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Indian Mounds of Wisconsin
More mounds were built by ancient Native American societies in Wisconsin than in any other region of North America--between 15,000 and 20,000 mounds, at least 4,000 of which remain today. Most impressive are the effigy mounds, huge earthworks sculpted into the shapes of birds, animals, and other forms, not found anywhere else in the world in such concentrations. This book, written for general readers but incorporating the most recent research, offers a comprehensive overview of these intriguing earthworks and answers the questions, Who built the mounds? When and why were they built?
The archaeological record indicates that most ancient societies in the upper Midwest built mounds of various kinds sometime between about 800 B.C. and A.D. 1200; the effigy mounds were probably built between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1200. Using evidence drawn from archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, the traditions and beliefs of present-day Native Americans in the Midwest, and recent research and theories of other archaeologists, Birmingham and Eisenberg present an important new interpretation of the effigy mound groups as "cosmological maps" that model ancient belief systems and social relations. It is likely that the distant ancestors of several present-day Native American groups were among the mound-building societies, in part because these groups’ current clan structures and beliefs are similar to the symbolism represented in the effigy mounds.
Indian Mounds of Wisconsin includes a travel guide to sites that can be visited by the public, including many in state, county, and local parks.
The archaeological record indicates that most ancient societies in the upper Midwest built mounds of various kinds sometime between about 800 B.C. and A.D. 1200; the effigy mounds were probably built between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1200. Using evidence drawn from archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, the traditions and beliefs of present-day Native Americans in the Midwest, and recent research and theories of other archaeologists, Birmingham and Eisenberg present an important new interpretation of the effigy mound groups as "cosmological maps" that model ancient belief systems and social relations. It is likely that the distant ancestors of several present-day Native American groups were among the mound-building societies, in part because these groups’ current clan structures and beliefs are similar to the symbolism represented in the effigy mounds.
Indian Mounds of Wisconsin includes a travel guide to sites that can be visited by the public, including many in state, county, and local parks.
264 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 27, 2017
November 2017, update: A second edition of this book published last month. It is a major upgrade from the first iteration, including better paper. Booksellers and libraries need to discard the earlier edition.
Just seventeen years ago, the earlier edition served as the first book-length overview of ancient earthworks in a hundred and fifty years, since Increase Lapham published his findings. Since the first edition, new and more accurate radiocarbon dating refines what we knew. New technologies in recent years, including remote below-grade sensing as well as light-detecting and ranging, known as LiDAR. These images in the new edition replace drawings and maps published earlier. Seventy pages of appendix, notes, bibliography, and index includes an updated list of mounds in Wisconsin open to the public.
January 2016, original comments and review:
Our story begins twelve thousand years ago. After the mile-thick glaciers melted and retreated, Paleo-Indians roamed in, eventually settling into villages, which naturally led to burial traditions.
Sometime around 800 BCE, these peoples began constructing the first burial mounds. They took different forms, such as chain, platform, conical, linear and effigy. The mound-building period ended around 1200 for reasons unknown.
Before 1650, explorers through the territory now known as Wisconsin, would have seen over fifteen thousand of these earthworks. Before understanding the significance of these mounds, the Euro-pioneers plowed through most of the them, starting about two hundred years ago. Maybe four thousand mounds remain.
In a swampy Milwaukee County, for example, where the confluence of three rivers feed into Lake Michigan, the mound builders built at least forty-two effigies on bluffs and shorelines, celebrating the water world. Those effigy mounds are long gone, although a couple of conical mounds survive in parks.
While this book explores the mystery of the mounds, it also covers the evolving fields of anthropology and archeology as applied to the discovery and understanding of these earthworks.
Increase Lapham, a pioneer Milwaukee scientist starting in the eighteen thirties, was the first to comprehend and document Wisconsin mound districts. Five of his maps and drawings appear in this book as illustrations. Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, early chronicler of plants, rocks, rivers, mounds and all things Wisconsin
The Milwaukee Public Museum and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, beginning in the nineteen forties, sent teams of anthropologists and archeologists to explore and document mounds around the state.
