BOARD OF
ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM ADVISORS

Copyright by
ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM
1958

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 5

Paleo-Indians 9

Archaic Man 12

Cultures and Cultural Change 19

Initial Woodland 20

Food Storers (Advanced Phase) 23

The Hopewellian Civilization (Classic Phase) 26

Final Woodland 30

Middle Mississippi 34

Upper Mississippi 42

The Illini 45

The Indians Leave Illinois 54

Summary of Illinois Prehistory 54

Glossary 59

Bibliography 67

Diagram: Stream of Culture 57

Table I: Stages and Archaeological Units 4

Table II: Radiocarbon Dates 8

Table III: Cultural Characteristics of Archaeological Units 70

STAGE

SUBSTAGE

ARCHAEOLOGICAL UNITS

PATTERN

PHASE

SUBCULTURE

TYPE STATIONS

IV. MACHINE AGE

Lacking in the Americas

III. FARMING

DOMESTIC PLANTS AND FOOD-DRAFT ANIMALS

Lacking in the Americas

PLANT-RAISING

MISSISSIPPI

Historic Illini: 1673-1833

[Illini Tribes]

Brandt II (Ra^v1)

Upper: 1100 (?)-1600 A.D.

Langford

Fisher II and III

Middle: 1000-1500 A.D.

Cumberland

Kincaid Site

Cahokia

Dickson Mound (F^o34) and Fout’s Village (F^v664)

Protomiss

Dillinger Village Site

WOODLAND (Hoe-culture)

Final: 200 (?)-1000 A.D.

Effigy Mound

Tampico

Maples Mills Site

Stone Vault

Spencer Mound Group

Jersey Bluff

Otter Creek Sites

Raymond

Raymond Site

Lewis

Lewis (Pp^v1A)

Classic: 500 B.C-500 A.D.

Hopewell (South)

Hubele Village (Wh^v30)
Wilson Mound (Wh^o6)

Hopewell (North)

Clear Lake Village (T^v1)
Liverpool Mound (F^o77-II)

II. SELF-DOMESTICATION

FOOD-STORING

WOODLAND (Ceramic)

Advanced: 1000 (?)-100 (?) B.C.

Crab Orchard

Sugar Camp Hill Village (Wm^v1)

Baumer

Baumer Hamlet (Mx^v30)

HUNTING-COLLECTING

Initial: 2500-500 B.C.

Morton

F^o14-II and F^v35

Red Ochre

Hilltop Mound (F^o11)

Black Sand

Liverpool Hamlet and Cemetery (F^v88 and F^o77-I)

LITHIC

Archaic: 8000-2500 B.C.

Terminal

Ferry Site (Hn^v251) and Godar Cemetery

Medial

Modoc II

Simple

Modoc I

Paleo-Indian: 50,000 (?)-8,000 (?) B.C.

Folsom

Fluted points as isolated finds only.

Clovis

I. NATURAL MAN

PROTO-CULTURAL

None found in America

INTRODUCTION

This paper is primarily planned for the layman, the beginning student of prehistory and others interested in acquiring a general understanding of how primitive man lived during his successive occupations of Illinois and neighboring areas in the more important archaeological periods. Most of the archaeological data for the chief cultures or ways of life are given in references in the accompanying bibliography of technical publications selected as those from which (in the opinion of the writer) the information can be most easily gleaned.

The reconstructions given of the cultural features, where not those ordinarily inferred from archaeological findings, are based on a study of the practices commonly found among primitive people now, or until recently, living in the same stage or substage. These are tentative conclusions resulting from a study of fifty tribes in the Self-Domestication (pre-farming) stage and forty in the Plant-Raising substage. Because primitive tribes which are under pressure from people with advanced food-draft-animal agriculture or with machine industry or which are in a transitional condition between two adjacent stages are disorganized or drastically changing a formerly stabilized mode of life, great care has been exercised in drawing general conclusions from their cultural features.

