Natural History Archaeology

The long period of incidental discoveries and fanciful speculation came to an end in the mid-1800s with the initiation of systematic surveys and excavations by private individuals and government institutions. One main stimulus for the research impetus was the escalating destruction of archaeological sites, especially earthen mounds, by the advancing farming frontier. Beginning in the 1860s, extensive land clearing began to severely damage Minnesota’s archaeological record, especially in the more agriculturally productive southern half of the state. Another was a growing scientific interest in the Mound Builder hypothesis, and a third the emergence of a “natural history” ideal in which the mark of an educated person was an interest in all facets of the natural world, including archaeological sites. The roots of the fact-based orientation that characterizes Minnesota archaeology today extend back to this period.

Most professional explorations in Minnesota during this period concentrated on earthworks, for they were being plowed down at an accelerating rate and they were still thought by many to have been built by the Mound Builders. These explorations were not unique to Minnesota, but part of a national trend. One of the earliest large-scale mound surveys in Eastern North America was by Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis for the newly founded Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), which concentrated mainly on earthworks in Ohio, was the first publication of the institution.

In the 1880s and early 1890s, Cyrus Thomas recorded the distribution of mounds in northern sections of the Midwest for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Thomas noted that mounds with animal shapes were largely confined to southern Wisconsin and neighboring states, including Minnesota. George Gale in a survey of the Upper Mississippi River region in the 1860s also concentrated on the form and distribution of effigy mounds.4

Distinctive characteristics of the period are the rapid establishment of archaeological societies and publications, and the leading role in archaeology of individuals with broad research interests. These characteristics were typical of the growing interest at the time in the natural history of the earth, an interest stimulated by the rise of science as a way of viewing the world, the discovery that the world had greater time depth than once thought, and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Five natural historians in this sense – Alfred J. Hill, Theodore H. Lewis, Jacob V. Brower, Newton H. Winchell, and William B. Nickerson – were especially active in Minnesota archaeology.

The Hill-Lewis Survey

Undoubtedly, the most impressive accomplishment of the natural history period in Minnesota was the Hill-Lewis survey.5 With the financial backing of Alfred J. Hill, Theodore H. Lewis, a trained surveyor, surveyed some 14,000 mounds and traveled an estimated 54,000 miles, at least 10,000 of which were on foot. Since the majority of these mounds were later plowed down or otherwise destroyed, Minnesota archaeologists rely today on Lewis’s notes and maps, many of which were later published by Winchell in The Aborigines of Minnesota (1911).

Hill, who was born in London in 1833, immigrated to the United States in 1854, where he first lived upon a piece of government land near Red Wing, Minnesota, and then in St. Paul from 1855 until his sudden death of typhoid pneumonia in 1895. Perhaps because of his drafting skills – he was trained as a civil engineer – and his interest in maps and mapping, Hill may have become interested in mapping the locations of earthen burial mounds and other earthworks when he lived near Red Wing, which had at the time one of the largest visible concentrations of earthen structures in the Upper Mississippi Valley. Whatever the origin of that interest, he remained committed to mapping the shape and size, and location, of these visible structures until his death, a span of about 40 years. The timing of Hill’s interest was particularly fortunate, for extensive land clearing and farming did not begin in distant Minnesota until the 1860s, leaving most of the state’s earthworks in relatively undisturbed condition throughout the nineteenth century.6

In St. Paul, Hill was at first employed as a draftsman in the road office of the United States government, which was actively engaged in the survey and construction of military roads in the new state. For most of his career, however, he was associated with the survey department of the land office of the state. Like others interested in the archaeology of the state at the time, he had diverse interests, including historical and geographical studies. In pursuing the latter interest, he collected all the maps of the state or parts of the state that he could find, including old French, Italian, and Dutch maps, and became involved in the drafting of a correct topographic map of the state (e.g., Hill 1867, 1893, 1894). Winchell (1911:viii) suggests in Aborigines that it was this interest that “led him into the study of the early history of the state and of North America.”

During the Civil War years of the 1860s, Hill first served in the Sixth Minnesota infantry during the Dakota Conflict, and later in the office of topographical engineers in Washington, D.C. When he returned to Minnesota at the end of the war, he joined the Minnesota Historical Society (which had been incorporated in 1849) and its committee on archaeology, of which he was made secretary; he also later served as treasurer of the MHS. Among the initiatives of the committee on archeology was the preparation and wide distribution of a printed circular that asked travelers, explorers, and other people visiting distant areas of the state to report information about the antiquities they encountered to the committee. The committee also sent circular letters to the United States deputy surveyors who were surveying Minnesota and neighboring states at the time asking them to report the location, size, number, and content, where possible, of the mounds and earthworks they encountered to the committee as well.

