs to this group. These writers concluded for four reasons that the Ho-Chunks built the effi gy mounds (Birming-ham and Eisenberg 2000): (1) ethnographic evidence of burial ceremonies indicating that the Algonquian new-comers to Wisconsin did not build effi gy mounds, and since the Dakota had left the region in the early Histor-ic period, that left the Ho-Chunk as the effi gy builders by default; (2) general geographic accordance of effi gy mound distribution with historic Ho-Chunk occupa-tion locales; (3) similarities between mound forms and Ho-Chunk clan symbols, as tribal informants noted; and (4) the mounds’ recent age in light of informants’ claims that their ancestors had built them recently, supporting point number 1. The fi rst two arguments had been made earlier, so the Ho-Chunk interpreta-tions of the mounds’ forms and functions and the Ho-Chunk claims of authorship were the most important elements of these authors’ analyses.

As of 1907, West—unable as Lawson was to cite specifi c Ho-Chunk information on the effi gy mounds—believed that the Siouan and probable Ho-Chunk authorship of the effi gy mounds was not only a well-founded hypothesis but also one he predicted “would be accepted as undisputed fact, within the present generation” (West 1907:253). In 1910, Stout reported that a Ho-Chunk individual told him: “Yes, Indians use to build mounds. Our Winnebago peo-ple did. They built many round mounds for burial” (1910:101). Unable initially to explain or interpret an effi gy mound, Stout’s informant later stated that it rep-resented an underwater spirit animal and that “Indi-ans built these animal mounds too” (Stout 1910:102),

a threat to American expansionist policies,” and so “America was emotionally ready to accept the fact that the Indian was another cultural being… [T]his readiness coincided with Thomas’s report on the investigations of the Division of Mound Exploration” (Mallam 1976a:170; see also Birmingham and Eisen-berg 2000:33).

Thomas weighed in on the subject of identifying the effi gy mound builders in the concluding section of his fi nal report (1894). Having demonstrated to his satisfaction that Indians had built the conical burial mounds, Thomas believed that the effi gy mounds “are too intimately connected” with the conicals to have been built by a separate race. He recognized that conicals and effi gies were two elements “of what is clearly a system,” i.e., systematically organized mound groups that contained both types of mounds. Therefore, Thomas (1894:709) ascribed effi gy mound construction to the same people who built the coni-cals (i.e., Indians). He hesitated to make more specifi c identifi cations: “To what particular tribes the ancient works of this northwestern section [the Upper Missis-sippi Valley] are to be attributed is of course a ques-tion which must be answered chiefl y by conjecture.” Yet he thought he could identify the general group responsible for the effi gy mounds: “…there are some good reasons for believing that the effi gy mounds and those works belonging to the same system are attrib-utable to one or more tribes of the Siouan stock….[T]here is no longer any substantial reason for deny-ing that the effi gies and other works thereto are due to the Siouan tribes” (Thomas 1894:709–710). The main reasons were the apparently relatively recent age of the effi gy mounds in an area known to have contained Siouan-speaking tribes at contact, as well as similari-ties between effi gy mound forms and “the compara-tively modern surface fi gures of the Siouan tribes” (Thomas 1894:709–710), i.e., the effi gy petroforms or “bowlder mosaics” of the northern Great Plains that Thomas assumed were built recently by Siouan peo-ples (Thomas 1894:534–535). Thomas and Peet thus came to similar conclusions on the identity of the effi -gy mound builders, not surprisingly in view of their association in the 1880s and their frequent citations of each other’s work.

The Twentieth Century

Between about 1900 and 1920, the interpretations of effi gy mounds that prevailed in the anthropological community were shaped by Thomas, Peet, and their forebears as well as: (1) data collected by the expand-ing archaeological survey work of Charles E. Brown


Although not cited in his arguments for Ho-Chunk mound construction, Radin observed ceremonial use of small mounds in the Buffalo dance (1923:298–299), similar to Fletcher’s (1884) account. He also observed use of a small mound inside the Bear dance lodge, a mound that “is supposed to represent a bear’s cave” (1923:299). Radin’s record of the origin myth of the Medicine lodge mentions an earth mound in front of the Thunderbird chief’s house but does not state its shape or purpose (1923:306).

Brown (1911) reported on a visit with two of Radin’s Ho-Chunk informants, Oliver Lamere and John Rave, in 1911. Rave agreed with Brown’s identi-fi cation of a bear mound as representing the bear, and he believed some bird effi gy mounds represented the thunder bird, although “he thought it likely that some other bird mounds were built to represent the now extinct Winnebago pigeon and hawk clans” (Brown 1911:126). Rave identifi ed the long-tailed panther mounds as “representative of the Winnebago ‘water spirit’” (Brown 1911:126). Regarding effi gy mounds in general, Rave told Brown: “An old Indian told me that his father used to tell him that the totem mounds would be placed in their fi elds that they would plant” (Brown 1911:128). Upon viewing a map of a crossed pair of linear mounds, Rave “without any hesitation pronounced the cross to be in all probability intended to represent the Winnebago symbol of the ‘Earth-Mak-er’” (Brown 1911:128). Regarding conical mounds, Rave “stated that according to the information which had come down to him thru several generations of relatives the Winnebago in the early days of their life in Wisconsin erected just such structures for purposes of interment” (Brown 1911:127).

W. C. McKern rebutted Radin’s and Brown’s conclusions that the Ho-Chunks had built the effi gy mounds. To begin, McKern alleged that Radin himself was the (or a) source for the Ho-Chunk belief that they had built the effi gy mounds:

One thing is certain; Radin thoroughly con-vinced many of the Winnebago that their ances-tors built the mounds. Since his sojourn in their midst, they have talked the matter over at length and are now quite proud of these, the supposed products of their forbears… Not a few actu-ally quote Radin for their authority [McKern 1928b:277].

McKern reported hearing several explanations of effi gy mounds “from the lips of young, middle-aged, and old Winnebago. Some of these informants actual-ly quoted Radin as the authority for their statements” (McKern 1929:563). James B. Griffi n recalled McKern telling him the same thing: “When McKern asked

although he did not say specifi cally that the Ho-Chunks had built such mounds. Still, Stout believed this evidence “supports the view that the Winnebago built both conical and effi gy mounds and that the lat-ter were built in connection with the totem system or organization” (Stout 1910:102).

Seeking native information about effi gy mounds, Radin reported that the Dhegihan and Chiwere-speak-ing people with whom he spoke “declared that they knew only of conical mounds and that their knowl-edge of even these was vague,” although he cautioned that “no systematic interrogations” of them had been made (1911:523). But during his ethnographic fi eld work among the Ho-Chunks from 1908 to 1913, he was told at some point that:

it had been customary not very long ago to erect near the habitation of each clan an effi gy of their clan animal. Subsequently, upon a more system-atic inquiry, it was discovered that not only were such effi gy mounds erected near clan habita-tions, but also on every plantation owned by a certain clan. In other words, these effi gies were, to all intents and purposes, property marks [Radin 1911:525].

Radin saw most of the Ho-Chunk clans, along with the water spirit, represented in the effi gies. Also, two elders reportedly identifi ed the “man” mound fi g-ures as “representations of the warrior or hawk clan” (Radin 1911:527). Anticipating an objection to this interpretation, he noted:

Only one possible adverse criticism could pos-sibly be made and that would be to regard the above as a folk explanation. But, if we accept the explanations of the other effi gy mounds as justi-fi ed, then we will have to accept this explanation likewise [Radin 1911:528].

Radin could obtain no information about the inta-glios, but he surmised that they were meant to refer to water spirits because most of them were so shaped and because the Ho-Chunk “frequently placed sym-bols referring to water deities under water” (Radin 1911:528). Radin’s informants claimed that linear mounds “had been erected by their ancestors, some even within the memory of their fathers,” with defen-sive works being the most commonly cited function but with lodge foundations and snake effi gies also suggested (Radin 1911:530–531). Likewise, Radin reported that Ho-Chunks claimed the composite or compound mounds served as bases for lodges with connections between them, and that conical mounds had numerous uses in addition to their main use for burial of chiefs (1911:533).


consideration before the question is disposed of on the basis of quite contradictory evidence obtained from living Indians, and that these data in no way tend to support any of the explana-tions of purpose and use advanced by Winneba-go informants [McKern 1929:564].

