Multiscalar Investigations of Ridged Fields at the Menominee Reservation, WI

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Raised Indigenous agricultural features were once the most common earthworks in the American Midwest. Today, they are among the rarest. The Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin contains the densest concentration of ancient agricultural features in the American Midwest, providing a unique opportunity to study these now rare features and examine how past Menominee communities successfully cultivated corn at these colder, high latitudes. This project employs an array of techniques to locate, map, analyze, and establish the long-term impacts of these landscapes. Here, we present lidar data collected from select archaeological agricultural sites at the Menominee Reservation alongside stable isotopic signatures of garden beds. Looking to the long-term impacts of these agricultural landscapes, we conducted contemporary vegetation surveys alongside our archaeological work. Together, these multiscalar approaches provide new, key insights on Indigenous corn agricultural practices in colder environments and their lasting legacies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36965.0