Locating Wisconsin's Past Indigenous Agricultural Landscapes Using Historical Aerial Photography

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Wisconsin has the largest number of recorded precolumbian and early historic Indigenous ridged and hilled garden beds in the American Midwest, with over 450 known examples. But, twentieth-century land-use practices have destroyed or obscured more than 90% of these sites. Leveraging a comprehensive database of high-resolution aerial photographs dating to the 1930s, alongside both modern aerial imagery and public lidar data, we systematically analyze sites in the Wisconsin River drainage basin where Indigenous agricultural features were previously recorded in order to determine whether such features could be resolved in historical imagery. Here, we present both our successes and challenges in detecting and interpreting archaeological field systems, effigy mounds, and other features in 1930s aerial photographs. Results offer new perspectives on Wisconsin's archaeological agricultural landscapes and highlight the potential of historical aerial photography to reinterpret known sites as well as discover previously unrecorded sites and features in regions that have been heavily impacted by modern development.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32461