In 1949, a chemist in Chicago developed radiocarbon dating, which quickly brought a new precision to the sequence of mound building and artifacts. By the nineteen seventies, archeologists constructed the succession of prehistoric cultures back ten thousand years.
In the past, the excavation of burial mounds divided the scientific and Native American communities. These mounds represent cultural continuity as eternally sacred earthworks for Native Americans. Today the communities collaborate with a common goal of preserving the mounds and artifacts, whether burial or ceremonial.
But, in the end, two questions remained at the time of this book, in 2000: What stimulated Late Woodland people to coalesce then display their ideology on the landscape? And what caused them to stop?
Wisconsin enacted the Burial Sites Preservation act twenty years ago, which requires a five-foot buffer around each one.
Robert A. Birmingham, the author of this book, served as a source for a Page One article, expressing his displeasure over a proposed loosening of protection: http://www.jsonline.com/news/Wisconsi...
A terrific book. A thirty-five page appendix includes notes, bibliography and mound sites open to the public.
The two mounds remaining in Milwaukee County:
— Lake Park. http://www.wisconsinmounds.com/LakePa...
— State Fair Park. http://www.wisconsinmounds.com/StateF...
The largest remaining group of mounds or mound city in Wisconsin, fifty miles west of Milwaukee:
— http://www.mpm.edu/research-collectio...
Just seventeen years ago, the earlier edition served as the first book-length overview of ancient earthworks in a hundred and fifty years, since Increase Lapham published his findings. Since the first edition, new and more accurate radiocarbon dating refines what we knew. New technologies in recent years, including remote below-grade sensing as well as light-detecting and ranging, known as LiDAR. These images in the new edition replace drawings and maps published earlier. Seventy pages of appendix, notes, bibliography, and index includes an updated list of mounds in Wisconsin open to the public.
January 2016, original comments and review:
Our story begins twelve thousand years ago. After the mile-thick glaciers melted and retreated, Paleo-Indians roamed in, eventually settling into villages, which naturally led to burial traditions.
Sometime around 800 BCE, these peoples began constructing the first burial mounds. They took different forms, such as chain, platform, conical, linear and effigy. The mound-building period ended around 1200 for reasons unknown.
Before 1650, explorers through the territory now known as Wisconsin, would have seen over fifteen thousand of these earthworks. Before understanding the significance of these mounds, the Euro-pioneers plowed through most of the them, starting about two hundred years ago. Maybe four thousand mounds remain.
In a swampy Milwaukee County, for example, where the confluence of three rivers feed into Lake Michigan, the mound builders built at least forty-two effigies on bluffs and shorelines, celebrating the water world. Those effigy mounds are long gone, although a couple of conical mounds survive in parks.
While this book explores the mystery of the mounds, it also covers the evolving fields of anthropology and archeology as applied to the discovery and understanding of these earthworks.
Increase Lapham, a pioneer Milwaukee scientist starting in the eighteen thirties, was the first to comprehend and document Wisconsin mound districts. Five of his maps and drawings appear in this book as illustrations. Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, early chronicler of plants, rocks, rivers, mounds and all things Wisconsin
The Milwaukee Public Museum and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, beginning in the nineteen forties, sent teams of anthropologists and archeologists to explore and document mounds around the state.
In 1949, a chemist in Chicago developed radiocarbon dating, which quickly brought a new precision to the sequence of mound building and artifacts. By the nineteen seventies, archeologists constructed the succession of prehistoric cultures back ten thousand years.
In the past, the excavation of burial mounds divided the scientific and Native American communities. These mounds represent cultural continuity as eternally sacred earthworks for Native Americans. Today the communities collaborate with a common goal of preserving the mounds and artifacts, whether burial or ceremonial.
But, in the end, two questions remained at the time of this book, in 2000: What stimulated Late Woodland people to coalesce then display their ideology on the landscape? And what caused them to stop?
Wisconsin enacted the Burial Sites Preservation act twenty years ago, which requires a five-foot buffer around each one.
Robert A. Birmingham, the author of this book, served as a source for a Page One article, expressing his displeasure over a proposed loosening of protection: http://www.jsonline.com/news/Wisconsi...
A terrific book. A thirty-five page appendix includes notes, bibliography and mound sites open to the public.