McKern’s continued identifi cation, classifi cation, and seriation of the various prehistoric cultures of Wis-consin soon led him to not only challenge Radin’s iden-tifi cation of the Ho-Chunk as the effi gy mound build-ers but to supply archaeological evidence that a differ-ent, non-Ho-Chunk group built the effi gies. McKern identifi ed constellations of traits that defi ned, among other units, the Effi gy Mound5 and Oneota aspects, two very different archaeological cultures. Each was characterized by different and distinctive pottery: Effi gy Mound pottery was cord marked and grit tempered, while Oneota or Upper Mississippian pot-tery was smooth-surfaced and shell tempered (McK-ern 1928a, 1931). Each type was associated with other distinctive patterns and styles of technology, burials, and other features (McKern 1942, 1945; McKern and Ritzenthaler 1949). After examining eastern Wiscon-sin habitation site assemblages and drawing on the work of Griffi n (1937) and Mott (1938), who had con-nected Upper Mississippi (Oneota) pottery with the Chiwere groups, McKern determined that the eastern Wisconsin Oneota material of the Lake Winnebago focus probably represented the prehistoric Ho-Chunk (McKern 1942, 1945). Clearly to him, then,

If Winnebago pottery was of this type [shell tem-pered, Upper Mississippian], the Effi gy Mounds of Wisconsin, with their typical Lake Michigan pottery, were not built by the Winnebago. As a matter of fact, there is no archaeological evi-dence for the Winnebago origin of these mounds [McKern 1931:386].

On this basis, McKern disputed the Ho-Chunk–effi gy mound link for reasons beyond his view that Radin was the source of Ho-Chunk beliefs of a connec-tion. McKern believed he had identifi ed the archaeolog-ical cultures of both the effi gy mound builders and the prehistoric Ho-Chunk, and they were clearly different and unrelated (see Birmingham 2004). While McKern suggested historical links for several archaeological foci and historic tribes, he drew no connection between the Effi gy Mound Aspect and any historical tribe:

Just what happened to them [the Effi gy Mound people] eventually is a major problem. If they ever left the state, we have not been able to fi nd their new address; yet, not only had they faded

the people with whom Radin had worked how they knew their ancestors had built the effi gy mounds they replied that Radin told him that was the case” (Grif-fi n 1995:15–16). Ho-Chunk claims for effi gy mound authorship do not appear until 1910 or 1911, after Radin had already spent two years working with the Ho-Chunks.4 Recognizing the paucity of early, docu-mented Ho-Chunk claims for effi gy mound author-ship, John Staeck argued that “the Ho-Chunk con-sider the purpose of mound construction to be sacred knowledge that is not to be shared with outsiders” (Staeck 1998a), yet Radin’s and Brown’s informants apparently were willing to share their opinions and interpretations of mound functions as well as many other sacred subjects. Radin does not appear to have replied to McKern’s charges, at least in print. The accusations against Radin do not allege that he delib-erately set out to convince the Ho-Chunks that they built the effi gy mounds, nor do they suggest that his ethnographic records and interpretations are unreli-able or unusable. However, critics assert that Radin’s sense of native history, both of the group and of indi-vidual lives, seems to have been guided by precon-ceptions, literary inclinations and license, and mutual manipulations of and by his informants (Burnham 1998; Krupat 1985:80–106; C. Mason 1993a). The Ho-Chunk historical memory of building effi gy mounds appears to exemplify the “feedback” loop that devel-ops in oral tradition when a group adopts and appro-priates an outside “expert” opinion regarding particu-lar phenomena (Henige 1982; Vansina 1985:156–157; Zimmerman et al. 2001:282).

Beyond Radin’s possible infl uence upon his infor-mants, McKern (1928b:276–288; 1929) urged caution in tribal attribution of the effi gy mounds for other reasons: locations of effi gy mounds and Ho-Chunk occupation loci often do not correspond; some mound forms cannot be identifi ed as Ho-Chunk clan sym-bols; the claimed purposes of some mound forms are contradicted by archaeological evidence; historical memory of the era of mound building is suspect and in some cases demonstrably incorrect; members of other tribes have claimed authorship of the mounds; pottery of the effi gy mound builders is “Algonkin” or “Lake Michigan” rather than Ho-Chunk; and mortu-ary customs of several other tribes are more similar to effi gy mound burial practices than are those of the Ho-Chunk. At fi rst, McKern did not claim to have shown that the Ho-Chunks did not build the effi gy mounds, just to have shown

that there is a considerable quantity of carefully collected archaeological data bearing directly on this problem, which must seriously be taken into


Agreeing with Lurie that data collected by McKern and others refute Radin’s conclusion, Carol Mason noted that when Radin wrote about effi gy mounds

there was not enough information available through actual fi eld work, artifact analysis, or appropriate dating techniques to provide a rea-sonable case for interpreting Wisconsin prehisto-ry in one way as opposed to another, and today Radin’s chapter in his Winnebago ethnography (1923:ch. 2, p. 76) is no longer even read, much less used seriously in the study of Wisconsin prehistory [C. Mason 1985:98].

Even beyond the weakness of the archaeologi-cal data, the unclear clan-mound connections, the incompatibility of mound distributions with actual Ho-Chunk habitation areas, particularly in the Ho-Chunk homeland region of Red Banks in northeastern Wisconsin, and the possibility that Radin encouraged the Ho-Chunks to claim effi gy mound authorship, C. Mason argued that Radin’s work was an “application of analogical reasoning that was fl awed to begin with, and the hypothesis should not have needed archaeo-logical disproof” (C. Mason 1985:98). The enormous disruption of Ho-Chunk life in the 1600s (Lurie 1960) fosters well-founded doubt or at least extreme caution about the use of specifi c historical recollections (Zim-merman et al. 2001). As C. Mason noted, “To agree with those recollections when they are useful and ignore them when they are not gives archaeologists a convenient authority to appeal to but no way of dem-onstrating that their analogies are correct: connections between modern ethnography and even eighteenth century Winnebago life have not been established” (1985:100).

Even though McKern’s dismissal of Radin’s direct Effi gy Mound–Ho-Chunk connection was archaeolog-ically well founded, his identifi cation of the prehistoric Lake Winnebago focus (phase) Oneota as representing the pre-contact Ho-Chunk is not as strong as it once appeared. In fact, “the actual evidence upon which this identifi cation originally was made is so slim as to be almost nonexistent (C. Mason 1976:348; see also C. Mason 1993b). No clear archaeological association between Lake Winnebago phase ceramics, historic trade goods, and a Ho-Chunk occupation of the early contact period has been found, and radiocarbon data do not indicate Lake Winnebago phase continuation into the historic period. The conclusions of several articles in the volume devoted to investigating the Oneota–Ho-Chunk historical connection (Overstreet 1993) are that the Lake Winnebago phase may have had some direct or indirect role in Ho-Chunk prehis-tory, and that the Huber and Orr Oneota phases may

from the picture at the raising of the historic cur-tain, but their culture offers no evidence of even a late contact with any of the Mississippi Pattern groups. From this it would seem that the Effi gy Mound folks had either departed or ceased to be Effi gy Mound folks before the arrival of the various cultural elements from the Southeast. It is possible that some unknown factor may have resulted in a change of burial customs to elimi-nate the effi gy-shaped mound, after which the culture would be less easily recognized from the cultural remains available to the archaeolo-gist; or, these people may have been attacked by invading armies (the Upper Mississippians?) with such vigor that they were reduced to the status of disorganized bands which joined other, stronger groups for protection and so lost their own cultural identity [McKern 1942:164].