The reconstructions of the perishable objects shown in the drawings are generally in keeping with the culture in which they are exhibited but cannot be vouched for as to their detailed form. The handle of an adze, the shape of a cabin roof, the headdress of a tribal chief each served the purpose for which they were made and their exact form was and is of no more consequence in the culture than the fashions in women’s hats or the fins on an automobile are in our own. The details in cultures serve to set them apart from each other; it is the basic and significant features and subfeatures that determine relationships and permit the most useful classification.

The study mentioned above is still incomplete, but results so far obtained indicate:

1. That man in the same stage (and substage) of cultural development tends to invent and employ the same broad social and spiritual features, regardless of surroundings.

2. That where significant differences arise between substages of the same stage, they are (at least sometimes) linked with peculiarities of climate and/or natural resources which the people have seized upon and exploited to the improvement of their economic situation.

3. That many details within these broad types of economic, social and spiritual features appear to vary unpredictably within the range of available possibilities.

The stage and criterion for each were proposed in an earlier issue (No. 6) of this series, Man’s Venture In Culture, (Deuel 1950, pp. 5-12) as:

1. Natural Man (Protocultural), when “man” presumably employed sticks and stones as implements and weapons.

2. Self-Domestication, following the discovery of the principle of the conchoidal fracturing of flint and its control, and the invention of tool and weapon types.

3. Farming or Food-Raising, due to the discovery that grains (grasses) and food-draft animals could be bred and raised in captivity.

4. Inanimate Power Machine (Machine Age), after the discovery of the availability of water and wind as sources for energy and the adaptation of animal-driven machines to utilize them.

Man in the wild or Protocultural stage is thought not to have reached the Americas. The oxlike mammals were not domesticated in America for drawing ploughs and vehicles, turning grain mills or to serve as a continuous food supply source. Consequently, we are concerned in the following discussion only with peoples in the Self-Domestication stage and the Plant-Raising substage of Farming.

In ordinary language, the word “culture” is used in a diversity of senses. In these pages it is used in one of two ways, the one employed being readily understood from the context. In a general sense, culture means the significant beliefs, customary activities and social prohibitions that are peculiar to man (together with the man-made tools, weapons and other material objects that he finds or has found necessary) that modify, limit or enhance in some manner, most of his discernible natural activities due to and arising from his physical animal inheritance and organization. Culture in a specific sense refers to the significant cultural features of a group or period under consideration.

For convenience, any cultural activity according to its dominant purpose may be spoken of as belonging to one of three aspects of culture, (a) economic (technological and intellectual); (b) social (and political); and (c) spiritual (religious, artistic and recreational). To lesser degrees, most cultural activities have relationships with the two aspects other than the dominant.

Certain prevalent archaeological designations have been changed to remove time implications (e.g. “early” and “late” Woodland to Initial [beginning] and Final [end of an archaeological series]), or to shorten (e.g. “Tennessee-Cumberland” or “Gordon-Fewkes” to Cumberland).

Technical terms have generally been avoided; but where it has seemed necessary to retain them or to use words in a special sense, they are explained in the text or can be found in the glossary. The terms pattern and phase are those generally employed in the McKern system of classification, for the larger groupings into which it is customary to place the “cultures” as determined from the typology of the artifacts, their association in the assemblage and pertinent data recovered at a site (or local community) with due regard to circumstances of time and location of other sites nearby and over a larger area. The largest unit is the pattern which is made up of a number of phases. Cultural divisions smaller than these units are spoken of here as subcultures.

The approximate relationships of the archaeological units to the broader cultural stages and substages are given in Table I, page 4. The succession and coexistence of the archaeological units is indicated in the diagram “The Stream of Culture”, p. 57. The summary of “Characteristics of the Archaeological-Cultural Units” occurs on pages 70-76.