The two mounds remaining in Milwaukee County:
— Lake Park. http://www.wisconsinmounds.com/LakePa...
— State Fair Park. http://www.wisconsinmounds.com/StateF...
The largest remaining group of mounds or mound city in Wisconsin, fifty miles west of Milwaukee:
— http://www.mpm.edu/research-collectio...
May 5, 2015
A good introduction for a reader with little or no prior knowledge on the subject, like myself. As the title implies, this book focuses mostly on the mound-building cultures of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest, but also discusses the predecessor and successor cultures of the mound-builders, as well.
February 1, 2012
For the archaeologists out there, this is a nice concise history of the prehistory of WI (well most of it anyway.) Great for textbook use, but it is a little dry for the average reader.
January 19, 2019
For anyone interested in the unique Wisconsin mound landscape and history, this is the most up-to-date resource book at the present time. Throughout history, there's been plenty of speculation and study about these mounds, and Birmingham and Rosebrough know as much about them as anyone else alive. They've taken pains here to give us a major update on this book's first edition. I very much appreciate their efforts, and the sheer amount of information given here.
Indian mounds exist throughout the eastern US, but Wisconsin (along with a strip of Iowa and Minnesota fronting the Mississippi River) is unique for its effigy mounds -- mounds built in the shape of thunderbirds, bears, canines, water spirits, geese, etc. Since these mounds were built during a limited time, from about 700 to 1200 AD, they are something of a mystery. By the time European travelers arrived in the area, no one was making effigy mounds anymore. The native people living in the area at the time had only guesses about why they had been built. Archaeologists and historians have been trying to figure this mystery out ever since.
This book is the most recent work accessible to lay readers to bring together current research and ideas on the topic. The listing at the end of the book of mounds the public can visit is very helpful (though naturally incomplete, due to space constraints). On the whole, the book does a nice job putting all this together. However I have a couple problems with it, one small and one kind of large:
1) Parts written by the main author (Birmingham) and co-author (Rosebrough) don't always fit together well. Rosebrough's second chapter, In Search of the Mound Builders, is new to this edition, and its tone and emphasis are quite a bit edgier (I'm tempted to say angrier) than Birmingham's more neutral, academic prose. I would love to see Rosebrough write her own book in her own way, since she's an expert on the topic in her own right, and obviously has a point of view about the history of mound research that deserves to be heard.
2) My main problem with this book is that the authors are in too much of a hurry to draw conclusions, and state some dubious ideas as if they were fact. Just one example:
"The earliest mounds … were built as crypts in which to inter community leaders and their families and as landmarks to visually anchor mobile bands and tribes in the natural and supernatural worlds. Rituals that attended periodic mound building sought to renew the world and the resources on which people depended, eventually linking people over wide areas by means of shared ceremonials."
Okay, there is definitely evidence that the mounds wore built in places where people from many areas periodically came together. That much is fact. The rest of it is basically speculation. It makes sense, and may very well be true, but without a written record or cohesive oral tradition, it's just too much to state something like this as fact. We don't have any way of knowing about the ceremonies or core beliefs of the mound builders; we don't even know for sure who they were. (The recent consensus seems to be that the direct ancestors of the Ho Chunk built them, but I have some doubts. Won't go into that here, though…)
Over the years, there's been a lot of study of native people of this area, including some very eye-opening dialog with members of the tribes themselves. The authors therefore had to pick and choose what to include in a work like this, to keep it accessible and reasonably short. So I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic, but it's obviously not the last word.
Indian mounds exist throughout the eastern US, but Wisconsin (along with a strip of Iowa and Minnesota fronting the Mississippi River) is unique for its effigy mounds -- mounds built in the shape of thunderbirds, bears, canines, water spirits, geese, etc. Since these mounds were built during a limited time, from about 700 to 1200 AD, they are something of a mystery. By the time European travelers arrived in the area, no one was making effigy mounds anymore. The native people living in the area at the time had only guesses about why they had been built. Archaeologists and historians have been trying to figure this mystery out ever since.
