Moundbuilders’ bundles give clues to purpose
For many of the indigenous tribes of North America, ceremonial bundles containing an assortment of sacred objects were, and in some cases continue to be, an important part of their religious lives. As repositories of spiritual power, bundles were entrusted to respected elders who used that power in various ways to benefit their communities.
Archaeologists Meghan Howey and Marieka Brouwer Burg propose that the concept of sacred bundles may be usefully applied to the Late Precontact period (AD 1200-1600) earthworks of the Great Lakes region. They presented their ideas in the June issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
Howey and Brouwer Burg ground their arguments in historic accounts and contemporary understandings of the beliefs and practices of the Hochunk and Anishinaabeg, descendants of these mound-building societies. They think that just as “Native American medicinal or personal bundles contain a prescribed suite of meaning-laden objects,” so ceremonial earthen enclosures of this period encompassed “a suite of specific meaning-laden landscape features.”
Focusing on a broad swath of southeastern Wisconsin along Lake Michigan, they attempted to identify those significant features by studying the locations of 67 earthen enclosures, many of which have been obliterated since they were first documented. For each location they recorded which of 17 different kinds of landform were in close proximity to the earthwork. Examples of the landform types they considered include hilltop, valley, wetland and open water.
Howey and Brouwer Burg found that earthworks have between five and nine different landform types in their immediate vicinity. This means that the Late Precontact American Indians in the Great Lakes were not building ceremonial earthworks in places chosen for some “single striking landform features,” but instead were intentionally choosing to build them in locations with a high degree of diversity in nearby landforms. One particular landscape feature that was often part of that mix was open water.
Howey and Brouwer Burg argue that selecting the place to build a ceremonial earthwork was “perhaps the most critical step” in the process and that spiritual leaders chose locations based on where they perceived “the right quantity and quality of manitous [powerful spiritual beings] to be bundled together.” Both the Ho-chunk and Anishinaabeg believe that some of the most-powerful spirits in the landscape inhabit open water, which accounts for it being a frequent factor in situating earthworks.
Howey and Brouwer Burg acknowledge that their statistical analyses cannot reveal what specific meanings these landscape features had for the ancestral Anishinaabeg and Hochunk. The relationships between people, the land, and the spiritual powers that permeate the landscape were deeply personal, so these “outsider categorizations of ‘landscape diversity’” provide only pale reflections of what made these places special to Indigenous people.
But in spite of the limitations imposed by a database comprised largely of erased earthworks and an analytical framework that has no demonstrable relevance to indigenous ways of thinking, Howey and Brouwer Burg “feel it is important to stretch our interpretive frames to confront lingering colonialist narratives” that frequently portrayed American Indians as savages incapable of building the mounds of this region.
In the words of the Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence Gross, quoted by Howey and Brouwer Burg, the Precontact earthworks of the Great Lakes are among the stories that “are written on the land of the people.” The work of Howey and Brouwer Burg help us to understand those stories.
Brad Lepper is an Archaeology Curator at the Ohio History Connection.
Email: blepper@ohiohistory.org