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.
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 petie8135@att.net,
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.