You have to love Wisconsin, where in this current Plandemic, an armed march on Madison to protest the Weak Liberal Governors excessive "lock down" orders, which were then decimated by a supreme court ruling, and 95% of Wisconsin just "Opened up" that very same day. But that's a whole another story, covered in charts on this blog. Much more available on my much more radical blogs.
We can also wrap in the current Potowatomi cultural appropriation, and they seem to be getting a pass on this....because they are "both Indian groups" and most people just lack of knowledge and have far too much political correctness.
Most likely, they are part of the peoples that wiped the Woodland Indians off the map entirely.
Interesting that the old Indians did have quite a bit of slaves. But that goes against the narrative, too.
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Researchers in Wisconsin are coming up with theories to explain the consistent compass orientations of the Indian Mounds, and these relate to Ancestral Worship and the Milkyway Galaxy, which may be "the path home", aka riding the bull home, a Buddist concept also.
As expected the "establishment" will viciously attack them, then in about 10 years they will all be like "I suspected that all along....."
This guy is a great example, arrogant, hiding lies or misrepresentations at least, between a few truths.
Living in Wisconsin, I totally realize that you do not dig graves in late December! Duh, the soil is frozen feet deep by then. It's kind of again, not "politically correct" but the Indians would put the dead tied up into trees, and in spring after they bodies were pretty much picked clean, would intern the bones.
So this guy picks Dec 21 as a date to model the start and then draw conclusions that this was the perfect day for a burial. Wow, just wow.
Read it if this stuff interests you....hilarious he thinks that burials ALWAYS occur in the mounds or near the mounds, and this is far from true.
And he loves to trot out the "previously I have shown....." as if a prior theory has magically become fact.
I may have lack of knowledge, but was unfamiliar with "Algonquian funereal season". I wasn't aware that humans died in a particular season. Leave it at that for now. A search, brings up zero results.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Algonquian+%22funeral+season%22&t=ffcm&atb=v132-1&ia=web
The ramifications appear to be that he thought December was the "mound building season", which seems insane to not understand the weather of Wisconsin. Spring would be the mound building season, as I am building my own mounds starting in May each year. It's called spring cleanup, and really it starts in fall cleanup when the semi-perenial somewhat tended "agricultural zones" get branches and weeds removed and piled up, they somewhat compost into fall and start up again in spring, added to in spring, and by the following year they are fully broken down, very rich in humus and micro-biome and worms of course, and grow strong plants that are not attacked by disease and bugs and fungi and the like.
My mounds all start conical and then branch off to the west (or east) as it becomes easier to dump collected material rather than to try to pile a conical mound very high. I posit that the really high conical mounds, like 15' tall, where no longer of a purpose of cleanup and planting. Why do mine go west or east....because they create a south facing slope that heats up earlier, allows winter crops like carrots to start their growing cycle earlier, and also the beloved asparagus, rhubarb.
Pemmican would be getting pretty old after the long winter and these early crops are awesome.
I am not saying that is the only purpose for mounds, but Indians didn't like to work 70 hour weeks like modern enslaved man. They made practical use of everything in their environment, so they could have more time chasing the squaws, pondering the stars and the animal spirits, and such.
The night sky does change over time, as the earth does it 25,600 year precession.
In the graphics I have reconstructed that sky for south-central Wisconsin on the night of December 20-December 21, 1000 CE, winter solstice. The map was made using Yoursky of Fourmilab.https://www.facebook.com/groups/feed/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/487042914784182/
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Conversation Starter
Why Do Wisconsin Effigy Mounds Point SSW? (revised)
(cross-posted at Adena Core)
Over the past few weeks our friends at Effigy Mounds Initiative in Wisconsin have provided a "data dump" showing the results of their measures of the orientations of effigy mounds and linear arrays of mounds in the Wisconsin area, with the conclusion that the greatest number of mounds and arrays "point" in the direction of south-southwest. Their specific conclusions are complex and I await complete data, but their general finding was that a large majority of these mounds and arrays point to SSW with due south and south-southeast following in frequency.
These findings are persuasive despite that the precise direction to which any given asymmetrical earthen mound remnants "point" is usually ambiguous. The important finding is that most of these earthworks generally point south-southwest, including or close to due south.
That is highly significant but it begs the question: why? I've made no secret of my dissatisfaction with the interpretations of the data we have so far gotten from Wisconsin, which have something to do with pointing to the Milky Way. That makes no sense to me, because the Milky Way is a band of dense starlight in which we sit in the middle, so it circles us, and there is no way to "point" to it except by pointing up. Where the Milky Way intersects the horizon at each visible end in the night sky changes over the course of every night and over the course of the year. To claim that the SSW orientation of the Wisconsin mounds was designed to point to the Milky Way is a bit of flim-flammery and it lacks ethnological justification. It also avoids the question of which ethnolinguistic group built those mounds, and that is the central question.
