A series of buried ridged agricultural fields has been discovered at the Sand Lake Site (47 Lc44) in La Crosse County, Wisconsin. Associated artifacts, features, and assayed carbon samples demonstrate that the fields were constructed by Oneota people in the fifteenth century A.D. Evidence suggests that water control was a major function of the ridges.
The recovery of anomalous (red-slipped, shell/grog/sandstone-tempered) pottery from three sites in the Upper Mississippi Valley (UMV) prompted a petrographic analysis of thin sections of 21 vessels from these sites. The goal was to evaluate their possible derivation from the American Bottom, the nearest locality where such pottery commonly occurs. Among the 12 UMV vessels tempered with shell (nine red slipped), ten were determined, based on comparisons to thin sections of stylistically similar pottery from the American Bottom, to have essentially identical physical compositions. Additionally, four vessels suspected of being limestone-tempered were determined to have been tempered with a type of sandstone that out-crops only farther south in Illinois and Iowa. Of the three UMV sites, only the Fisher Mounds Site Complex (FMSC) produced the presumed exotic pottery in undisturbed, dated contexts. The petrographic evidence is consistent with the C-14 age and lithic assemblage at FMSC in suggesting an actual influx of people from the American Bottom into the UMV. The time of this influx, the Edelhardt phase of the Emergent Mississippian/Terminal Late Woodland period, ca. cal A.D. 1000-1050, is earlier than previously believed, i.e., precedes the main Mississippian period in the American Bottom.
Archaeological investigations at the Trempealeau and Fisher Mounds Site Complexes in western Wisconsin have provided definitive evidence of settlements and platform mounds in a portion of the Upper Mississippi Valley dating to the early Cahokian era, immediately priorto A.D. 1050 and ending before A.D. 1100. The presence ofCahokian earthen constructions, wall-trench buildings, ceramics, and imported stone tools associated with likely religious buildings and a series of possible farmsteads 900 river km north of Cahokia points to a unique intrusive occupation. We suggest that Trempealeau was a religious installation located proximate to a powerful, storied landform on the Mississippi River that afforded Cahokians access to the animate forces of that region. Probably built by and for Cahokians with minimal involvement on the part of living local people, the timing of this occupation hints at its close relationship to the founding of the American Indian city to the south.
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