A UW-La Crosse professor will unearth information about prehistoric Wisconsin in a lecture today in Hibbard 101.
Connie Arzigian, laboratory director and research associate for the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center at UW- La Crosse, will present a lecture titled “Prehistoric People of Western Wisconsin: Multidimensional Analysis.”
The lecture is sponsored by the Sociology and Anthropology Student Organization and the sociology and anthropology department. It was initiated and arranged by junior Christopher Kwaterski, the SASO co-chair.
Kwaterski participated in Arzigian’s archaeology field school in La Crosse during the summer of 2000. The group excavated a large Native American village occupied intermittently from about A.D. 1300 to 1600, known as the Krause site.
Many storage pits and possible house structures, pieces of pottery, stone, tools and other archaeological material were found at the Krause site.
Arzigian said he believes all articrafts would help scientists learn more about the people inhabiting that and many other villages of those times. They could learn what the people ate, what types of crops they grew, what animals they had as cattle, articrafts they used in their daily cooking and other activities, including how they hunted and fished hundreds of years ago.
Archaeologists use the term Oneota to describe the antique culture Arzigian rescued from being lost. The place had been prepared for housing development.
The people of the discovered Oneota civilization were probably the ancestors of the Ioway and Oto tribes now living in Iowa and Nebraska, and related to the ancestors of the Ho Chunk people as well.
“From this and similar sites, we have learned that those were the first true farmers in Wisconsin, living in villages along the major rivers terraces and farming floodplains,” Arzigian said.
During her lecture on campus, Arzigian will give a brief overview of the 12,000 years of occupation in western Wisconsin. She also will present slides and artifacts from Krause and other sites.
“This event will provide (students) with an opportunity to learn more about … the prehistoric peoples of Western Wisconsin,” Kwaterski said.