As secretary of the committee, Hill not only corresponded with people who responded to the circulars, but organized the information the committee received into a series of large notebooks. This information stimulated his own interest in the mounds and provided a base for his later work with Lewis (Finney 2005a).

After the Minnesota Historical Society discontinued the committee on archeology in the 1870s, Hill continued to work on the recording project, but now on his own. He had considered finding a younger person to work on the project with him for some years, for he himself found field investigations too time consuming. Hill found that person in 1880 when he met Theodore Hayes Lewis. A Virginian, Lewis, who was some 20 years younger than Hill, shared Hill’s enthusiasm for an extensive survey of the earthworks and mounds of Minnesota and surrounding areas. In a 1881 unpublished prospectus, Hill presented the project to potential supporters, but was unsuccessful in obtaining funds for it. Not willing to abandon his dream, he entered into a formal contract with Lewis that year to begin the survey, with himself as donor and Lewis as surveyor. The picture in this paragraph is that of Lewis in survey gear.

Hill’s plan was to survey the Old Northwest, which is a geographical term that includes portions of the western Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi Valley north of St. Louis, Missouri. All or portions of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, and Michigan, and part of the province of Manitoba are included in this region. Using information from Hill’s notebooks and other sources, Lewis, who spent the cold months of the year working on archaeological projects in the South, spent the warm months surveying portions of this region, seemingly in no particular order. As Lewis (1898) later recounted, most of his travels were difficult and usually by train and foot. Of the 54,000 or so miles he estimated that he traveled, more than 10,000 miles were by foot.

During the 15 years of the survey, which was called the Northwestern Archaeological Survey, the headquarters of the project was Hill’s home in St. Paul. In Dobbs’s words, the house “was the center of the most extensive archaeological survey ever privately initiated and supported on the American continent” (in Benchley et al. 1997:51). By the time the survey was brought to a sudden end by Hill’s early death in 1895, Hill had already donated $16,200 to support the survey and Lewis had documented an estimated 17,000 mounds and earthworks. In an agreement with Hill and with his intentionally unacknowledged input, Lewis also published at least 35 articles in a variety of journals, including the American Antiquarian, American Naturalist, Magazine of American History, American Anthropologist, and Science, and contributed numerous “fugitive” stories to local newspapers. Both Winchell (1911:576-577) and Finney (2005b) provide a bibliography of Lewis’ publications.

Hill and Lewis had planned to publish a comprehensive overview of the Survey when it was completed (Hill 1877). Hill’s unexpected death in June of 1895 put an end to that plan. In addition, the survey itself was not completed, for portions of areas in many states had not been visited. A short time before his death, Hill himself had estimated that another 10 years were needed to complete the project. The subsequent history of the records of the Northwestern Archaeological Survey is one of the great dramas of Minnesota archaeology.

Despite Lewis’s insistence that Hill had intended to provide funds for the publication of the results of the project, no concrete evidence of that intent was ever found. After a lengthy probate process, which included a lawsuit and a mysterious, much younger fiancé who was to marry the 62-year-old Hill, the Ramsey County Probate Court awarded all of Hill’s rather large estate, including the survey records, to two elderly cousins in England and Ontario. Brower jotted down some of the details of these proceedings in his journals, including his own outrage that Hill’s heirs would only part with the records for money. Since the Minnesota Historical Society did not have the funds to purchase the records, Brower obtained funds from the state legislature for the MHS for their purchase and study, for they were in danger of being shipped out of the country and lost forever. His intent was to combine portions of the Hill-Lewis survey with his own archaeological investigations (see below) to produce a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of the archaeology and Native American ethnography of the state.

Lewis, who worked for a time as a partner in a St. Paul publishing house after Hill’s death, continued to write articles on archaeology between 1895 and 1898, and hoped to work with Brower on his own planned publication. He left the state after Brower’s death in 1905 and vanished (so to speak) into the night. His subsequent whereabouts still remains a question of intriguing interest to modern day archaeologists and historians (but see Finney 2005b).