This book is the most recent work accessible to lay readers to bring together current research and ideas on the topic. The listing at the end of the book of mounds the public can visit is very helpful (though naturally incomplete, due to space constraints). On the whole, the book does a nice job putting all this together. However I have a couple problems with it, one small and one kind of large:
1) Parts written by the main author (Birmingham) and co-author (Rosebrough) don't always fit together well. Rosebrough's second chapter, In Search of the Mound Builders, is new to this edition, and its tone and emphasis are quite a bit edgier (I'm tempted to say angrier) than Birmingham's more neutral, academic prose. I would love to see Rosebrough write her own book in her own way, since she's an expert on the topic in her own right, and obviously has a point of view about the history of mound research that deserves to be heard.
2) My main problem with this book is that the authors are in too much of a hurry to draw conclusions, and state some dubious ideas as if they were fact. Just one example:
"The earliest mounds … were built as crypts in which to inter community leaders and their families and as landmarks to visually anchor mobile bands and tribes in the natural and supernatural worlds. Rituals that attended periodic mound building sought to renew the world and the resources on which people depended, eventually linking people over wide areas by means of shared ceremonials."
Okay, there is definitely evidence that the mounds wore built in places where people from many areas periodically came together. That much is fact. The rest of it is basically speculation. It makes sense, and may very well be true, but without a written record or cohesive oral tradition, it's just too much to state something like this as fact. We don't have any way of knowing about the ceremonies or core beliefs of the mound builders; we don't even know for sure who they were. (The recent consensus seems to be that the direct ancestors of the Ho Chunk built them, but I have some doubts. Won't go into that here, though…)
Over the years, there's been a lot of study of native people of this area, including some very eye-opening dialog with members of the tribes themselves. The authors therefore had to pick and choose what to include in a work like this, to keep it accessible and reasonably short. So I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic, but it's obviously not the last word.
October 23, 2018
More than an overview of the Indian Mounds in Wisconsin; this book gives an overview of pretty much all the knowledge we have on pre-European inhabitants of Wisconsin. This was a welcome surprise to me. But other readers may be turned off by the level of detail given on Wisconsin archeology.
A few favorite parts. The reader learns how the American Indian empire of Cahokia changed how mounds were constructed in Wisconsin. The reader learns about discredited pseudoscientists (largely from the late 19th century) and their theories about how the mounds were built by anyone but American Indians (e.g., the Egyptians, the "Hindoos," or everyone’s favorite: one of the lost twelve tribes of Israel). And the book wouldn’t be a complete Wisconsin history book without its many illustrations from the work of Increase Lapham.
For me, the best part was learning about where all the sites are that I can go visit. I knew there were lots of Indian mounds in Wisconsin, but I didn’t know that some of them were shaped like animals, and some of them are huge. I’m looking forward to a trip to Aztalan State Park!
A few favorite parts. The reader learns how the American Indian empire of Cahokia changed how mounds were constructed in Wisconsin. The reader learns about discredited pseudoscientists (largely from the late 19th century) and their theories about how the mounds were built by anyone but American Indians (e.g., the Egyptians, the "Hindoos," or everyone’s favorite: one of the lost twelve tribes of Israel). And the book wouldn’t be a complete Wisconsin history book without its many illustrations from the work of Increase Lapham.
For me, the best part was learning about where all the sites are that I can go visit. I knew there were lots of Indian mounds in Wisconsin, but I didn’t know that some of them were shaped like animals, and some of them are huge. I’m looking forward to a trip to Aztalan State Park!
October 11, 2021
A thorough, layperson introduction to Native American history in Wisconsin as viewed through the archaeology of mounds and a lesser extent of other artifacts, after an extensive review of the history of how the mounds have been investigated over time. The writing style is perfunctory, which makes attentiveness a challenge, as well as the huge historical gaps and assumptions that result from the erasures over the decades of time and human activity. Still good, but a bit of a struggle.
May 24, 2025
A thorough and practical guide for those seeking out these creations of Water, Earth, and Sky.
August 9, 2014
Admittedly, something I never would've picked up had I not been force-fed it for class, but a fascinating read nevertheless. The land around here might seem like a hilly detour on the road to nowhere, but it's really a huge part of midwestern Native culture.
December 31, 2014
A good reference book regarding mounds for those with questions about who built them, when, where why & how.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews