Madison County Genealogical Society

Minutes of the Meeting - March 14, 2019

The March 2019 meeting of the Madison County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on Thursday, March 14, at 7:00 pm.

President, Robert Ridenour, called the meeting to order.

The following is the Treasurer's report for the month of February:

·       General Fund - Beg. Balance $2,951.84 - Income $75.42 - Expenses $40.00 - End Balance $2,987.26

·       Publications Fund - Beg. Balance $12,988.87 - Income $0.00 - Expenses $0.00 - End Balance $12,988.87

GIFT MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE

Do you have a family member that is interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership in the Madison County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful gift. A gift card will be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.

The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $25.00
Patron Annual Membership $35.00
Life Membership $300.00

Contact our Secretary, Petie Hunter, at [email protected], about a gift membership.

March Meeting

 

On March 14, 2019, Cherie Kuhn presented a program titled Ancient Indian Cultures and Artifacts.

 

Ms. Kuhn graduated in 1968 from Livingston High School.  She worked at SIUE Lovejoy Library for 28 years.  Her hobbies are horses, playing piano, travel, reading, genealogy, and hunting arrowheads. She is a member of the Silver Creek DAR Chapter, Archaeology Society of Illinois, and Cahokia Mounds Society.

 

I love Native American history … I always have. When I was working, I did not have a lot of time to hunt the fields and creeks for arrowheads, but now that I have been retired for a while, I spend a lot of time doing that. It is pretty interesting, I have found a lot of fossil rocks. There are artifacts everywhere; I do not think we will ever find all of them. One of the collectors at the artifact show in Effingham said that for every artifact you find, there are 5,000 more. Of course, some of them are 2 to 5 feet down in the ground —and they are found by accident when excavating is being done for construction or a road; a lot of things are found that way.

 

I decided tonight to talk about just the Paleo period and the Archaic period. The Paleo period goes back to 12,000 BC to 9,000 BC. Archaeologists think the Indians have been in Illinois about 12,000 years.

 

The Clovis culture were the first people that we know of to create a culture in North America. This is as far back as we can find artifacts. They were nomadic hunters that followed herds of mammoths, mastodons, and buffalo. The accepted theory is that a group of hunters came from Siberia across the land bridge and came in to North America, went down the coast, and spread out over North America, Central America, and went down to South America.

 

During the Clovis culture, they did not have arrowheads, they had spearheads. The difference is that arrowheads would be notched, but spearheads were made to fit on a larger shaft. The Clovis culture made fluted spear points, they had knowledge of fire, they did not farm, they did not have villages, and they did not build mounds. The Clovis toolkit was adapted for mobile hunting, because that is what they did; they moved from place to place. Their hunting kit was tools and weapons for killing, skinning, and cutting of meat. This culture was named for the spear point found near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1929. A cowboy was riding around, saw these bones (they were actually mastodon bones), and found this spearhead tool among the bones. It was taken to a college in New Mexico and was dated to be thousands and thousand of years old. Spear points were 4-6 inches long, fluted on both sides … fluted means they had a groove or flute chipped up both sides so the shaft could be fastened on better. The spear point was attached to the shaft with sinew or animal tendon and an atlatl was used to throw the spear a longer distance with greater accuracy and greater force. If you go to Cahokia on Archaeology Day, you can learn to throw a spear using an atlatl (it is not very easy). Using the atlatl gave the spear more speed and force, making them more deadly. Archaeologists think that the Indians used what are called bannerstones on the spear or the atlatl to add more weight to the spear or impart more force to the spear when it was thrown. They are not sure that was the purpose of the bannerstones, but that is the current theory.

 

Clovis sites are all over Canada, The United States, Mexico, and Central America. One Clovis kill site was found near Imperial, Missouri. Bones were found there in the early 1800s; the site was excavated in 1979. Also found was a St. Charles point dated to 7,500 BC. St. Charles points have what are called dovetails, i.e., shaped like the tail of a mourning dove. To date, 20 kill sites have been found in the United States with Clovis artifacts. One site was found in northwest Missouri between St. Joseph and the Iowa border and there is a site in Chesterfield, Missouri, dated to 9,500 BC. The Indians have been in this area for a long, long time.

 

The mammoth became extinct about 10,000 years ago. They had shaggy hair, a long flat head, and long curved tusks. The mastodon was smaller than the mammoth and looked more like today’s elephant. And both of them weighed about 17,000 pounds. So it took quite a bit of skill to bring one of those down for the meat and the skin, etc. I watched the Science Channel a reently and they are trying to make a hybrid mammoth, why I do not know. There is a team of scientists from Harvard that went to Siberia to search for mammoth bones to try to recover DNA to mix with today’s Asian elephant (The Asian elephant is the closest to the mammoth) and make a hybrid mammoth. When this is going to take place, I do not know … it is not going to be next week. They said they could develop an embryo within two years.

 

The Folsom culture dates from 9,000 BC to 8,000 BC. They developed from the Clovis and used the spear and the atlatl. They were also nomadic hunters and they followed the herds. In 1908, a cowboy working on a ranch near Folsom, New Mexico, which is just north of Clovis, New Mexico, found bones with a spear point. They were tested at a university to be 10,000 years old. Often found with Folsom point are scrapers, knives, and worked bone. Most Folsom points are found west of the Mississippi River, but only occasionally east of the river — in Illinois and Wisconsin. There have been Folsom points found in Jersey County and Macoupin County, Illinois.