This is a story mainly of Illinois when occupied by American Indians but it would not give a reasonably true picture without showing the known extensions of some of the cultures into surrounding areas and the probable intrusions from outside the state.

Of necessity in attempting a summary of the archaeology of Illinois and adjacent areas, the writer has had to lean heavily on the field work and reports of the many anthropologists who have contributed so much to the present understanding of the American Indian in the United States. To this invaluable source material and to these able scientists the indebtedness of the writer is acknowledged to be very great indeed. In the compass of a work of this type it is impossible to name them or give them credit for original or similar views, nor is it practicable to include in the bibliography all the publications used.

Acknowledgment of assistance is made especially to Georg K. Neumann, Joseph R. Caldwell and Melvin L. Fowler, Milton D. Thompson, Ruth Kerr, Nora Deuel and Orvetta Robinson for reading and discussing the manuscript from various viewpoints, to Dr. James B. Griffin for helpful information on the dates of sites and of archaeological data, to Irvin Peithmann, Southern Illinois University, for photographs furnished, for information on sites he had discovered and the privilege of visiting them in his company, to George Langford for photographs and data regarding the Fisher site, to Charles Hodge for all photographs reproduced not otherwise credited, and to Jerry Connolly, Bettye Broyles, Barbara Parmalee and Jeanne McCarty for their excellent drawings. Without all this considerable and valuable aid the publication could not have been completed.

TABLE II. RADIOCARBON DATES[1]

PALEO-INDIANS, BIG GAME HUNTERS, DISCOVER A NEW WORLD (50,000? to 8,000? B.C.)[5]

Man probably discovered America as early as 50,000 years ago and gradually occupied the two continents in the succeeding millenia. The first discoverers of the New World were of Mongolian racial stock as are the American Indians. They crossed from Siberia to Alaska over an existing land bridge, over ice, or possibly by wading or by boat over the shallow sea in the wake of mammoth, mastodon or musk ox herds on whose flesh they lived. Following in the path of the huge animals, they made their way possibly up the Yukon from its mouth to the divide, thence down into the Mackenzie Basin, and along a great river where now exist a chain of lakes and so into the Mississippi Valley.

The migrants trailing each herd doubtless traveled in their several ways in family groups, uniting from time to time to trap and kill one of the great shaggy beasts. When the animals stopped, the families bedded down nearby in the most sheltered spots available taking care not to lose touch with the herd. These were wanderers, not explorers, nor were they seeking new homes; they were hunters that traveled where the herd led.

Their belongings, by our standards, were pitifully few, their way of life laborious, full of hardship and danger, but their needs were simple and their means of meeting them doubtless seemed ample to these hardy hunters. The chief weapon was a thrusting spear with a chipped flint head and a long shaft to keep the hunter as far from harm’s way as possible when attacking the dangerous animal. The narrow width of the spearpoint made it easy to withdraw from a wound and attack again. Our evidence that the Paleo-Indians (as the Big Game Hunters are commonly called) lived in Illinois are these same spearheads (Clovis and Folsom types), usually grooved or fluted lengthwise of the blade, which are scattered over much of the Illinois prairie as isolated finds. No campsites of this people have yet been discovered in Illinois, as they have been in Pennsylvania, Alabama and several southwestern states. We can only surmise that in Illinois the hunters also had stone hammers and chipped flint scrapers as they had elsewhere.

Having arrived in the great central valley between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern ranges, the herds probably moved slowly from one browsing ground to another in the open corridor between glaciers. It may have taken them many years to reach what is now the United States. Eventually the herds wandered back and forth across the Mississippi Valley, and some favorable spots came to be used as camping grounds again and again by the same or different families. Such places would appeal immediately to the campers because of their protection from rain and the piercing glacial winds, the presence of a plentiful supply of wood and water. The possibility of our gaining a better knowledge of Paleo-Indian life in Illinois rests on the discovery of such a site, difficult now to recognize because it may no longer provide wood, water, or shelter of any sort.