McKern thus was recognizing one of the strongest reasons to doubt claims of a direct Effi gy Mound–Ho-Chunk connection: the great time depth and cultural discontinuities that separated the practice of effi gy mound building from the ethnographically recorded Ho-Chunk and other peoples. Summarizing the status of the debate on the possible Ho-Chunk–Effi gy Mound connection in 1960 in Radin’s festschrift, Lurie wrote:

It was believed for many years that the historic Winnebago Indians were the descendants of the people who made the effi gy mounds in Wiscon-sin. The error was an understandable one, based on sound logic but a paucity of data. The mounds are scattered throughout a territory occupied by the Winnebago well into the nineteenth century. Although no Winnebago could recall having seen his people build mounds, the animals in many cases conform to shapes of mounds which are totems of Winnebago clans. Traditional refer-ences to earth works could be easily construed to refer to the effi gy mounds as well as to the linear and round mounds belonging to the same trait complex. Whether this association of ideas fi rst occurred to the Winnebago and was trans-mitted to archaeologists, or whether archaeo-logical interest in the mounds spurred devel-opment of such a reasonable explanation is no longer known. The fact remains that a majority of the Winnebago people today believe that their ancestors made the Wisconsin mounds. More recent archaeological research refutes this con-tention and assigns the Winnebago to a different prehistoric tradition, known as the Mississippi Pattern. Apparently an intrusive population from the southeastern area, the Winnebago in Wisconsin did not produce these effi gy mounds [Lurie 1960:790].


they perpetuate the affi liation of the individuals buried in them (whether clan, guardian spirit, or whatever) or perhaps of the individuals per-forming the burial service [Baerreis 1958:320].

Years later, Mallam (1976b) and Hall (1993, 1997) suggested that Rowe’s effort to detect the meanings of effi gy mound shapes by comparing them with clan totems of historic tribes was unreasonably restricted because it neglected spirit beings as possible subjects of representation. The scope of Rowe’s comparisons was so limited that he did not consider the Ho-Chunk statements that the long-tailed panther mounds rep-resented water spirits or the fact that the Ho-Chunk Thunder clan was represented by the thunderbird fi g-ure, a common effi gy form. Viewing “panther” and “bear” mounds and intaglios as water and earth spir-its, and “bird” and “man” mounds as upper-world spirits (thunderers or representatives of the Thunder clan) would bring nearly every known effi gy shape into accord with the essential cosmologies of all tribes in the region.

In the 1960s, Hurley’s (1975) excavations in cen-tral Wisconsin led to fuller understanding of Effi gy Mound settlement and subsistence patterns, but they also led to confusion regarding chronology and cul-tural connections. Hurley proposed that the Effi gy Mound tradition was extremely long-lived, persisting as recognizable Late Woodland complexes from ca. A.D. 300 until European contact. He saw no develop-ment into Oneota but posited continued Effi gy Mound culture occupation after A.D. 1200 in areas not inhab-ited by Oneota people. The relationship between the two cultures was one of culture contact, not of trans-formation or evolution (Hurley 1974).

Gibbon (1972) challenged this viewpoint by argu-ing that evidence and logic indicated a relatively rapid transition from Effi gy Mound to Oneota, sparked by human-ecological factors and Mississippian6 contact. As the evidence showed that effi gy mounds were built only during Hurley’s “Middle Effi gy Mound” period, ca. A.D. 650 or 700–1100, Gibbon’s new synthesis and model accounted for the post-Mississippian disap-pearance of Effi gy Mound and its transformation into Oneota. However, Hurley continued to maintain that Effi gy Mound did not transform into Oneota and that it retained an identity apart from Oneota during late prehistory. Despite what would seem like the natural desirability and relative ease of determining a histori-cal connection for a culture that supposedly persist-ed until 1642 (“the time of historic contact;” Hurley 1975:354), Hurley initially declined to suggest a link between Effi gy Mound and a historical group. How-ever, his 1986 Effi gy Mound review gingerly handled

have, too. An Oneota–Ho-Chunk historical connec-tion of some kind is generally accepted for the western Lake Michigan basin, although whether the connec-tion is through an eastern Wisconsin group continu-ity (Overstreet 1997) or through the Huber phase (Hall 1993) or other means is not known.

McKern’s conclusion regarding the lack of devel-opmental connection between Effi gy Mound and Oneota–Ho-Chunk was acceptable in the subsequent research era (1945–1971) because it was generally compatible with the new radiocarbon-based chro-nologies and new understandings of Cahokia that were built in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Griffi n 1960). This viewpoint also prevailed because it was diffi -cult to perceive how the apparently massive differ-ences between Late Woodland and Oneota could have resulted from in-situ processes. Hall (1962) was one of the few to suggest an indigenous rather than Middle Mississippian–derived origin for Oneota, but the local precursors were represented by the small amounts of shell-tempered Douglas and Baraboo pottery found in Wisconsin rather than the archetypal Effi gy Mound Madison ware.

McKern’s view helped shape Chandler Rowe’s overview of the Effi gy Mound culture (1951, 1956). Rowe classifi ed mounds according to shape in plan view and then investigated the possible relationships between mound shapes and historically recorded clans within local Indian cultures. The hypothesis he tried to test was essentially that of the earliest effi gy mound observers: that the mounds represented clan symbols or totems. Finding no clear relationships between mound shapes and recorded clans of several tribes including the Ho-Chunk, Rowe rejected the con-cept of clan identifi cation for the mounds but reached no fi rm conclusions regarding the mounds’ functions, meanings, or cultural affi liations, other than that they probably served “certain ceremonial purposes, per-haps some religious rite involving animals” (Rowe 1956:90).

Just as McKern and others found signifi cant fac-tual and logical problems with Radin’s Effi gy Mound–Ho-Chunk connection (Baerreis 1958; Hall 1993, 1997; Mallam 1976b), Baerreis’s critique noted:

Aside from the uncertainty in attaching specifi c names to the animal or concept symbolized by the mounds which Rowe admits, implicit in the argument is the idea that each of the tribes involved had a fi xed number or kinds of clans from earliest times and also that the signifi cance of mound construction underwent no change from early to late phases of the culture. This may well be in error…. Since the mounds are burial mounds, it is reasonable to assume that


group, the number of different types of effi gy forms may represent not only clan or corporate groups, but also diversity of resources” (1995:118, 120).

Birmingham and Eisenberg accepted the map metaphor and went one step further: they viewed effi gy mound groups as “maps of ancient belief sys-tems”: “The underlying structure of effi gy mound ceremonialism is the division of the universe into the upper world and lower world and the subdivision of the lower world into the realms of earth and water. The spatial relationship of effi gy mounds mimics or models this ideological structure” (2000:129). This ideological “mapping” accounts for the frequent inclusion of at least one mound of each division in most mound groups, maintaining a balance between the earth/water and sky symbols. Thus, mound forms do not necessarily represent individual clans but more broadly recapitulate the underlying dual-realm cosmology and ideology, a belief system expressed in other Late Woodland media such as ceramics (Samp-son 1988).

These models of effi gy mound purpose and meaning facilitate interpretations of mound functions, but they do not necessarily demonstrate direct connec-tions of any particular sort with Oneota or succeeding groups. Models of Effi gy Mound transformation into Oneota or resistance against Oneota, or some combina-tion, both are compatible with these viewpoints. Mal-lam believed Oneota “impact on the local population was considerable. In short order they either became Oneota or moved. It seems that the Oneota used, on occasion, the mounds of the Woodland peoples.” Intrusive burial “may have signifi ed Oneota respect for the preceding lifeway, or, alternately, served to symbolize their aggregate strength by appropriation of the sacred ground of others” (Mallam 1983:44).

Benn asked:

What happened to the Effi gy Mound Culture? The continuity between the Effi gy Mound Tra-dition and historic tribes remains unresolved…. Central to the question of the demise of Effi gy Mound culture is the development of Oneota culture across the upper Midwest after ca. 800 AD. Other authors (e.g., Hall 1967:180; Gibbon 1972) have argued that Woodland peoples were transformed into Oneota…. I take the specula-tive position that some Woodland peoples did, indeed, become Oneota, and that Oneota and the Effi gy Mound culture could have been con-temporaries in the same broad region, but not the same territories.… [T]he Effi gy Mound tradition had a totemic social system synchronized with a subsistence pattern preoccupied with the sea-sonal round of hunting and collecting and cer-emony, while the Oneota were maize-complex

the question of historic cultural affi liation by suggest-ing that Effi gy Mound might have been ancestral to the Dakota Sioux:

It has been held, without any evidence, that the Effi gy Mound peoples were Algonquian speak-ers in contrast to the indigenous Chiwere Siouan speakers, such as the Winnebago. The Algon-quian - Siouan dichotomy has continued to color if not to cloud interpretations in eastern North American archaeology. I would suggest that the Effi gy Mound peoples have yet to be fi rm-ly attached, via direct historic methods, to any modern tribe in the Upper Great Lakes region. They could well have been Siouan speakers such as the Dakota Sioux who may have moved from Wisconsin to central and northern Minnesota as the Cheyenne and other groups moved west-ward. This hypothesis as well as any other con-cerning their demise or historical tribal identifi -cation needs to be supported by further excava-tions, reanalyses of published and unpublished site data, computer/statistical verifi cations, and renewed linguistic interest in prehistoric/histor-ic problems [Hurley 1986:291].

