Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Asian Carp
This tough-nut alien species is poised to, quite literally, invade Lake Michigan via Illinois,
which is doing everything save for poisoning rivers to keep it out. If it gets into Lake
Michigan, it could mean doom for species present there.
TheSiberia-to-AlaskaBeringiatheory,whichpositsthattheprogenitorsofNorthAmerica's
Native Americans arrived over a land bridge that rose and submerged in the Bering Strait
beginning as many as 20,000 years ago, was dealt serious blows in the late 1990s. Provoc-
ative new anthropological discoveries in North and Latin America have forced a radical
reconsideration of this theory (a Wisconsin archaeologist was one of the first to bring up
the topic—Kenosha County in southeastern Wisconsin has revealed key new finds). The
last of the glacial interludes of the Pleistocene era, the Two Rivers, probably saw the first
movement into the state of early Paleo-Indians about 11,500 years ago. The time is based
on examinations of fluted points as well as a rare mastodon kill site, the Boaz Mastodon,
which established Paleo-Indian hunting techniques of the Plains Indians in Wisconsin.
Glacial retreat helps explain why the Paleo-Indian groups entered the state from the
south and southwest rather than the more logical north. Nomadic clans followed the masto-
don and other large mammals northward as the glaciers shrank.
Solid archaeological evidence establishes definite stages in Wisconsin's earliest settlers.
The
Archaic
period lasted, approximately, from 8000 BC to 750 BC. The tribes were still
transient, pursuing smaller game and the fish in the newly formed lakes. Around 2000 BC,
these Indians became the first in the New World to fashion copper.
The later
Woodland
Indians, with semipermanent abodes, are generally regarded as the
first Natives in Wisconsin to make use of ceramics, elaborate mound burials (especially
in southern Wisconsin) and, to a lesser extent, domesticated plants such as squash, corn,
pumpkins, beans, and tobacco. Lasting from around 750 BC until European exploration,
the Woodland period was a minor golden age of dramatic change for the Native cultures.
Around 100 BC, the Middle Woodland experienced cultural and technological prolifera-
tions, simultaneous with the period of Ohio's and Illinois's Hopewell societies, when vil-
lages formed and expanded greatly along waterways.
