by Gregory Vogel

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2008 January 9
The Earliest Illinoisans

            Who were the very first people to set foot in western Illinois, how did they live their lives, and what happened to them?  This year I’ll try to cover every major time period in the archeology of this region – from the original Native American settlers to European explorers who created the earliest written accounts. 

            The prehistory of this region is long, exciting, and filled with at least as many questions as answers.  There were times in prehistory when the population of some western Illinois counties was greater than it is today.  There was also a time, shortly before the arrival of Europeans to this continent, that a portion of western Illinois was nearly empty of human populations.  We still don’t know why.

            To begin at the beginning, we need to understand something about the environment of the area when it was first colonized, at least 12,000 years ago.  This marks the beginning of what archeologists call the Paleoindian period, and while there is ample evidence that people were actually here before then, we don’t know very much, yet, about who these earlier people were or what they did.  More on these earliest of early settlers in a later column.

            Most evidence suggests that Paleoindian people migrated here from Asia.  Anthropologists have long suspected this because languages spoken by Native Americans are closely related to Asian languages, and modern DNA evidence confirms the link.  Paleoindians encountered a western Illinois very different from the one we are used to today.  The last Ice Age was coming to an end, and glaciers more than one mile thick still covered parts of North America.  The weight of the glacial ice was so great that it pushed the earth’s crust down, and where the ice was thickest, near the northern Great Lakes, the earth is still rebounding at the rate of about half an inch per year. 

            At 12,000 years ago western Illinois had a sub-arctic climate and held vast forests of spruce trees.  Ancient needles from these trees can still be recovered from deep sediment cores in some parts of the floodplains, preserved in water-saturated clay.  They still smell like spruce.  Giant Ice Age animals roamed the land: mammoths and mastodons, saber-tooth cats, and short-faced bears nearly twice as large as any bear today.  These animals are known as Ice Age Megafauna. Quite a menagerie for anyone to encounter. 

            Most Paleoindian sites are small, consisting of a few stone tools or debris from flintknapping (the process of manufacturing stone tools).  From this evidence, it appears the Paleoindian people lived in small groups (maybe 25-50 people living together), and didn’t settle permanently in one location but moved frequently, following food and other resources. 

            The most famous type of artifact from Paleoindian times is the Clovis Point, a style of stone spear-tip with a distinctive shape.  Clovis Points are named after an archeological site in Clovis, New Mexico, but are found throughout North and South America.  These tools are usually a few inches long, thin, and shaped something like a sumac leaf with a bite taken out of the base.  They all have a distinct channel or “flute” running up from the base on each side, which allowed them to be firmly attached to the end of a spear.  Thousands of Clovis points and other Paleoindian-age artifacts have been found in this region, but not many have been recovered within the context of well-documented archeological sites. 

            One notable exception is the Lincoln Hills site along the Mississippi River in Jersey County.  Lincoln Hills represents one of the largest Paleoindian sites in the Midwest, consisting of a great number of stone tools and flintknapping debris.  The site is located near a source of high-quality chert, the stone from which Clovis points and other tools were made, and was probably re-visited numerous times over the centuries as Paleoindians returned to gather more stone for tool making.

            Another well-documented Paleoindian site is Kimmswick in Mastodon State Park south of St. Louis.  Kimmswick consists of a large bed of bones from animals that lived near the end of the Ice Age.  At this site, a Clovis Point and other tools were found mixed with the bones of mastodons and other animals. 

            This leads to one of the most dramatic aspects of life at the end of the Ice Age: Paleoindians hunted and butchered Ice Age Megafauna, including mammoths and mastodons.  How they were able to hunt these animals with the technology of the time is still not well understood.  Did they attack them directly, mire them in bogs, set traps, or somehow disable them?  Considering the science and technology available to us today, it surely reflects better on the Paleoindians than on us that we haven’t figured them out yet.  We may consider people who lived 12,000 years ago “Paleo”, but they certainly weren’t primitive. 

Dr. Gregory Vogel is Director of Research at the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois.  He may be contacted at: gvogel@caa-archeology.org, or P.O. Box 366, Kampsville, IL, 62053.