Hurley ended with these discouraging words: “regarding the purpose of mound construction and which tribe or tribes built these mounds, we are no further along than Lapham was in 1855” (1986:298).

Yet much progress had been made regarding the purposes and functions of effi gy mounds, if not on the cultural identities of their builders. Mallam (1976b, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984) and Benn (1979) in particular had developed models of cultural ecology, process, and ideology that viewed effi gy mounds as fully func-tional elements of Late Woodland cultural systems (see also Goldstein 1995): “In this system the mound complexes served as integrative mechanisms, the institutional means for coordinating and articulating the cultural activities of numerous hunting and gath-ering societies seasonally exploiting the northeastern Iowa ecotone” (Mallam 1976b:68). The animal forms “stood as the political or social symbols of the corpo-rate group who constructed them and are buried with-in” (Benn 1979:71), or they represented the fundamen-tal duality of Native American cosmology and ideol-ogy, earth/water spirits and sky/thunder spirits (Hall 1993; Mallam 1982). In this way, effi gy mound build-ing “may be perceived as an ongoing world renewal ritual, a sacred activity humans entered into in order to ensure regular and consistent production of natu-ral resources” (Mallam 1984:19). Goldstein referred to effi gy mound groups as “maps,” i.e., “symbolic repre-sentations of both form and space,” indicating resourc-es controlled by particular groups. “Within a mound


Effi gy Mound–Oneota History, Process, and Ideology

The basic tenets of the Direct Historical Approach still underpin many efforts aimed at understanding relationships between postcontact and precontact groups in North America. However, connections between the ethnographic “known” and the archaeo-logical “unknown” are rarely straightforward because the formation and transformation of group identity—i.e., ethnogenesis—frequently if not always occurs in the context of interaction with other groups (Hill 1996). As Moore has stated, “each human language, culture, or population is considered to be derived from or rooted in several different antecedent groups” (1994:925). Ethnogenesis via incorporation of multiple antecedents has been a common phenomenon in the historic era in North America (e.g., Anderson 1999; Hill 1996; Mullins and Paynter 2000). Recognition of its pervasiveness provides a useful basis for under-standing the formation of group identities, affi liations, and relationships in the prehistoric period as well (for a comprehensive overview, see Hu 2013; a sample of pertinent case studies includes Blakeslee 1994; Card 2013; Emerson 2012; Engelbrecht 1999; Millhouse 2012; Ortman 2012; Pugh 2010; Staeck 1994; Syms 1982; for a useful overview of the processes and implications of societal coalescence in the prehistoric Southeast and Southwest, see Kowalewski 2006). Processes of ethno-genesis involving fusion or creolization (Buisseret and Reinhardt 2000; Stewart 2007) commonly operate in frontier-boundary settings, at the edges of traditional group territories where intersocietal contact is likely to be greatest (Green and Nolan 2000; Lightfoot and Martinez 1995; Millhouse 2012).

The metaphor of the braided stream nicely char-acterizes ethnogenetic relationships among human groups through time (Ferguson 2004; Moore 1994, 2001). Braided streams connote both fi ssion and fusion—splitting, merging, and reformulation of groups—as opposed to a tree diagram, which pre-cludes a “branch” from growing out of more than one “stem.” Dendritic or straight-line (cladistic) descent might be an appealing concept, but for human cul-tures, languages, and biological relationships—all of the elements of group identity—ethnogenesis via multiple antecedents is seen as a more comprehensive and realistic representation of “culture in history,” to borrow the title of Diamond (1960). In essence, groups have both multiple predecessors and multiple descen-dants.

Archaeologists employ material remains to try to identify ancient identities and ethnicities. Some also

agriculturalists. One suspects that the ideology of these two cultural systems was as different as their subsistence and social organizations. Thus, we can predict that the confl ict between Oneota and Woodland peoples probably centered on the divergence of belief systems and social integra-tive mechanisms [Benn 1979:77-78, emphasis original].

This divergence in both the ideological and socio-economic realms differentiates the Effi gy Mound and Oneota traditions whether they overlapped in time as Benn suggested or were entirely sequential. Either way, the formal gap between Effi gy Mound and Oneota represents a stark difference, a signifi cant cul-tural discontinuity.

As of the early twenty-fi rst century, several viable and, to a degree, complementary approaches exist for understanding and explaining much of this gap, or at least the end of effi gy mound building. What I term the processual-ecological approach is well rep-resented in work by Boszhardt (2012), Rodell (1997), Stoltman (1983, 1986, 1990, 2000; Stoltman and Chris-tiansen 2000), and Theler (Theler and Boszhardt 2000, 2006). These authors focus on shifts in subsis-tence and settlement systems, ecological adaptations, technology, interaction patterns, and demography. Both internal resource stresses and external forces (Cahokia contact) play roles in ending Effi gy Mound and inaugurating Oneota. A second, social-historical approach emphasizes factors such as core-periphery relationships, political power, and gender roles (e.g., Benn 1995, 2014; Emerson 1999; Staeck 1998a). Finally, several archaeologists have added considerations of world-view and cosmology into the mix of ecological and social factors (e.g., Benn 1989; Mallam 1983, 1984; Pauketat 2008), often employing oral tradition and other ethnographic or ethnohistoric data to suggest analogies or explanations for particular patterns and historical sequences (e.g., Fox and Salzer 1999; Gartner 1999; Hall 1993, 1997; Salzer 1993; Staeck 1993, 1994, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000).

Of these three approaches, attempts to employ oral tradition seem to have the most signifi cant loose ends—unresolved issues that have not yet found consilience with the other approaches, much less sat-isfactory resolution. In the following section, I build on previous work on Effi gy Mound–Oneota relation-ships, primarily from the standpoint of ideology and oral tradition7. Progress in the use of ideology and oral tradition can help not only to understand this sig-nifi cant episode of cultural change but also to supply insights into identity and ultimately the conundrum of Effi gy Mound cultural affi liation.


represents the major characters from the Red Horn sto-ry cycle as recorded among the Ho-Chunk and Ioway (Fox and Salzer 1999; Hall 1997:148–151; Salzer 1987, 1993; Salzer and Rajnovich 2000; see Radin 1948; Skin-ner 1925:456–458). Some motifs in the paintings “relate to iconographic conventions found in prehistoric Mis-sissippian cultures to the south” (Salzer 1993:96), spe-cifi cally the “Braden A” art style (Salzer 1987:454; Sal-zer and Rajnovich 2000:32–33). Salzer stated that “the Gottschall artists were sharing many of the symbols, and the motivating ideology, with Emergent [sic] Mis-sissippian peoples (i.e. Lohman [sic] and early Stirling phases at Cahokia, 950–850 B.P.). Three radiocarbon assays, from tightly controlled contexts, indicate that the composition was painted around 1050–950 B.P., supporting the preceding conclusion” (Fox and Salzer 1999:254). The deposit that was the “active surface” when the paintings were executed contained artifacts identifi ed by Salzer as Effi gy Mound as well as Azta-lan Collared.

A painted sandstone human head sculpture was found in the deposit immediately overlying the stra-tum that contained the pigment spill. This layer con-tained a cord-impressed vessel “clearly related to Effi -gy Mound ceramics” (Fox and Salzer 1999:256) as well as Aztalan Collared and plain shell-tempered pottery. Salzer identifi ed this sculpture as a “mortuary fi gure, quite possibly a portrait of a specifi c individual” (Fox and Salzer 1999:257), and suggested it may have func-tioned within a ritual similar to the Ho-Chunk War-bundle feast as recorded by Radin (1923).

