Who were the first Minnesotans? Where did they come from? When did they arrive? Their story began thousands of years before the first written description of life in the state. It must be reconstructed from the countless pieces of stone, pottery, bone, and other materials that survive in places where these early people once lived and worked, such as camp sites, villages, and quarries. Since this record, the archaeological record, is easily destroyed and difficult to study, their story remains sketchy. However, when the Minnesota archaeological record is combined with information from oral histories, early historic records, and the archaeological records of neighboring states and Canada, the outline of the past is fairly clear. This brief timeline is a guide for understanding the precontact Native American societies that archaeologists have identified in their studies.
Archaeologists also study historic-period life in Minnesota, covering the time since the first people with writing moved to the state. Historic archaeology uses many of the same techniques of excavation and study as prehistoric archaeology, but it is supplemented with diaries and other written materials and concentrates on Euro-American settlement and its impact upon Native American societies. The story of Native Americans during the long period before Euro-American contact can only be told through the study of the archaeological record, oral traditions, and language.
The current environment in Minnesota consists broadly of four different zones, or biotic provinces, roughly stacked north to south. The last major glacial period ended 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, and as the glaciers retreated, this sequence of zones appeared gradually in the state, moving north with the glacial retreat. Since species of animals and plants were dying off as the Ice Age ended, these slowly moving provinces were also slowly changing. The timeline of Native Americans in Minnesota’s past must be seen against this shifting canvas of possibilities.
The Hudsonian is the most northern of the four provinces. It is also called the Spruce-Fir-Moose-Caribou Biome. Although it now covers only a small slice of northeastern Minnesota, it expands to the north, stretching from Alaska to Newfoundland and northward to the treeline. Referred to over much of its area as the subarctic, it is known for its long, cold winters, deep snow cover, and short, warm summers. It is a recently deglaciated land of thin soils and exposed bedrock. An intricate maze of bogs, lakes, and rivers remains a heritage of this withdrawal. Its boreal forest cover is composed of often dense stands of black and white spruce, white birch, jack pine, balsam fir, and tamarack. Poplar, cedar, and willow, among others, are also present.
Animals associated with the boreal forest include large game such as moose, caribou, and black bear; predators such as wolf, lynx, and wolverine; and smaller game such as beaver and snowshoe hare. Fish are abundant in lakes and rivers. Turtles, frogs, and clams are present, too, in some lakes and rivers. For early hunter-gatherers with a limited technology, the Hudsonian Biotic Province is a difficult environment within which to gather adequate food energy throughout the year. As a result human populations in prehistoric times tended to be low in numbers and dispersed throughout much of the year, congregating only in seasons and at times when fish and game were particularly abundant.
Most Minnesotans call the Canadian Biotic Province the Northwoods. Although a distinctive biotic province in its own right, it is also a broad transition zone between the much larger Hudsonian and Carolinian biotic provinces, with Hudsonian plants and animals increasing in frequency to the north and Carolinian plants and animals becoming more common to the south. All of the Hudsonian mammals are present, but caribou, wolverine, and lynx are rare, while moose, mountain lion, and bobcat are more common. White-tailed deer are common where deciduous trees are abundant.
While Canadian Province winters are still long and cold, summers are somewhat longer and warmer than further north. Although this land was also heavily glaciated, its soils are richer and tend to be deeper than those in the north. It retains, however, extensive lakes and bogs, again a heritage from the passing of the last glacier.
The Carolinian Biotic Province separate the Canadian and Illinoian biotic provinces in Minnesota. Also called the Oak-Deer-Maple Biome, this province is characterized by broad-leaf deciduous trees that drop their leaves in winter, like oak, hickory, maple, beech, elm, and cottonwood. Large numbers of a wide variety of animals are present. Although white-tailed deer were the primary game animal, black bear, elk, opossum, cottontail rabbit, and other medium-pieced and smaller animas were hunted also. Occasional buffalo and badgers inhabited areas of open grassland. The climate of this province was still more moderate, with shorter winters, less snowfall, and longer, hotter summers. Soils were deeper and rich.
Of these four biotic provinces, the densest populations of Native Americans in eastern North America were in the Carolinian Biotic Province. Besides its rich plant and animal resources, the hospitable climate offered a longer growing season, eventually allowing the cultivation of food plants to become highly productive in this environmental zone. In some areas, especially in the southeastern United States and along the central Mississippi river Valley, complex farming societies developed. These developments eventually influenced Minnesota, too.
