rivers and lakes: pike, bass, and catfish in the Mississippi River; sturgeon, perch, and mussels in the Great Lakes. They hunted smaller and faster animals, like birds and deer, using longer-range projectile weapons like the atlatl, a spear-thrower that increased the effective length of the hunter’s throwing arm and thus his effective range. They learned to make wild plant foods (like acorns) edible by leaching out tannin and other bitter or toxic compounds. They domesticated dogs to serve as hunting assistants (and occasionally as food), a process that began early in the Archaic era—in fact, some of the oldest domestic canine remains in North America, dated to 6500 BCE, were found near the Illinois River. They learned to make pottery, which provided them with rigid, leak-proof storage containers. Pottery making also indicated that the Archaic Indians had become less nomadic, since ceramics are heavy and easy to drop and break, and it probably also elevated the economic status of women, since women usually produced ceramics.5
Some Indians learned to mine copper from ore-bearing rocks, which the glaciers had deposited close to the surface in the upper Great Lakes region, and to anneal (strengthen) the metal by heating it and plunging it into cold water. Archaic Indians in Wisconsin were mining copper and turning it into spear points, fishhooks, and awls by 4,000 BCE. They apparently halted production sometime after 500 BCE, though Indians continued to mine and work copper north of the Great Lakes for many centuries thereafter.6
In the late Archaic era, around 1500 BCE, Indians in the Ohio valley began cultivating squash and several other North American plants that produced oil-rich seeds, such as sunflowers and sump weed. During the same period (ca. 2450–1000 BCE), they and their northern neighbors engaged in silviculture, promoting the growth of desirable trees by girdling rival tree species and burning undergrowth. The arboreal species that Archaic Indians favored, like oak and hickory, produced acorns, hickory nuts, and other “mast” that game animals could eat, attracting large populations of deer and turning some forests into de facto hunting parks.7 All of these Archaic-era innovations in food production took several thousand years to unfold, but they allowed Native Americans to continue increasing their numbers after their old nomadic hunting economy became unsustainable. By 1000 BCE there were probably around one million people living in North America north of the Rio Grande. If the human population in the Great Lakes region maintained its proportion to the overall Native North American population, then it reached approximately fifty thousand people by the end of the Archaic era.8
The Archaic era ended with the rise of several sophisticated cultures in the upper Ohio River valley: the Adena culture (1000–100 BCE), the Hopewell cultural system (200 BCE–500 CE), the Mississippians (900–1500 CE), and the Fort Ancient culture (1000–1500 CE). The Adena people, named for the “type site” in Ohio where archaeologists first discovered their artifacts, had a social or religious elite whom they interred in wooden tombs covered by conical earthen mounds. With their former leaders they buried ceremonial goods like carved stone pipes and figurines of people or animals. The culture occupied a region extending from southern Indiana to West Virginia and from central Ohio to central Kentucky. Most of its people lived near the Ohio River and its tributaries, where large populations of fish, game, and wild plants provided enough food to support dense human populations—more than ten times as many people per square mile than in the uplands.9
The Adena people’s successors, the Hopewellians, covered a much larger geographical area; they were a network of societies bound together by trade and some common cultural forms. The main Hopewell peoples resided in central Ohio and northern Kentucky, while their cultural relations and trading partners dwelt in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The Hopewell people lived in widely separated homesteads in river valleys and, like their Adena predecessors, spent part of their labor building large burial mounds for their elite. Hopewell mounds usually formed geometric shapes, and their builders sited them near other earthen buildings in ceremonial complexes, some of which covered several square miles. At the edge of these complexes, the Hopewellians built temporary dwellings where commoners lived part of the year, while they were constructing earthworks or attending religious ceremonies, before they returned home to hunt and plant.10
In their mounds, the Hopewellians interred not only their leaders but also hundreds of grave goods, many of which they fashioned from exotic materials: obsidian blades, copper jewelry, mica cutouts of human hands, and artifacts made of marine shells and grizzly-bear teeth. The trade network that provided these materials extended south to the Gulf of Mexico and west to the Rockies. The goods themselves were most likely “prestige goods,” indicators of status that circulated in a different economic sphere from ordinary goods like food or animal skins.11
It is not easy to draw conclusions about the nonmaterial lives of Hopewell peoples from the remains they left, but the anthropologist Matthew Coon has made some thought-provoking suggestions. The orientation of human remains at one Hopewell-era site in Ohio, he argues, indicates that the Indians there may have organized themselves into social “halves” (or “moieties”). Such large binary groups would have helped draw potentially rival families and clans together. Coon also believes that some of the Ohio Hopewellians’ engravings show human beings wearing animal masks, and he notes that masks would have improved social harmony by allowing lower-ranking people to disguise themselves while they publicly criticized their ruling elite. His hypotheses help answer one of the most fundamental questions facing any large society with a governing class: why do the governed give their allegiance to the governors? In the case of some of the Hopewell communities, the answer may lie in the formation of large groups that increased social solidarity and in the development of mechanisms for criticizing rulers.12
The Hopewell era coincided with the spread of a new crop, Mesoamerican maize (Indian corn), through the Ohio valley. It is likely that maize agriculture led to population growth in the region. A carbohydrate-rich diet lowers the risk that pregnant women will have miscarriages, and the development in the fifth century CE of thinner pottery that one could use to heat food more efficiently allowed women to turn maize into gruel, which they could use to wean their children at an earlier age. Women who stopped lactating would then resume their menses and their fertility. Population growth, which provided the labor force for the Hopewellians’ mounds and earthworks, may have eventually produced social conflicts and stresses that the Hopewell culture’s institutions could not contain. Perhaps this helps explain that culture’s disappearance after 500 CE. Only a few centuries would pass, however, before new “mound-builder” cultures would take Hopewell’s place.13
One of these cultures, the effigy mound builders of modern Wisconsin, emerged during the Late Woodland period (500–1200 CE) and began building their distinctive mounds around 700 CE. The Wisconsin mound builders lived in an ecologically diverse region rich in food resources: forests harboring game animals, marshes full of fish and birds, and flat prairies suitable for raising corn, which local Indians adopted around 900. They constructed their mounds, numbering over three thousand by 1200 CE, at places where large numbers of people gathered to hunt, fish, and hold religious ceremonies. The mounds themselves apparently formed a vast symbolic map of the effigy builders’ cosmology. Some of the effigies, concentrated in southeastern Wisconsin, represented long-tailed water spirits from the builders’ watery underworld, similar to the manitous in the Odawas’ creation and flood story. Some, concentrated in southwestern Wisconsin, represented bird spirits from the builders’ Upper World, akin to the thunderbirds from Ojibwa mythology. Some, located in a band across the present southern border of Wisconsin, represented bear and other animal spirits from the Middle World (that is, the physical world). A few represent a horned human who may have been a precursor of Red Horn, a culture hero of the Ho-Chunks, whose cosmology resembled that of the effigy builders. The finished mounds were probably ceremonial centers—some contain concentrations of stones that archaeologists believe are the remains of altars—and they certainly served as burial mounds, though the sparseness of grave goods suggests that the effigy builders had an egalitarian society, certainly more so than their Mississippian neighbors.14
The Mississippians would become the most famous of the post-Hopewell mound-building cultures. Their society arose around