Salzer has drawn several conclusions about the longevity of the ideologies expressed at the Gott-schall site and about connections between the site’s occupants and the Chiwere peoples. In 1993 he stat-ed, “people who shared at least part of the ideology of the modern Ho-Chunk have clearly been residents in southwestern Wisconsin for a period of time that appears to reach back a thousand years, as refl ected in the Red Horn paintings” (1993:95). Along with eth-nographic evidence, the Gottschall site helps “identify the long-term presence of the ideological ancestors of the modern Ioway and Winnebago peoples in the southwestern Wisconsin area” (1993:113). By 1999, Salzer identifi ed the Effi gy Mound culture occupants of Gottschall as the ancestors, not just the ideological ancestors, of the Ho-Chunk and Ioway peoples:

Clearly, the artists must have been the ancestors of the HoChunk and Ioway peoples, but strati-graphically, they must have been the Eastman Phase (early Effi gy Mound) occupants. This is at variance with the widely held consensus that it is Oneota, not Effi gy Mound, that is the precon-tact expression of the HoChunk and Ioway ([R.]

use other types of source material such as oral tradi-tions and belief systems to help make historical con-nections. Here, I am interested in seeing how mythol-ogy8 and archaeology may be compatible—not neces-sarily consistent, but complementary. Both the study of myths and the study of material remains, when conducted scientifi cally, are part of anthropology. Both oral traditions and material remains can tell us things about past societies. While this is not the place to review debates about oral tradition and archaeol-ogy, both R. Mason (1993, 2000, 2006) and Echo-Hawk (2000) seem to agree that careful analysis is needed before any oral tradition can be “reconciled” (i.e., become compatible) with archaeology.

There is no a priori need to reconcile mythol-ogy and archaeology; they stand apart perfectly well. There can be danger to the integrity of mythological as well as archaeological analysis in attempts to merge them, to “prove” the historical veracity of oral tradi-tion or to fi nd oral traditions that “prove” archaeo-logical interpretations (R. Mason 2000, 2006). Still, one value of reconciling oral tradition and archaeology lies in the ability archaeology can have to identify histori-cal processes or events that may have contributed to the adoption and transmittal of myths. This approach is not to be construed as demonstrating the “histori-cal accuracy” of any myths or set of myths, whether Native American oral traditions or the Bible or any other. The goal of reconciliation, of fi nding and under-standing compatibility, is in learning whether the archaeological and historical records can help explain how and why societies adopted and perpetuated par-ticular mythologies. In many cases this will not be possible. In the present case, I believe archaeology can offer a plausible and testable interpretation of how, when, and why a body of oral tradition developed among the Ho-Chunk–Chiwere—a tradition whose historicity has been diffi cult to understand.

Efforts have been made to link Effi gy Mound through Oneota to Ho-Chunk–Chiwere (hereafter, HCC) based on oral tradition and ideology (Fox and Salzer 1999; Hall 1993; Salzer 1987, 1993; Staeck 1998b, 1999). Effi gy Mound–HCC connections are also inte-gral parts of Birmingham and Eisenberg’s (2000) and Gartner’s (1999) discussions of prehistoric mounds and landscapes, as well as Smith’s (1996, 2000) Ho-Chunk tribal history. My review will begin by focus-ing on Salzer’s discussions, because those relate HCC oral traditions to a considerable amount of well-docu-mented archaeological data.

Salzer has suggested a close HCC–Effi gy Mound connection on the basis of data from the Gottschall site in southwestern Wisconsin. A pictograph panel at that rockshelter contains a composition that apparently


earlier than the age of the latest associated ceramics, in this case Aztalan Collared and plain, shell-tempered pottery. Dates for sites that produce collared ceramics range broadly (Christiansen 2003), but careful analysis of southern Wisconsin dates and contexts shows that Aztalan Collared dates to ca. A.D. 1040–1160 (Kelly 2002). Collared ceramics occur occasionally in late Effi gy Mound contexts (Rosebrough 2010) but appear often, along with shell-tempered pottery, in Mississip-pian-contact contexts among non–Effi gy Mound Late Woodland groups in southwestern Wisconsin (Finney 2013; Stoltman and Christiansen 2000).

Salzer emphasized the Mississippian style that characterizes the pictograph fi gures, noting the simi-larity of several motifs to those of the Lohmann and early Stirling horizons of the American Bottom. As he pointed out, these style elements are neither Effi gy Mound motifs nor otherwise indigenous to the Upper Mississippi Valley but are Mississippian in origin. The Braden style that characterizes the Gottschall art originated in the American Bottom in early Mississip-pian times (Brown 2007; Brown and Kelly 2000). Salzer and Hall argued that the paintings and the associated rituals and beliefs may have constituted some of the cultural baggage involved in the adoption, as fi ctive kin, of one group by a distant other. A key compo-nent of the paraphernalia would have been the Long-Nosed God maskette, which could be made of shell, copper, or wood, or represented by tattoos, as one of the Gottschall fi gures exhibits (Hall 1991:31; Salzer 1987:450–452). Hall stated that the maskettes (worn by Red Horn, a.k.a. “He-who-wears-human-heads-as-earrings”) “may have functioned in the Early Mis-sissippi period of the eastern United States within an adoption ritual much like that of the Calumet cer-emony of the Historic period” (1997:151). The ritual drama may have been “part of an adoption ceremony used to provide a ceremonial relationship between the participants through a fi ction of kinship,” specifi cal-ly to “establish friendly relations between otherwise unrelated groups” (1991:31), for example “between the powerful leader of a large polity and his politi-cal clients in outlying areas” (1997:151). The place of the Red Horn cycle in HCC oral literature as well as the wide distribution of related art in conventional-ized styles suggest that such adoption engaged many “hinterland” groups in a range of relationships and connections with Mississippian lineages (Duncan and Diaz-Granados 2000; Brown 2007). At Gottschall and other sites, paintings associated with the ideologies of the adoption ritual were executed in the style of the expansionist group, i.e., Mississippians.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to the goal of the rituals as conversion, not just adoption. The

Mason 1993; Overstreet 1993). This view is based in part on the fact that it is Oneota, not Effi gy Mound material culture, which persists after 650 B.P. and into the contact period. However, the HoChunk have claimed that their ancestors built the effi gy mounds (Radin 1923), and they con-tinue to do so—now with some archaeological support. It remains for archaeology to fi nd some answer to this apparent contradiction in realities [Fox and Salzer 1999:255].

…the (Effi gy Mound) ancestors of the HoChunk and probably the Ioway engaged in a ritual that has remarkable parallels to what they performed some 900 years earlier [Fox and Salzer 1999:256 ].

…ethnographic data provide a solid basis for identifying the participants in the [Gottschall site] rituals as being part of the ideological ances-tors of the modern HoChunk and Ioway, and these peoples certainly included the artists who painted the Red Horn group of fi gures. Those peoples were, during the period of use, members of an archaeological construct called the “Effi gy Mound culture”; but at contact times, at least, the Ioway and probably the HoChunk can be identi-fi ed with the “Oneota culture”. The information from this site strongly argues for ideological continuity between additional archaeological “cultures”; materially discrete manifestations which do not readily appear to express such an ideological (ethnic?) continuum [Fox and Salzer 1999:258].

Although not universally accepted (R. Mason 1993:406–409, 2000:254–255, 2006:166–168), Salzer’s and Hall’s identifi cation of the Gottschall composi-tion with the Red Horn cycle as recorded among the Ho-Chunk and Ioway is plausible. However, the association Salzer draws between the painters of this composition and the Effi gy Mound culture may not be as strong. Salzer dates the principal pictograph composition at Gottschall to ca. A.D. 900–1000 on the basis of stratigraphic and radiocarbon evidence. Yet as Boszhardt notes (1999:210–211, 2004:20–22), the reported Gottschall site data are consistent with a post–A.D. 1000 rather than pre–A.D. 1000 age for the pictographs. Additionally, associated artifacts indi-cate the pictograph would not date to “early Effi gy Mound” as Salzer suggested but to the fi nal decades of Effi gy Mound or to a succeeding complex. Because the minimum age of an archaeological stratum can be no greater than the age of its youngest artifacts and dat-ed materials (unless they intruded into that stratum), the age of the pictographs, based on a paint spill in a stratum with diagnostic pottery, is not necessarily any


balanced reciprocity as in networks such as the Kula rings (Malinowski 1960) and compadrazgo systems (Ravicz 1967).