As it happens, the orientation data does answer the question definitively. There were only two ethnolinguistic groups in the upper Midwest over the past two thousand years in the vicinity of Wisconsin: the Algonquians and the Plains Sioux. On the periphery of the region were the Pawnee, a Caddoan tribe. The builders of the effigy mounds, most of which date to a period of between 600 and 1200 CE, had to come from one or more of these three groups, which have radically different languages and traditions.
Assuming the effigy mounds had a funereal purpose, which is generally recognized because burials are always found either in or adjacent to the mounds, it is obvious that the mounds likely pointed in the direction to which the souls of the dead were meant to travel. That answers the identity question because all of the Siouan-speaking peoples of the Plains from which reports have been recorded say that the souls of the dead travel to the west, in the direction of the setting sun, while all of the Algonquian groups of the north and east (I am excluding the Cheyenne and Arapaho because they have long been separated from the main Algonquian stocks) expressed the belief that the souls of the dead travel to the south or north. The Ojibwe of Minnesota and northern Wisconsin explicitly said that souls travel to the south. Examination of Algonquian cosmology reveals that most Algonquians believed in a complex afterlife journey path that begins in the south at the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and proceeds to the northern stars.
Therefore, the orientation of Wisconsin effigy mounds to SSW, and mostly to the south, confirms that the builders were Algonquian-speakers, an identity that accords with all of the other evidence including DNA analysis of burials, artwork styles, the lineage of mound-building, and the reconstructed prehistory of the upper Midwest.
(Algonquians constituted a continuum of connected groups throughout their cross-continental expanse, but if we were to rank tribes by their degree of connectedness to the Wisconsin-area effigy-mound builders, that list would look something like: 1. Menominee, 2. all Adena-descended groups including the Miami-Illinois, the Ojibwe, and the Shawnee, 3. Cree, 4. Blackfoot, 5. all others. Again, I'm excluding the Arapaho and Cheyenne from present consideration because their separation led to admixture with other groups. It should be noted the Meskwaki (Fox), Asakiwaki (Sauk) and Potawatomi, though well-known in Wisconsin in historic times, had been displaced from the east during the Beaver Wars of the 17th century and therefore do not top the list in terms of connection to prehistoric Wisconsonians.)
That should be a settled question and the politics are irrelevant. If the effigy mounds pointed west, that would imply a strong Siouan connection. But they almost all point south, and that implies that Algonquians were at the helm. This does not mean that Siouan-speakers could not have been involved in some way, but if they were involved, it was likely not cooperative. (Slavery was common among tribes of the American interior.) It also doesn't mean that Siouan tribes don't share some Algonquian heritage. In fact, DNA studies show that the Plains Sioux, especially the Chiwere and Dhegiha branches, have large amounts of Algonquian admixture. Most of that admixture, however, would have come after the period of effigy-mound building.
With ethnic identity settled, we can now turn to the question of why the Wisconsin effigy mounds tend to point to the south southwest.
Previously, I have shown that Algonquians in interior North America had rather constant beliefs about the destinations of the souls of the dead, continuous with the cosmology of northern and western Asians from which the Algonquians descended in a separate migration from that of Amerindians or Athabaskans.. (This does not apply to Eastern Algonquians who had much admixture with other groups.) The tradition of which the Algonquians are one branch is often referred to as Northern Shamanism or the Bear Cult, a tradition with parallel interpretations of the Great Bear constellation in the sky and bear-hunt ceremonialism on earth. The fixity of this system's astronomical motifs lies in the relative brightness of the winter sky at northern latitudes and the plausibility of seeing those bright stars as guide-lights for the celestial journey, undertaken either at death or in shamanic trance.
The Algonquian traditional celestial pathway consisted of movement among a certain set of bright stars, starting with Sirius, moving through the belt stars of Orion and Aldebaran to the Pleiades, then turning at the Pleiades to travel to the star Capella, then on to the stars of the Great Bear or Fisher. Algonquians did not see the Great Bear as the later Greeks and Romans did. Rather they saw it as the four paws of the quadrilateral followed by either a very long tail or a line of hunters that extends at least to Arcturus. The very long tail likely accounts for why some Adena groups (namely the Ojibwe and the Miami-Illinois) changed the bear to a long-tailed fisher.