Hill remains a seminal figure in the history of Minnesota archaeology, despite his many attempts to remain in the background. The following paragraph from Winchell’s (1911:ix) biographical sketch of Hill succinctly summarizes his contribution to Minnesota archaeology and serves as a fitting tribute to that effort:

"Mr. Hill’s archeological labor in Minnesota stands preeminent, not only in being the earliest but in being the longest continued and, perhaps, the most valuable in its accumulated scientific data. It is preeminent also in the self-sacrificing and generous motive which inspired and sustained it. He devoted his life and his money to science, and to a definite and chosen purpose. He was apparently entirely destitute of personal ambition, not publishing his results unless in obedience to some public demand. His records, as well as much of his time, were free for the service of all who asked his assistance. He had underlying plans for future publication, but they were never realized. The memory of his modest personality, his generous nature and his quiet industry, will always be a benediction to those who knew him, while his contribution to archeological science will stand always as a monument, aere perennius, to his name, ranking in value and permanence with the names of many others whose labor was better known by their cotemporaries and was emblazoned on many printed pages. Mr. Hill plowed the field where Mr. Lewis sowed the seed, the fruit of which Mr. Brower garnered. It is simply the putting of this fruit into the current markets of archeology which has fallen to the writer" [Winchell is referring here to his own incorporation of the Minnesota portion of the Survey in Aborigines].

Although Winchell published the Minnesota portion of the Hill-Lewis survey in his The Aborigines of Minnesota, the Northwestern Archaeological Survey remains under-appreciated and under-utilized today because it has not been fully published. Current books on the history of North American archaeology give pride of place to then contemporary surveys in the Midwest by archaeologists associated with the Smithsonian Institution (e.g., Thomas 1887, 1894; Gale 1867), even though the Survey recorded more than three times as many earthworks and mounds as the largest of those surveys and often in finer detail. Still, the files of the Hill-Lewis survey remain an indispensable and irreplaceable source of information about the life-ways of Native Americans in the state in the prehistoric and early historic periods.

Jacob V. Brower

Jacob V. (Vradenberg) Brower’s (1844–1905) widespread interests are typical of natural history-phase Minnesota archaeologists. At various times a soldier, seaman, attorney, influential legislator, and elected official, Brower was an avid collector of books, maps, and archaeological specimens. He was as well known for his geographical exploration surveys as for his archaeological surveys. In the late 1890s (1896, 1897, 1898), he made three trips to Kansas in an attempt to locate Quivira, Harahey, and other Indian villages visited by Coronado in 1541. He also investigated the source of the Missouri River in Montana and of the Mississippi River in the Lake Itasca basin in Minnesota.

With a grant he received from the Minnesota Historical Society in 1890, Brower traveled to the Lake Itasca area to settle a dispute over the exact location of the Mississippi Headwaters and, subsequently, over who should be considered its discoverer. He prepared a map of the basin that is dated 1892 and published a report of his explorations in 1893 as Volume 7 of the Historical Society’s collections. As a politician who wielded considerable power, he was instrumental in the founding of Itasca State Park (Minnesota’s first state park), which was established by the state legislature (by one vote) on April 20, 1891. He was appointed the park’s first commissioner and worked for nine years to transform the park from a concept to a physical reality. His efforts are honored today in the name of the park’s visitor center (The Jacob V. Brower Visitor Center).

Brower became more intensely interested in Minnesota archaeology in the late 1880s and, with his usual forcefulness, quickly became one of the state’s most influential archaeologists. Though initially convinced by the mound-builder explanation for the presence of prehistoric earthen mounds in the Midwest, he decided to investigate that connection himself. With his usual vigorousness, he began by examining the contents of the mounds and earthworks in the Mille Lacs region of north central Minnesota. By comparing the pottery and other artifacts found in the mounds and in nearby village sites, he concluded that the proto-historic Eastern Dakota and their ancestors had built the mounds (Brower 1900:133-135), a conclusion considered correct today at least for the late prehistoric and proto-historic mounds. In 1911, Winchell (1911:x) concluded, “One of the most important results of Mr. Brower’s archeological work in Minnesota was the demonstration that the Dakota were the builders of the mounds of the state….”

Many of Brower’s archaeological investigations throughout the Midwest were summarized between 1898 and 1904 in the eight-volume Memoirs of Explorations in the Basin of the Mississippi, four of which focus on Minnesota (Mille Lacs, Kathio, Kakabikansing, and Minnesota, which are volumes 3-7 respectively).7 Volumes 1 and 2 summarize his geographical and historical explorations in Kansas. Although a fire destroyed his collections and field journals in 1896, copies of later field journals are available at the MHS. Through his involvement with the Minnesota Historical Society, he became head of the archaeology program at that institution, a position he held until his sudden death in the field in 1905. His successor was Newton H. Winchell, who subsequently incorporated many aspects of his work in Minnesota in his own monumental The Aborigines of Minnesota (1911).