There are in southern Illinois a number of simple linear stone piles known locally as “stone forts,” all in the same type of land structure. Each forms an obstruction five to fifteen feet in height across a narrow neck or ridge leading to the plateau top of a near-vertical-sided “promontory” projecting out into a stream valley, making an excellent corral, with no fence necessary except across the entrance. They may have been used in late Paleo-Indian times and on into the Archaic period for impounding large game and/or driving them over the cliff.

ARCHAIC MAN, FIRST SETTLER IN ILLINOIS (8000 to 2500 B.C.)[6]

We have reason to believe that the Big Game Hunters wandered over Illinois and the adjoining states during the last advance of the glaciers. Around 12,000 B.C. the climate in the Midwest became milder, the glaciers “retreated,” and the mighty torrents—the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Illinois that had torn irresistibly down their valleys—shrank into smaller, less turbulent rivers that occupied but a fraction of their former beds. The great shaggy mammoths, musk oxen, the ground sloths and the giant beavers moved westward toward the mountains or to the north.

Some of the Big Game Hunters with their families may have followed the retreating glacier and the herds; others stayed behind in country to which they had grown attached. With the great herds gone, the human families remaining in Illinois had to hunt the game animals that now frequented the area—deer, elk (wapiti), bear and smaller mammals. The large hunting party was no longer practicable. The game roamed over the country singly or by twos or threes and had to be stalked by one or two hunters. Families were compelled to live widely separated one from another in order to secure ample food throughout the year. Thus developed a new way of life which we call the Archaic phase or culture.

The hunter, as time passed, learned the secret habits of the deer, bear and raccoon and the more sluggish fishes. His wife and daughters learned the haunts and ways of the smaller animals, the rodents, turtles and lizards, discovered where edible greens, wild tubers, nuts and fruits grew and where mussels and snails abounded in creeks and rivers. With increasing knowledge Archaic man made better and fuller use of his changed and changing surroundings, food became more plentifully available, life easier and less hazardous though still very difficult from our standpoint.

With new needs and some leisure from the labor of providing food, Archaic man invented specialized devices, new methods of making tools and weapons, the more skillful among them shaping the objects carefully into symmetrical forms pleasing to the eye of others and strangely satisfying to the maker.[7] He pecked a hollow in both sides of his cobblestone hammer so he could grip it securely and use it more skillfully. He pecked and ground diorite and granite into adzes, hatchets (celts), and axes with a groove for hafting. These were a decided improvement over flaked choppers. He ground and polished banded and highly-colored shale (“slate”) into prismatic and cylindrical spearthrower weights and bored them with a tube, sand and water. His own person he decked out with necklaces and oval pendants (made by boring a hole in smooth flat waterworn pebbles) and with bone ornaments cut to shape, ground, engraved and polished. These he and his wife wore as had their forefathers but not the skin robes of glacial times.

As life grew easier, the family or local group increased in size. Sons brought their wives to the family dwelling place and built windbreaks near those of their parents. With food abundant the little settlement became a small cluster of households or a hamlet consisting possibly of sixty to seventy persons.

If Archaic Man Was Like Present-Day Archaic Tribes[8]

If Archaic man in Illinois lived as do present-day Archaic peoples, the family or local group, though they restricted themselves during most of the year to their hunting grounds which they guarded jealously from trespassers, did not camp continuously in one spot. At appropriate seasons of the year they rotated from one hamlet site to another to take advantage of the food resources of that locality. In winter perhaps they moved to a rock shelter, like that of Modoc in Randolph County, Illinois, near the wooded valleys of streams emptying into the river where deer and elk sought protection from the rigors of winter; in spring to upland lakes for duck and other waterfowl; and in autumn to wooded parklands to harvest acorns, hickory nuts, and berries. The spot chosen for each hamlet location was generally one that had been so used at that same season from time out of mind by the family and its forebears.