 

In 1936, a student at the University of New Mexico discovered a cave east of Albuquerque and he found Folsom points, mammoth, ground sloth, horse, and bison bones, also woven sandals and baskets thousands of years old. Folsom sites were discovered in Alexander County in extreme southern Illinois and the boot heel area of southeast Missouri … which is also a good place to look for arrowheads.

 

In Jackson County, Illinois, Paleo and Archaic tool complexes, rock shelters, and petroglyphs were found at Fountain Bluff above the Mississippi. Macoupin Creek runs all the way through Macoupin County to the Illinois River at Hardin. All of the bluffs, on top, are Indian hunting camps. So, I will be out there this summer walking that creek. A lot of the Indians did not stay on the flat land; they stayed up on the bluffs for hunting camps, so that is a good place to look.

 

Modoc rock shelter, located a few miles south of Prairie du Roucher, dates to 9,000 BC. I drove down to look at it and took a picture of it. There is a big, big rock shelter right next to the road, but in 9,000 BC, the Mississippi River was where the road is today. It was a big rock cliff at the edge of the Mississippi River Valley undercut by Ice Age floods. Used as a short term hunting camp, it gave shelter to the hunters from the wind and the rain. It was discovered in 1951 by an archaeologist. It was excavated in the 50s and the 80s and it contained 28 feet of sediment that contained spear points, scrapers, hammer stones, and bone awls. I would have liked to gotten in on that, but I was too small then. Their food was deer, raccoon, birds, and fish. People here were intelligent in the way that they learned about plants that allowed later cultures to flourish.

 

The Dalton culture, still in the Paleo period, appeared in the Mississippi Valley and invented a point called a Dalton point. They established base camps for years at a time. They traveled to hunt, fish, collect nuts and plants for food. They acquired chert that was bound in limestone bedrock. I have big boxes of chert at home that I ordered to learn how to make arrowheads … and it is not easy. I have all the tools — of course the Indians used a hammerstone and antler tips to flake off (or knap) the edges of the points. They used flint and obsidian to make points, drills, scrapers, knives, and hammerstones. They established trade routes to Canada and the California coast.

 

Greene, Calhoun, and Pike Counties in Illinois are the best counties to hunt for artifacts, because they are along the Illinois River. There are many points found in fields and riverbanks. There are two sites in northeast Arkansas … that is a good state to look for artifacts … the Brand site was a Dalton hunting camp and the Sloan site was a Dalton cemetery. They buried artifacts with the dead. At the Olive Branch site in Alexander County, Illinois, which is in extreme southern Illinois by the Mississippi, were found Dalton tools and points, Thebes points and a cemetery. Two large bifaces eleven inches long were found that were 9,500 years old.  A biface can be any size; it is a stone implement flaked on both sides and you can make what you want out of it.

 

Some of the artifacts were stained with red ocher and probably used in a ritual. Red ocher was used a lot by the Indians; it is an iron oxide found in the ground. They would scrape it, making a powder, to be used to cover the dead in the burial mounds, stain tools and weapons, and even on their skin to protect themselves from the sun.

 

Now we get into the archaic period, 8,000 to 3,000 BC, marking the end of the ice age. The earth became a warmer more arid climate and the mammoth and mastodon were extinct. The early archaic period is 8,000 to 7,000 BC. The temperatures rose and the forests began to spread, providing a variety of nuts, berries, and fruits. People were hunter-gatherers. They lived in long-term settlements on rivers and streams and they domesticated dogs. They used stone mortars and pestles to crush seeds. Some of the plants that they had were the wild grape, persimmons, and chokecherry. Weapons were barbed and notched arrowheads.

 

Pike County Illinois is known for large archaic knives and points of light Burlington chert. Calhoun County has two sites where archaic artifacts were found. There is a cave in Phelps County, Missouri, on the Big Piney River where Dalton and Archaic points were found. There is a site in Coco Beach, Florida, that is 8,000 years old, where they found 168 skeletons buried in peat at the bottom of a pond.

 

The Middle Archaic period was from 6,000 to 3,000 BC. People were less nomadic. They lived in villages part of the year and the full-groove axe came into use.

 

A full-groove axe was the oldest axe made by the Indians. A full-groove axe has a groove that goes all the way around the head to allow the handle to be fastened on. A three-quarter groove axe is flat on one side. A half-grove axe is flat on both sides.

 

The Late Archaic Period, 3,000 to 1,000 BC, was when the bow and arrow came into use. People still hunted and gathered plants, but they began to cultivate plants for food, like beans, corn, and squash. Food was stored and tribes traded with each other. At his time, pottery making emerged. At the Fox site in Union County, Indiana, Archaic people made large base camps on the Ohio River. Hickory nuts, walnuts, wild plants, gourds, and squash were important foods. Hard stone tools were found like axes, pestles, and hammerstones. The Black River in the Ozarks has quartz and granite that is not found anywhere else in mountain ranges in North America. This stone was used by Indians in the Ohio Valley for axe heads.

 

The Koster Site at Kampsville, Illinois, goes from to 5,000 BC up to 1,000 AD in Greene County, Illinois a few miles east of Kampsville and south of Eldred on the Ted Koster farm. They dug down thirty feet during the excavation from 1969 to 1978. One artifact was 8,500 years old. Some of the artifacts are on display at the Kampsville Museum. A cemetery was established on the bluff overlooking the Illinois River Valley. They domesticated dogs and had rituals to bury the dead.

 

When I come back in September, I am going to talk about the Woodland period and all the Mound Cultures. There are quite a few Mound cultures: Cahokia, Poverty Point in Louisiana, Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancients in the Ohio Valley. They are all different mound builders and they go back pretty far.

 

This presentation was very well received and provoked many questions and comments.

 

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