Brower was a forceful and energetic individual, who had famous fallings-out with fellow archaeologists. An example was the abrupt rupture in 1892 of his relationship with A. J. Hill, who he occasionally collaborated with after his interests turned to archaeology. Winchell (1911:xiii) described him as “a man of unique and even picturesque personality, (who) in his makeup included a vast fund of energetic efficiency.” Except for his untimely death in 1905, he might well have been the author of The Aborigines of Minnesota, for he had planned a synthesis of the Lewis-Hill survey and his own research, and had helped purchase the records of the Northwest Archaeological Survey after Hill’s death with that purpose in mind.

Brower’s contributions to Minnesota archaeology are somewhat more nebulous than are those of Hill, Lewis, Winchell, and other archaeologists during the natural history phase of Minnesota archeology. The following list is an initial attempt to summarize those contributions:

Like Lewis he visited and described many sites before they were destroyed, though his maps are not as precise as are Lewis’s. His information on some northern Minnesota mound groups is of particular value;

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he amassed a large artifact collection. Though much of his original collection was destroyed in the 1896 fire, a still sizable later collection is housed at the Minnesota Historical Society;

He made important contributions within the state to the collapse of the mound builder myth;

His research was interdisciplinary in conception, especially in its combination of history, geography, and archaeology;

He was most likely ultimately responsible for the preservation of the records of the Hill-Lewis Northwestern Archaeological Survey, for he helped acquire those records for his own planned synthesis of state archaeology (see Benchley et al. 1997:53, for details of this acquisition).

Like Winchell and Upham, and later Jenks, Jacob V. Brower was a prodigious writer who made large-scale contributions in multiple fields. His contributions to Minnesota archaeology are largely known today through their incorporation into the more widely consulted Aborigines by Winchell.

Newton H. Winchell

Newton Horace Winchell (1839-1914) was one of the most renown and active natural scientists in Minnesota in the late nineteenth century. Born in New York in 1839, he received his university education at the University of Michigan, from which he received the degree of Masters of Arts in 1867. In autumn 1872, he became the first director of the newly organized Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, a post he held until 1900. From 1906 until his death in 1914, he worked at the Minnesota Historical Society, where he was in charge of the Department of Archaeology. A modest, retiring individual, Winchell was a prominent faculty member at the University of Minnesota, a prodigiously productive author, and, of greatest importance for archaeologists, the compiler of The Aborigines of Minnesota (1911), a monumental survey of archaeological studies in the state to that date.

As director of the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota (now the Minnesota Geological Survey), Winchell was responsible for many pioneering studies of Minnesota geology, the majority of which were published between 1872 and 1899 in twenty-four annual reports. As typical of the period, the reports are noteworthy for their length and thoroughness, with individual reports varying from 42 to 504 pages. He also prepared a six-volume geology of Minnesota that was published between 1884 and 1901 as the final report of the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, as well as ten bulletins of the Survey between 1887 and 1894.

Because the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota was under the jurisdiction of the University of Minnesota, Winchell taught classes as a professor of geology in geology, zoology, and botany until 1879. After 1879, he gave all his time while at the university to the state survey and the curatorship of the university museum, where he began a catalog of archeological specimens in 1881. Winchell was a founder and president (1902) of the Geological Society of America, chief founder of the American Geologist, and a chief organizer and president for three terms of the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences, among many other initiatives and achievements.

Two of Winchell’s accomplishments as a geologist may be of particular interest to archaeologists. In 1874 he accompanied the Custer expedition to the Black Hills of South Dakota, at which time he prepared the first geological map of the interior of the Black Hills. He also studied and estimated the rate of recession of the Falls of St. Anthony. On the assumption that the falls began near Fort Snelling and eroded upriver to its present location in Minneapolis only after the retreat of the ice sheet, he calculated its recession rate by using historic records of its past locations. By multiplying the rate of recession times the length of the Mississippi River gorge from Fort Snelling to the falls, he arrived at a date of ca. 8000 years ago. This date provided archaeologists at the time with an age range for the post-glacial period, though it is considered too short by several thousand years today.

