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From the Antarctic Sun:
.... But the big prize — Cretaceous mammalian fossils that could bolster theories about vertebrate dispersal through the southern hemisphere — still eluded him.
“All the biogeographical indications are that mammals had to have been there,” said MacPhee, a curator in the mammalogy department at the American Museum of Natural History 
in New York City....
Photo Credit: Kelley Watson / USA Gov
The Geological Society of America’s annual conference is being held in Minneapolis this week. In addition to many interesting lectures and presentations, the conference offers various field trips, including a full-day field trip that we attended: Flaming meteors, dark caves, and raging waters – Geological curiosities of western Wisconsin. What follows are a few notes and photos - Dianna Lord.
Crystal Cave, Spring Valley, Wisconsin
Blaze and Jean Cunningham provided a tour of their own personal cave (don't we all wish for our own personal geo sites!), The Crystal Cave, which they open to approximately 35,000 of the public each year. It is the longest cave (4,600 ft in length) in Wisconsin. The Crystal Cave tour teaches students about mineralogy, karst features, hydrology, speleotherms, soda straws, stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, columns and various bat species that inhabit the caves..
Photo: A few of the sleeping bats in the Crystal Cave
Crystal Cave was formed in the lower Ordovincian Praire Du Chien Goup, which is a shallow marine deposit of dolostone and contains glaciofluvial deposits from the Wisconsin Glaciation period. In order to show the caves, in the 1900's the first owners removed much of the glacial deposits from the cave in order to allow people to tour the multi-level maize cave.
Continue reading "GSA Annual Meeting, 2011, Field Trip Notes" »
This is a picture of Pete Stark with our family's ancient Indian artifact--an authentic copper celt. Pete, Vice President of the Oconto Historical Society, is an expert on the Old Copper Culture. The Old Copper Culture refers to the items made by early inhabitants of the Great Lakes region.
We met Pete Stark at the Copper Culture State Park Museum which is just about a half hour north of Green Bay. This is the location of the "oldest dated cemetery" in eastern North America. It is only the second instance of Old Copper artifacts found in sites with burials, the first being the Osceola site in Grant County, Wisconsin. The artifacts at this site date from about 4,000 to 3,000 BC.
Pete explained that most of the prehistoric copper was mined on the north shore of Lake Superior, Isle Royale, and the Keweenaw Penninsula of Michigan. It was found in the bottom of pits and in veins. Later, it would be these ancient, abandoned copper pits that would eventually lead early miners to most of the first successful mines.
(Image with permission: "Map of Last Glacial Maximum by C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP Project, (www.scotese.com)." http://www.scotese.com/lastice.htm.)
Archaeological expeditions in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale uncovered copper producing pits and hammering stones which were used to work the copper, but by the time the first European explorers arrived, the area was the home of the Chippewa people, who did not mine copper.
In her article, The Archaic Culture in Wisconsin, Peggy Hoehne writes that the Copper Culture used the adze, gouge, and grooved axe which were woodworking tools made of ground stone. They also used a side notched spear-point as well as lanceolate spear-point. Other woodworking tools used were the ax and the celt. Also during this time, the atlatl was first used.
In Early Woodland Culture in Wisconsin Peggy Hoehne goes on to explain that after 1,000 BC the climate warmed and where once the archeologists had identified earlier groups by the spear points they used, now groups were to be defined by the use of pottery, the construction of burial mounds and the cultivation of plants.
Time periods are in debate. This is how I list the history of the Wisconsin Indians to 1200 AD.
After touring most the Copper Culture Museum and reveling in the incredible artifacts and how they were used, Pete showed us an interesting model that brought home the significance in understanding how the levels of Great Lakes have changed.
During historical times, the modern Great Lakes have fluctuated by more than a meter, but when you go back over the past 20,000 years, the level of the lakes has changed by more than 100 meters. These maps which were are in a study, Shifting Shorelines, by the professor of geology at Wheaton College, show the Great Lakes during several eras:
A) 15,400 years ago.
B) 13,000 years ago.
C) 11,800 years ago.
D) 6,000 years ago.
The great ice sheet that covered half of the North American continent once blocked the modern outlets of the Great Lakes. During this time, further studies have found that the earth was deformed under the huge weight of the ice sheet as well. As the ice sheet retreated northward, outlets became ice free and controlled the level of the lakes. But these outlets were also changing in elevation because the earth was slowly rising to the undeformed position it held in the pre-Ice Age.
In 1897, a mastodon was discovered in an eroded stream bank in Boaz, Wisconsin. Later, more Paleo-Indian points were discovered and their locations identified. In the book “Images of America--Baraboo,” by the Sauk County Historical Society, we find that on the south side of Baraboo, which is also the Ringling riverfront area, a mammoth skeleton was excavated in 1844 when the first dam was built at Oak Street as well. It was not preservable.
Just southwest of Baraboo, the Natural Bridge State Park features the largest natural arch in the state of Wisconsin. Directly beneath the arch is a rock shelter once used by Paleo-Indians. The oldest artifacts were pieces of charred wood, presumably from fire pits making this rock shelter. According to the park sign it is "one of the oldest dated sites for human occupancy in northeastern North America."
A few years ago, after a kayak expedition in the Apostle Islands, I was able to take a ferry over to Madeline Island, which is part of the Apostle Island group in the northernmost part of Wisconsin. Here, at La Pointe, according to Selwyn Dewdney and Calvin Martin, Madeline Island possesses a religious importance among the Chippewa not unlike that of Rome or Jerusalem to the Catholics and Jews.
RELATED
Wisconsin Indian Mounds and Slideshows
Old Copper Culture; Milwaukee Public Museum
Madeline Island Pictures on Flickr