From the Late Woodland point of view, territo-rial and resource stresses in the Upper Mississippi valley (Boszhardt 2012; Theler and Boszhardt 2000, 2006) may have motivated many Effi gy Mound people to seek a new way of living and thus be quite agree-able to participate in what amounted to a revitaliza-tion movement (Wallace 1956). Adoptees became connected to the infl uential and powerful Cahokian “founder’s cult” (Pauketat 2008). Factors that might have attracted many Late Woodland peoples to part-ner up would have been the opportunity to ally with a clearly powerful group as either a status-building device within a transegalitarian network (Staeck 1994, 1998a) or as a simple means of ensuring they were not placed at a comparative disadvantage as their neigh-bors bought into the Mississippian “family.” Late Woodland peoples were not necessarily given an offer they couldn’t refuse, but any single group’s options became constrained during and just after this short period of initial alliance-building: walk away (some probably did), move south to join the Mississippians in their communities (Alt 2012; Emerson and Har-grave 2000), or consolidate with others in the region to create new networks and identities (Emerson 1999).

Radin (1948, 1949), and then Griffi n (1960), Lurie (1974), and Staeck (1993, 1994, 1999, 2000), examined HCC oral traditions and history and concluded (1) that the HCC traditions describe and place a high value on hierarchical behavior expressed to a far greater degree than evinced in the historic-era tribes, and (2) that such greater sociopolitical complexity (inequality, ranking, hierarchies) may have characterized the social systems of the precontact HCC. (The Dhegihan groups also are identifi ed as having once had a more complex sociopo-litical structure [Griffi n 1960].) C. Mason (1993a) ques-tions these reconstructions on the basis that Radin’s telling of these stories and his interpretations were shaped by what amounts to another case of feedback from archaeological sources: Radin became convinced that North American prehistory derived from the spread of infl uences from Mesoamerican civilizations. He believed the Ho-Chunk in particular descended from or at least inherited Maya traditions, or perhaps Maya as fi ltered through the Mississippians. As C. Mason points out, there was no ethnographic or his-torical evidence to support this contention, only an outdated archaeological framework which itself had no solid basis. So, can the Ho-Chunk stories be used to indicate past complexity? Ioway traditions are simi-lar (e.g., Skinner 1925, 1926) and may be free of such feedback, lending some credence to their authenticity

paintings, associated sacra, and ritual dramas were situated and enacted in shrines or other locations of power and mystery belonging to the dispersed soci-eties that were being joined with the semidivine Mis-sissippian leader or lineage (Duncan and Diaz-Gra-nados 2000). If adoption proceeded “as a metaphor of rebirth” (Hall 1991:31), there would have been no more appropriate location for such rituals than a cave or deep rockshelter such as Gottschall, a portal to and from the underworld (Salzer and Rajnovich 2000). Another likely location would be a prominent land-mark already “tagged” as sacred space through centu-ries of prior ritual and ceremonial use and augmented by mounds whose construction also opens “a portal between upper and lower worlds” (Pauketat 2008:65; see Boszhardt et al. 2012; Green and Rodell 1994).

Having developed a ranked, hierarchical politi-cal structure in the American Bottom by ca. A.D. 1050, Early Mississippian groups established far-fl ung out-posts, colonies, or missions, surely adopting many “hinterland” groups as fi ctive kinfolk through ritual means (see e.g., Boszhardt et al. 2012; Finney 2000, 2013; Green and Rodell 1994; Hall 1991; Pauketat 2008, 2009). The motivations for both Mississippians and Late Woodlanders to engage in such adoptions were perhaps many and varied. On the Mississippian side, even though elite lineages could probably attain only local rather than regional control, consolidation of even local power required establishment of long-distance connections and alliances (with cosmological forces as well as with people) that could supply status-enhancing goods and power. Elites needed to accumu-late exotica and well crafted items from the edges of the known world in order to confi rm and consolidate their semidivine nature, which legitimized their sta-tus (Green 1997; Helms 1993). In the crowded and competitive environment of the American Bottom in early Mississippian times, local control required broad regional connections. Establishing viable relationships with far-fl ung groups required their adoption into elite lineages, symbolized by the accumulation of prestige goods. Such goods arrived in the American Bottom during the Lohmann and Stirling phases, when elites were adopting hinterland groups as fi ctive kin. We see the archaeological material that resulted from these endeavors as the prestige-good tips of what was prob-ably an iceberg of fi ctive-kin adoptions, alliance-mak-ing, religious conversions, and infl uence peddling, not a network of real exchange of goods or services. Reci-procity was expected, as in any exchange system, with a developed, or at least expected, set of rights and obli-gations between individuals or groups at some time in the future. But it was an asymmetrical relationship instigated by the Mississippians (Stoltman 2000), not


as the Stirling phase), and he identifi ed several inter-mediate and transitional sites and complexes as well. With their elaborate temple-towns and clearly ranked social organization, Mississippians supplied evidence of a culture consistent with Radin’s and Griffi n’s expectations for the complexity hinted at in HCC oral traditions. In Griffi n’s model, Mississippians migrated north from the American Bottom during Cahokia’s peak, settling at Aztalan, Apple River, Silvernale, and other locales. When they arrived in the north, these “proto-Oneota” people “found resident Woodland populations of the Lake Michigan Effi gy Mound peri-od occupying the land” (Griffi n 1960:856). The Missis-sippians’ transition to Oneota involved simplifi cation of their culture although they retained oral traditions of their past. These simpler cultures with their rich Mississippian past thus formed the Oneota and, even-tually, the ethnographic Ho-Chunk and Chiwere peo-ples. It is unclear what happened to the Effi gy Mound people, although Griffi n suggests that they, too, ulti-mately adopted an Oneota-like culture but not that of the HCC. Griffi n thus derived the HCC from Cahokia Mississippians, not from Effi gy Mound.

Griffi n’s model of Oneota genesis has been super-seded in many respects as debate on the subject has intensifi ed over the past fi ve decades. Several schol-ars have proposed historical or processual means to generate Oneota out of, usually, some combination of Late Woodland (principally Effi gy Mound) predeces-sors and Mississippian infl uence (e.g., Gibbon 1972, 1982; Hall 1962, 1986; Hurley 1974; Overstreet 1997; Stoltman 1986; Stoltman and Christiansen 2000; The-ler and Boszhardt 2000, 2006). Several models posit an Oneota emergence parallel with, independent of, or even prior to the rise of Cahokia Mississippian. Most notably, Lurie (1974) returned to the question of how HCC oral traditions of a Mississippian-like past can be compatible with an Oneota archaeological record that evinces little evidence for a high level of complex-ity. Rather than treating Oneota as an archaeological expression of the prehistoric Ho-Chunk, Lurie instead derived the Ho-Chunk directly from the Mississippi-ans of Aztalan. As noted earlier, others (e.g., C. Mason 1976, 1993b), expressed doubts about the connection between the Ho-Chunk tribe and the prehistoric Lake Winnebago focus Oneota of eastern Wisconsin, a tie that many believe “ought to” exist even as it has resisted confi rmation (R. Mason 1993:400). But Lurie went straight to the heart of the matter and said that because both Oneota and Effi gy Mound archaeology were incompatible with Ho-Chunk tradition and eth-nohistory, it was reasonable to propose an alternative archaeological signature for the group, one that match-es the apparent hierarchical sociopolitical structure of

and thus possibly to the inference that Radin did not shape the Ho-Chunk stories to match his preconceived notions of prehistory. Further critical study is needed, but the Ioway and Ho-Chunk stories do appear to refer to a complex past, although as noted earlier whether that past is mythical or real is not crucial. Addition-ally, the political organization refl ected in the stories is important but not crucial for present purposes; rath-er, the use of these stories in ritual adoption is key to understanding their historical contexts.

Analysis of the Red Horn cycle and other Ho-Chunk oral traditions suggests that the society por-trayed therein “appeared to have well-developed ranking, quite unlike the Winnebago as they have been known through the past three centuries” (Hall 1997:151), although historic-era Ho-Chunk heredi-tary differentiation is certainly evident (Lurie 1978). Staeck attempted to understand ancient Ho-Chunk social structure by conducting systematic analyses of sub-texts, i.e., “the repetitively portrayed connections between characters, identity and social obligations” as recorded by Radin (Staeck 1999:72). Radin’s data revealed evidence of rigidly hierarchical organization and social stratifi cation in the traditions (Staeck 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000). Hierarchical relations are attenuated in the historic HCC groups, and even fewer indica-tions of such complexity appear in either Oneota or Effi gy Mound archaeological contexts. Long-house villages and intensive agricultural practices among the late prehistoric Oneota suggest matricentered but not hierarchical organization (Hollinger 1995), and Staeck’s hypothetical model of Oneota status differ-entiation suffers from a self-described lack of data (2000:109). Effi gy Mound contains evidence of nei-ther matricentered nor hierarchical behaviors, despite Staeck’s efforts to fi nd them (1998a, 1998b). Some degree of “masked” ranking may be present in Effi gy Mound as Rosebrough suggests (2010:568–573), but it would have been nowhere near as hierarchical as HCC oral tradition would suggest. Griffi n (1960) and Lurie (1974), however, pointed in the appropriate direction for such complex sociopolitics—the Mississippians—although they suggested widely divergent means of bringing a Mississippian structure into the stream of Ho-Chunk history.