When the state discontinued its support of studies of Minnesota geology in 1900, Winchell began to devote much of his time to the archaeology of the state (the Survey was reinitiated in 1911 as the Minnesota Geological Survey). When he became head of the Department of Archaeology at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) (as successor to Jacob V. Brower) in 1906, he began compiling the monumental The Aborigines of Minnesota, which was published by the MHS in 1911. Aborigines, which contains 761 pages, 36 half-tone plates, 26 folded inserts, and 642 figures, remained “the most comprehensive published collection of information on the mounds, earthworks, and other early archaeological information from Minnesota” (Benchley et al. 1997:53) available until the publication of Arzigian and Stevenson’s Minnesota’s Indian Mounds and Buried Sites in 2003.

The Aborigines of Minnesota summarizes much of the information gathered in Minnesota during the Hill-Lewis survey, and by Brower and others up to that time, as well as extensive ethnographic and historical information about early historic Indian peoples in Minnesota, in particular the Dakota and Ojibway. It seems likely that Winchell became involved with the Department of Archaeology at the MHS through his connection with Warren Upham, his friend and former assistant, who was superintendent of the MHS between 1896-1914 (it is interesting that Upham, who was also a geologist, remained at the MHS as an archaeologist himself until 1933). As head archaeologist at the MHS, Winchell was primarily interested in synthesis, though he did test-excavate a few mounds, such as four Sherburne County mounds (21SH16) in 1907 (this is the same mound cluster that contains 21SH1, the Christensen Mound). Many folders of manuscripts handwritten by Winchell during his tenure at the MHS are preserved in its archives.

Today, archaeologists primarily remember Winchell as the author of Aborigines. However, he had broad ranging interests in archaeology. In the Fifth Annual Report of the Survey for 1876, he described earthworks in Houston and Hennepin counties, and in the Sixth Annual Report for 1877 he began writing about the presence of white quartz implements in valley drift near Little Falls in central Minnesota. He also wrote articles on the prehistoric copper mines on Isle Royale (1881), the migrations of prehistoric peoples in Minnesota (1908, 1910a), the habitations of the Sioux in Minnesota (1909a), the Kensington rune stone (1909b, 1910b), and petroglyphs on the Three Maidens at the Pipestone Quarry (1884), which he wrote with Warren Upham, his assistant at the time. Some archaeologists might also be interested in Volume 5 of his final report, which was co-authored with U. S. Grant. The report contains 881 pages of petrographic descriptions of Minnesota rocks. He also argued as early as the 1888 annual report that American Indians had built the mounds and earthworks rather than a mysterious race of Mound Builders.

However, Winchell was more broadly known at the time among archaeologists for his insistence on the presence of early humans in the Ice Age. As understated by Upham (1916:68), the “relationship of the Ice Age and the antiquity of man in America claimed Professor Winchell’s increasing interest with much controversial investigation and authorship to the end of his life.” In fact, Winchell (as well as Upham, J. V. Brower, and F. W. Putnam, among others, according to Upham) was “confident … that mankind occupied this continent during the later part of the Ice Age, or even quite probably much earlier in that period, and possibly even before our continental glaciation began” (Upham 1915:30-31; also see Upham 1902). That Winchell retained this focus and perspective throughout his employment at the MHS is evident in the theme of the last paper he wrote (“The Antiquity of Man in America Compared with Europe”), which he delivered before the Iowa Academy of Sciences in Cedar Falls, Iowa, a week before he died. The picture in the paragraph is of Upham.

Winchell became interested in evidence of an early human presence in America during the late part of the Ice Age while examining fragments of white quartz found in the upper beds of modified drift along the Mississippi River near Little Falls in central Minnesota (Winchell 1903a and in the 1877 Sixth Annual Report). He like Brower and Upham maintained – “after much field examination and long deliberation” (Upham 1916:69) – that they were cultural artifacts in a late Ice Age deposit. He also argued strongly on geological grounds for the great antiquity of a skeleton found at a depth of 20 feet in a loess terrace of the Missouri River near Lansing, Kansas, for remains found near Washington, D.C., and for “paleoliths” in Kansas that he thought predated the ancient Kansan stage of continental glaciation (1902, 1903b, 1909c, 1912, 1913). The latter interpretation was based on a study of the degree of patination on the stone “implements.” These interpretations were soundly rejected by other authorities, including the Smithsonian’s W. H. Holmes (1893) and T. C. Chamberlin (1902). Also see the American Geologist 12:165-181, which summarizes a heated debate at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science over the presence of humans in the Americas during the glacial period, with the purported quartz implements from Little Falls one focus of debate.