The fourth biotic province is the Illinoian. Also called the Grass-Oak-Bison Biome, it contains prairie vegetation and animal associations. Typical mammals include buffalo, elk, skunk., badger, jack rabbit, ground squirrel, gopher, and coyote. Herds of buffalo on these prairies acted as magnets that attracted Native Americans. Hunter-gatherers from the northern forests of the state and horticulturalists from the northern forests of the southern Carolinian Biotic Province entered the prairies seasonally to hunt these herds, and people who lived year-round on the prairies had successful buffalo-hunting economy that remained largely unchanged for thousands of years, Eventually, sizeable farming villages were established along a few of the major rivers that flowed through the prairies.
MINNESOTA’S PRECONTACT CULTURES
The Native Americans encountered in the middle of the 17th century by Minnesota’s first European explorers were heirs to a rich and varied cultural tradition, a tradition that can be traced back at least 11,000 years. The first human inhabitants of the land that later became Minnesota were most likely people archaeologists call Paleo-Indians. These pioneers entered the state in small numbers as the lobes of the last major glacier, the Wisconsin, receded. They entered a raw landscape different from the one we are familiar with today. Their sites are difficult to locate, since they are small, contain few artifacts, are few in number, and are usually deeply buried beneath more recent sediments. In fact Paleo-Indian sites are known primarily from a scatter of large and distinctive lanceolate (lance-like) projection points. Archaeologists know little about their daily life compared to the lifeways of their descendants, though they seem in some areas to have been highly mobile gatherers and hunters who pursued big game such as bison and mammoth.
The Paleo-Indians were followed by Plano and Archaic hunters and foragers, who may have been their descendants. Their lifeways emerged in part as adjustments to a rapidly changing post-glacial environment and the extinction of mammoth and other Ice Age mammals. New complexes of plants and animals appeared as the spruce forests of the Paleo-Indian period followed the retreating ice northward. The melting ice exposed new land surfaces with extensive lakes and large, swift rivers quite unlike any in present-day Minnesota. These people increasingly specialized in the exploitation of smaller game, fish, shellfish, plant foods, and other energy resources that were not very abundant in late glacial environments. Their more varied artifact assemblages reflect this adjustment in subsistence practices. Archaic hunters and foragers seem to have been less nomadic and more numerous than Paleo-Indian and Plano societies. As a result, their sties, which are easily identified by the presence of large notched and stemmed projectile points, are more frequently discovered and excavated by archaeologists.
By the time the Woodland culture developed, all four biotic provinces were in place in the state. In Minnesota Woodland cultures are separated into an earlier Initial Woodland period and a later Terminal Woodland period. Although a hunter-gatherer lifeway continued, the Initial Woodland is marked by the first construction of earthen burial mounds and pottery vessels. These innovations did not enter all areas of the state at the same time or necessarily together, and, as a result, there was overlap in time between some late Archaic and early Woodland cultures. Because Initial Woodland sites are less deeply buried than earlier sites and are marked by the presence of burial mounds and distinctive ceramics, they have been examined more frequently by archaeologists and grouped together into archaeological cultures.
Terminal Woodland People were also hunters and gatherers. However, their economy in the Northwoods was increasingly supplemented by the harvesting of wild rice. The number of people in the region rose dramatically, and major, abrupt changes occurred in ceramics and other artifact forms, and in settlement patterns. Archaeologists have generally relied on the geographic distribution of the distinctive ceramics and burial practices of the period to identify archaeological cultures in this region of the state. Examples of regional groups are Kathio, Blackduck, and Psinomani. In the part of the state covered by deciduous forests and prairies, Terminal Woodland people gradually began to supplement their economy with maize, that is, with the domesticated plant we call corn. Some people built distinctive "effigy" mounds having the shape of birds, bears, and other animals. Most of these southern Terminal Woodland societies abruptly adopted new lifeways and artifact assemblages, too. Archaeologists group these transformed societies together and regard them as a northern expression of a "Mississippian: way of life.
Mississippian culture was a more complex society based on agriculture centered along the rich river bottoms of the Mississippian basic to the south. Mississippian sites are easily distinguished from Woodland sites by their distinctive ceramics, by their larger size and greater artifact density, and by the presence of maize fragments. Archaeologists have identified three Mississippian complexes in the state: Silvernale, Oneota, and Plains Village.
The transformation of lifeway of Terminal Woodland people was similar in broad outline throughout the sate and may have been a regional expression of changes occurring at about the same time across eastern North America. Although connections with historic ethnic groups are still somewhat clouded, these newly emergent cultures mark the first appearance in Minnesota of the lifeways of the Dakota, Ioway, and other Native American societies as they were before Euro-American intrusions. It was Mississippian people in the south and Terminal Woodland people in the north who made contact with the first Europeans to visit the state in the middle of the 17th century.