Griffi n’s “Hypothesis for the Prehistory of the Winnebago” (1960) worked from the then and still widely accepted premise that Oneota formed the archaeological signature of the prehistoric HCC groups (Griffi n 1937; McKern 1945; Mott 1938). In seeking Oneota origins (Griffi n 1995), Griffi n looked south to the Mississippians of the Cahokia region. He saw a likely predecessor in the Cahokia “Old Village” complex (constituted largely by what is now known


style that were not indigenous to the Effi gy Mound ideological system. The Mississippian ideology, undoubtedly associated with numerous elements of expressive culture, quickly transformed Late Wood-land societies. The rituals and symbols associated with the spread of Mississippian ideologies had not been part of the belief systems of indigenous groups such as Effi gy Mound but were adopted by local groups as part of their initiation into the broader Mis-sissippian ideological world. This pattern of adop-tion and fi ctive-kin alliance-making apparently began at the time of the sudden emergence of the Cahokia paramountcy, the “Big Bang” around A.D. 1050 (Hall 2006; Pauketat 1994, 2008). Groups whose myths and rituals are of Mississippian origin (i.e., HCC and Dhegihans) may be descended from groups whose cultures were transformed at that time, or they may trace descent more directly from the “source” groups of (presumedly) the American Bottom. Either way, the adoption of Effi gy Mound people into this net-work and the rapid and nearly simultaneous demise of the Effi gy Mound culture indicate that the Red Horn cycle and associated beliefs and rituals were not part of Effi gy Mound life in pre-(Mississippian) contact times, and therefore that the Effi gy Mound people were not the “ideological ancestors” (Salzer 1993:113) of the peoples who maintained these ide-ologies in the historic period. Instead, a major part of the ideological ancestry of HCC (and probably other) peoples derives—via adoption—from Mississippian sources.

Oneota emerged around A.D. 1100–1200 (Boszhardt 1999, 2004). Construction of effi gy mounds ended at or just before this time. Populations con-verged on key locales such as Red Wing and Apple River (Fleming 2009; Millhouse 2012), which are situ-ated at the northwestern and southwestern corners, respectively, of the Effi gy Mound territory. By aggre-gating in these localities, Late Woodland people, many of whom had been affected by Mississippian contacts and ideologies, left other parts of the Mis-sissippi Valley and adjacent regions vacant for a few generations. The ethnogenesis of Oneota and other Upper Mississippian identities occurred via creoliza-tion (Millhouse 2012) in these clusters of terminal Late Woodland populations. Tribalization linked these formerly dispersed societies, ultimately in competi-tion with or resistance to the Middle Mississippians (Benn 2014; Emerson 2012). Likely accompanying greater local population size, density, and sedentism were increased interactions through exchange rela-tionships as well as intergroup confl ict. (For descrip-tions, explications, and case studies of this scenario, see, e.g., Benn 1989, 2014; Finney 2000; Fleming 2009;

Ho-Chunk prehistory. She hypothesized that Aztalan was the earliest of the ancestral Ho-Chunk villages in Wisconsin, followed not by Oneota but by additional Middle Mississippian–like sites in the region. This non-Oneota model is not widely accepted because no post-Aztalan Mississippian sites have been found in Wisconsin. However, the model has value because it exemplifi es that scholars have had to think “outside the box” when trying to reconcile HCC traditions of a past hierarchical organization with the absence of such evidence in Oneota and Effi gy Mound.

As an alternative to the existing models, I sug-gest that the complexity indicated in the oral texts and traditions does indeed refer to the real or imagined world of the Mississippians but that these traditions were brought into the late Effi gy Mound world as part of the rituals of the Effi gy Mound peoples’ adoption into Mississippian lineages. The HCC traditions that evince complexity are mostly waika—stories that are true (Staeck 1994)—so they would have been impart-ed as oral literature much as Bible stories were con-veyed before being written down. The new mythology included several syncretic ideological elements, com-patible with and layered onto the existing cosmology that included the dual division of the universe into earth/water and sky realms. However, the continued construction of effi gy mounds was irreconcilable with the new religion. Rebirth via adoption of the Missis-sippian worldview and its history—again, whether mythic or real is irrelevant—is precisely what led to the cessation of effi gy mound building. One could not adhere to both the Effi gy Mound and Mississippian belief systems. Timothy Pauketat explains why:

[T]he earthen citationality [the way in which practices reference previous ones] of Wisconsin’s effi gy mound builders might well have been inconsistent with the new Cahokia Mississip-pian narrative, painted on the Gottschall Rock-shelter wall and, not coincidentally, embodied by intruders or converted locals residing at a series of likely Cahokian outposts or missions in southern Wisconsin (see Stoltman 2000). From that point of view, the end of effi gy mound con-struction was a consequence of the decoupling of the old practices from their referents and their enchainment [i.e., the association of one force to another] to the new referents, those of a for-eign founder’s cult centered at a distant place (Cahokia) where the powers of wa-kan-da [the mysterious life-force] were being gathered. The effect was to dissolve effi gy mound building in Wisconsin [Pauketat 2008:76–77].

The Red Horn cycle and associated myths are associated with the spread of an ideology and art


Mound and Oneota mortuary ritual behavior differ in the extreme: Effi gy Mound burial involved individual (occasionally communal) secondary interment within conical mounds and within mounds that were built to resemble the principal spirits of the earth/water or sky realms, and that are segregated from occupa-tion sites; Oneota burial often involved primary burial within individual graves in unmounded cemeteries (and occasionally in mounds), as well as primary buri-al within graves beneath longhouse fl oors and sec-ondary burial in other parts of the village. Such polar distinctions refl ect different social orders, symbol sets, and identities (Benn 1979).

What do these differences mean in terms of the relationships between Effi gy Mound and Oneota? It would seem that much of the Oneota heritage would have to belong to Effi gy Mound and other proximate Late Woodland groups unless one believes large-scale Mississippian immigration occurred. Bioarchaeologi-cal data do not indicate such an infl ux, yet neither do they show a straightforward Effi gy Mound–Oneota connection. Four decades ago, Elizabeth Glenn (1974) concluded on the basis of multivariate biodistance analyses that Oneota skeletal remains did not evince affi liation with either Effi gy Mound or Mississippian populations. For that matter, there was great variability even between Oneota groups, indicating “mixed origi-nal affi liations” for Oneota (1974:142). (See the useful summaries of Glenn’s work in Myster and O’Connell 1997:267–268, 275, 294–295.) Subsequent studies by Scherer (1998) and Vradenburg (2000) confi rmed the interregional variability Glenn had identifi ed. These data conform to expectations if Oneota ethnogenesis proceeded via amalgamation and reorganization of multiple groups. Although Effi gy Mound bioarchae-ological data are inconclusive in this regard because of small sample sizes, in the future “DNA analysis of Effi gy Mound human skeletal material from well-doc-umented contexts may provide some insight into who they ‘became’” (Lillie 2001:83).

Late Woodland people from the Mississippi Val-ley were not the only groups that coalesced to form the Oneota tradition: some Plains Village populations as well as Mississippians probably participated (e.g., Rodell 1997). And not all Late Woodland groups nec-essarily took the Oneota path. Biodistance study sug-gests that while there was no direct Effi gy Mound–Oneota relationship, “distinct biological continuity exists between the Late Woodland (Kathio), Effi gy Mound, and Big Stone series” examined in a study of dental morphology (Scherer 1998:98). The apparent connection of Effi gy Mound and Kathio (Minnesota Late Woodland, ca. A.D. 600–1100) to the Big Stone phase of southwestern Minnesota and eastern South

Millhouse 2012; Rodell 1997; Stoltman and Christian-sen 2000; Theler and Boszhardt 2000.)