Like many educated Minnesotans during this period, Winchell had a broad-ranging interest in all branches of natural history – and, as a professional scientist, he did not hesitate in publishing the results of his investigations. Nonetheless, his contribution to Minnesota archaeology remains monumental and established, if for no other reason than the publication of The Aborigines of Minnesota, which records a relatively undisturbed archaeological landscape compared to today. For reviews of Winchell’s career as a geologist and archaeologist, see Upham (1915, 1916). A succinct summary of Winchell’s life and career is also available on the Web site of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Minnesota.

William B. Nickerson

The tradition of productive, independent archaeologists continued with vigor in Minnesota through the first half of the twentieth century, after which it began to fade. Examples are George Flaskerd and Fred Lawshe, who, like other active amateur archaeologists in Minnesota in the 1940s and 1950s, were members of the Minnesota Archaeological Society. With rare exceptions, they were collectors whose articles describe interesting artifacts that they or others had found. Except for an occasional pit or two in a site, they did not engage in large-scale excavation. William B. Nickerson, a professionally trained but for the most part institutionally unattached archaeologist, was one of the rare exceptions. During his 40-year career, he conducted surveys and excavations in at least northern Illinois, Minnesota, and Manitoba. He is especially well known for his survey and excavations in the mounds region of southern Manitoba in 19XX, perhaps because of Katherine H. Capes (1963) published compilation of that work, and his excavations for the Davenport Museum in 1908 at the nearby Albany Mounds in Illinois (Nickerson 1912), which were later fully reported by E. B. Herold (1971).8

Informed of the presence of a large site along the Minnesota River near Cambria by Warren Upham, then president of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), Nickerson, with some financial support from the MHS, excavated portions of the “Jones Village” or Cambria site (21BE2) during the summers of 1913 and 1916. His excavations documented the presence of a large village at the site and at least one probable house floor. He also tested the Judson site (21BE3) in 1916. Lloyd Wilford (1945b, 1955) later placed both of these sites in a late prehistoric (Mississippian-related) Cambria focus.

William B. Nickerson warrants special attention in histories of the archaeology of this period, for his excavation, mapping, profiling, and documentation skills, which were professional-level for the time. His field documentation and final site report are in the manuscript library at the Minnesota Historical Society (Nickerson 1913, 1916, 1917). Many of the artifacts recovered by Nickerson from the Cambria site have been described and analyzed in Master’s theses by graduate students at the University of Minnesota (Shay 1966; Watrall 1968).

Other notable contributions during this period were made by W. H. Holmes, who studied the supposed early workshop site at Little Falls and the quarry at Pipestone, Cyrus Thomas, who excavated three mounds in Houston County, and George Bryce, who attempted to tunnel through the Grand Mound at Laurel on the Rainy River.9

The archaeological explorations carried out during this period resulted for the most part in a mass of descriptive data about the earthworks of the state. The unraveling of this information eventually led to the professionalization of archaeology in the state and a growing gap between professional and amateur interests in the following period.

Of special interest is the impact of Cyrus Thomas’ 1894 report, which brought an end, at least among serious scholars, to the notion that a lost race had built the numerous earthen mounds scattered across eastern North America. Following the death of the mound builder myth and the realization that the mounds were built by Native Americans, the public in general lost interest in Midwest archaeology. Institutional financial support also faded in many states. In neighboring Iowa, the shift is evident in the rapid decline after 1894 of publication on local archaeology by authors under the age of forty (Kurtz 1979).10 In Minnesota, the Minnesota Historical Society has remained a weak supporter of archaeology, whether prehistoric or historic, since the late nineteenth century.

The main characteristics of the natural history period are:

Concern for careful description, advancement in field methods and reporting techniques, and increasing recognition of the great age of human beings in the Americas.

A growing concern for the preservation of sites and artifacts, and a move to integrate archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, first in museums and later in university departments of anthropology. The state institution most intensely involved in Minnesota archaeology at the time was the Minnesota Historical Society.

The acceptance among professionals that the earthworks in Eastern North America were built by Native Americans. This realization focused attention on Native American life ways and their history.

The continued absence of a basic understanding of the prehistoric history of the human occupation of Minnesota and more broadly of North America.

Contributors to this chapter: Guy Gibbon

Date of last contributions: October 30, 2008