The long-tailed version of the Great Bear/Fisher is confirmed in the star lore of the Mi'kmaq as recorded by Stansbury Hagar, in the Marching Bears effigy mounds of Iowa, in the Pawnee Sky Map (which includes Arcturus) and even by the original Greek astronomers who named Arcturus after the bear. In many of these traditions it was important that funereal ceremony be performed only when the complete Great Bear/Fisher is visible, which becomes challenging at lower latitudes because Arcturus is a far-northern star in relation to Sirius, not often visible at the same time as Sirius and the Pleiades. We can think of the Algonquian funereal sky as extending from Sirius in the south to Arcturus in the north, with the Pleiades as a crucial middle step. At mid-latitudes this sky is visible only in late autumn and winter.
The Skidi Pawnee Sky Map is highly relevant because it shows this view of the sky, including Sirius, the Pleiades, and Arcturus. The inclusion of these stars, most shown in linear alignment, shows that either that the Pawnee of the Great Plains had borrowed Algonquian cosmology or even perhaps that the Pawnee obtained the map from Algonquians. At minimum it shows that Algonquian cosmology ruled in the upper Midwest as well as in the areas where continued to dominate, including the Great Lakes and Maritime regions.
Assuming that this cosmology was held by the Algonquians who built the conical and effigy mounds of Wisconsin and neighboring territories, we can easily reconstruct what their sky looked like during the Algonquian funereal season, which straddled winter solstice on the calendar. In the graphics I have reconstructed that sky for south-central Wisconsin on the night of December 20-December 21, 1000 CE, winter solstice. The map was made using Yoursky of Fourmilab. All stars of magnitude 3.0 or greater are shown and all stars of magnitude 2.0 or greater are named. The yellow line shows the Adena (Algonquian) celestial journey path, beginning at Sirius and ending either at the north celestial pole or at the ellipse that marks the prominent arc of stars between "the Great Bear" and Arcturus. ("Arc to Arcturus" is a mnemonic used by modern astronomers which recapitulates the etymology of those words; "arca" likely became a pseudonym for "bear" among the Proto-Indo-Europeans because of that prominent "arc" in the sky.)
(In my earlier attempt at this reconstruction, I made the mistake of selecting a single viewing time, and I neglected to include Arcturus, which rose that night at about 11:30 pm.)
It is logical that the Algonquians of that time viewed the proper time for the celestial journey as the time when the entire path from Sirius to Arcturus was visible. On that night of winter solstice, 1000 CE, that time covered a span from 11:30 pm, when Arcturus rose in the northeast, to about 3:45 am, when the Pleiades set in the northwest. My three sky maps show the sky at 11:30, 1:40: and 3:45. The first and third would have been times when key stars were at the edge of visibility, on the horizon. 1:40 am was about the ideal viewing time, when all of the important stars were plainly viewable. This would have been the ideal time for funereal ceremony and for the funereal orations explaining the celestial path that are still the key part of Algonquian funereal ceremony.
All three maps are for latitude 43 degrees North, longitude 89.5 degrees west, which is a point in or near Madison, Wisconsin, at the heart of effigy mound territory.
It can readily be seen that the common segment between Sirius and the Pleiades (M45) traverses the region of the sky's brightest stars. I chose 1000 CE as an approximate average date of the Wisconsin effigy mounds. I chose winter solstice because that was the high point of the Algonquian funereal season and probably was considered the ideal day to make the celestial journey.
Note that changing the location within the general region or changing the date within the winter season and within a couple centuries won't matter much and won't alter the analysis. The same assemblage of stars was visible in mid-evening anytime in late autumn or early winter, anywhere near Wisconsin, within a couple centuries of 1000 CE. Only the peripheral viewing times would change.
On all three maps, I have drawn an arrow in white from the zenith of the sky (center of the chart) through Sirius. That would have been the direction for viewing Sirius, the first stop on the celestial journey route. The azimuth of that line changes from about 177 degrees (SSE) to about 245 degrees (WSW). That is the same azimuth range as the predominant pointing direction of the effigy mounds and linear arrays of Wisconsin and neighboring areas as determined by the study of Sampson et al. At the ideal viewing time of 1:40 am, the azimuth of Sirius was at about 210 degrees, south southwest, almost precisely where the greatest number of effigy mounds and linear arrays point.
(Remember that on the sky maps, east and west are reversed from their terrestrial directions. Azimuths are therefore measured counterclockwise from the top rather than clockwise.)
If the EMI data is accurate, the probable explanation is that the builders of the effigy mounds were pointing the spirits of the dead toward Sirius, the first stepping-stone on the Algonquian celestial journey route. Variations in the pointing direction could have been caused by local groups picking a different time of the evening, or a different day of the year for the sighting.
This hypothesis is testable, because the predominant direction of pointing should change gradually with year of construction, assuming that winter solstice remained the optimal day. That test would require a careful assemblage of radiocarbon dates.
This interpretation far surpasses any non-testable and non-specifiable idea that the consistency in direction correlated with some kind of viewing of the Milky Way. The consistency in direction implies a point target; that point was the star Sirius.
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