Cahokia connections were no longer signifi cant in the Upper Mississippi valley after ca. A.D. 1200. Despite or perhaps because of the retrenchment of those alliances, interactions among various groups in the area continued through the web-like networks that had connected societies for centuries (Green 1997; Hall 1991). Oneota societies spread throughout the Mid-west after A.D. 1200, including into some of the former Effi gy Mound areas. Many places that were centers of Effi gy Mound life ca. A.D. 700–1050 were never occu-pied by Oneota people, but Oneota group continuities were established in several regions (see papers in Hol-linger and Benn 1998).

In the Driftless Region of southwest Wiscon-sin and adjacent northeast Iowa, cessation of effi gy mound building accompanied the appearance of a new Late Woodland complex that incorporated “hybrid” Mississippian and Plains Village character-istics but no Oneota features. These sites date to ca. A.D. 1050–1150 (Benn 2014; Benn and Green 2000; Finney 2013; Finney and Stoltman 1991; Tiffany 1982) and may represent either the direct descendants of the local Effi gy Mound people or groups of new settlers from places like northern Illinois where some of these artifact styles probably developed. Subsequently, the region was largely abandoned. Did these people move to the Red Wing or Apple River regions, along with many other ex–Effi gy Mounders, to reinvent their societies along Oneota lines? Did they move west into the Plains Village communities with which they had been interacting, or into other regions?

The people of the Upper Mississippi valley pro-foundly transformed themselves in several ways between ca. A.D. 1050 and 1200. Boszhardt (2012) goes so far as to term the change a “revolution.” In the most simplistic sense, they entered that era as Late Wood-landers and most of them exited as Oneota or other Upper Mississippians. Ethnogenesis at Red Wing and elsewhere on the Effi gy Mound frontiers involved aggregation of various groups (Effi gy Mound and non–Effi gy Mound), recombination and creolization, and development of new identities. The newly formed groups were linked through their new religion and maintained affi nal and other relationships. The dif-ferences between them and their predecessors were profound, especially in terms of identity as expressed through ritual and mortuary behavior. Mortuary ritual is one of the strongest expressions of ethnic identity; “ritual and symbolic practices are important because of their close linkage to ‘the underlying social order and specifi c symbol-set of a given society’ (Beck 1995:171–172)” (Emerson and Hargrave 2000:2). Effi gy


peoples involving Mississippian-like sociopolitical complexity may refl ect the appropriation of that his-tory as part of a ritual adoption package symbolized in the maskette–Red Horn complex and the Braden art style. Shortly after the demise of Effi gy Mound and its replacement by Mississippian-inspired ideology, the transformed societies developed new—Oneota—identities and relations of production.

In the NAGPRA era, we seek to identify “a rela-tionship of shared group identity” between mod-ern tribes and “an identifi able earlier group.” The Late Woodland–Oneota relationship is marked by profound discontinuities. Effi gy Mound comprised broadly dispersed groups with variable material cul-tures, making it “unlikely that the effi gy mound build-ers identifi ed themselves as a discrete tribal entity” (Rosebrough 2010:157). Oneota ethnogenesis occurred in this social landscape through creolization, conver-sion, and coalescence. Therefore, group continuities and, thus, relationships of shared group identities cannot be traced prior to ca. A.D. 1200. In this sense, although effi gy mounds have meaning and impor-tance to tribes that claim ancestral connections as well as to relative newcomers in the region (Zimmerman et al. 2001; Zimmerman and Makes Strong Move 2008), and although some mounds were reused for burial by later groups (Birmingham and Eisenberg 2000:175-177), Effi gy Mound as an archaeological taxon is “cul-turally unidentifi able.”

Acknowledgments

This article is a revised and updated version of work originally conducted as part of a cultural affi li-ation study for Effi gy Mounds National Monument (Green 2001a) and presented as a paper at the Midwest Archaeological Conference (Green 2001b). I thank the National Park Service for supporting the initial study and in particular Michelle Watson and Michael Evans of the NPS Midwest Support Offi ce for their assis-tance. I also thank my co-Principal Investigator Larry Zimmerman for his invaluable contributions through-out the course of that project, and the entire staff of the Offi ce of the State Archaeologist, The University of Iowa, for their support. As I prepared and revised the study, David Benn, Robert Birmingham, Robert Boszhardt, Marvin Jeter, and John Staeck generously shared ideas and manuscripts. I received helpful com-ments from those colleagues as well as from Warren DeBoer, Fred Finney, Robert Hall, Dale Henning, Eric Hollinger, Nancy Lurie, Ronald Mason, Willow Pow-ers, and Amy Rosebrough. James Theler’s work on Woodland and, in particular, Effi gy Mound lifeways

Dakota is notable for several reasons. Big Stone dates to ca. A.D. 1100–1300, immediately following Effi gy Mound and Kathio, and is characterized by collared Late Woodland–like ceramics (Anfi nson 1997:104). Furthermore, an Effi gy Mound–Big Stone relationship is consistent with the Hidatsa origin proposal of Ahler et al. (1991). Wisconsin Late Woodlanders who did not join the Oneota emergence would have moved fi rst to western Minnesota and then to the Middle Missouri region by A.D. 1600, where they coalesced with other Siouan speakers to constitute the Hidatsa tribe. The Hidatsas apparently “brought onto the Missouri the custom of shaping animal effi gies from boulders to which they periodically returned to perform rites for success in hunting” (Bowers 1948:131; see also Bow-ers 1965:369-370). This proposition reminds us that the historical processes of ethnogenesis involve multiple ancestors and multiple descendants.

Conclusion

[W]ho were the Effi gy Builders? This is not an easy question to answer, and we do not expect to answer it in any positive or indisputable man-ner, but merely propose to give suggestions, and leave our readers to draw their own inferences. It is not likely that, in the absence of all tradition or reliable knowledge on the part of the Indian tribes who have dwelt here since the advent of the white man that any one will arrive at com-plete certainty in this matter. Opinions will differ even if we give all the evidence that is possible for from the same data, different persons will draw different conclusions and there is not posi-tive proof possible [Peet 1887:67].

In this article I have considered data and argu-ments regarding the identity of the builders of Mid-western effi gy mounds. Recent research supports Peet’s suggestion that semi-autonomous, interacting groups (though not separate “clans”) were respon-sible for the different forms and styles of mounds that clustered in various locales within the Effi gy Mound region (Rosebrough 2010). And the evidence is still compatible with his conclusion (Peet 1893) that Siouan-speaking people probably built the effi gies, if only because there are no other likely candidates.

Peet would also be pleased to know that we have developed a far richer understanding of Effi gy Mound identity over the past 125 years. Several lines of evi-dence show that effi gy mound building ended around one thousand years ago during a short period of ter-ritorial, economic, and ideological reorganization. The outwardly incongruous mythic history of the HCC


things considered, the credibility of the Shafer-Wiscopawis report of mound building is suspect.

4 John Blackhawk’s (1929) report of Ho-Chunk effi gy mound building traditions has similar problematic elements and may additionally refer to reuse of existing mounds (Bir-mingham and Eisenberg 2000:174–177).

5 Effi gy Mound (capitalized) refers to the archaeological taxon that has been variously termed an aspect, phase, cul-ture, period, variant, and tradition. It is left unqualifi ed to sidestep disputes of terminology that are not germane to the focus of this article.

6 Henceforth, “Mississippian” unless qualifi ed denotes Middle Mississippian culture as exemplifi ed at Cahokia and closely related communities.

7 Ideology, as used in archaeology, can be understood in a general sense as a worldview or in Marxian terms as “encompassing the ideas, beliefs, and values specifi c to a social group that assist in the promotion and legitimation of the interests of the group” (Van Dyke 2011:234). Oral tradi-tion, as defi ned by the historian Jan Vansina, refers “both to a process and to its products. The products are oral messages based on previous oral messages, at least a generation old. The process is the transmission of such messages by word of mouth over time until the disappearance of the message” (Vansina 1985:3).

8 Mythology means the body of stories associated with a culture, institution, or person; or a body or collection of myths belonging to a people and addressing their origin, his-tory, deities, ancestors, and heroes. A myth is a traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves a fundamental purpose in the worldview of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natu-ral world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals of society. Therefore, myths do not necessarily adhere to or strive for objective or historical accuracy and are not meant to do so. In non-literate cultures, mythology can be equated with oral tradition (Free Dictionary 2013).

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Identity, Ideology, and the Effigy Mound–Oneota Transformation

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