An Indian will follow an oak anywhere

Musings on the Mitt and one helluva finding

Shag Bark, not an Oak at all, with Adena mound in background

Dear reader,

    This is a segment from ‘Earliest Michigan History’, a small tome I wrote or am writing. Quotes in this article are from: An Archaeological Inventory and evaluation of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Leelanau and Benzie Counties, Michigan. William A. Lovis, principal investigator.

    The project, and the funds that supported it, was sponsored by the National Park Service, Midwest Archaeological Center, and was conducted by the Michigan State University Museum (Contract No. CX-6000-4-0150).

    GAS

    In Michigan our original ancestors started experimenting with plant food sources around 10,000 years ago. It’s similar to the experiment Burger King is going through now with the Impossible Whopper only on a survivable scale.

    They started tasting the growth around them discarding most but adopting others into their weekly subsistence routine. Acorns became a pivotal part of their annual diet. Ergo, the title.

    Heidi Lucero tells WCRW radio, her tribe, the Juañero Band of Mission Indians, “used to eat it in a mush, similar to Cream of Wheat or Malt-O-Meal, and it would be served hot with every meal.”

   But the acorn straight from the tree is inedible, at least to me. They need to be prepared and it is this preparedness that redounds through the years. Let’s say oak trees made it into lower peninsula of Michigan 10,000 years ago, humans would have followed and just as sure they would have brought their knowledge of how to prepare acorn flour with them.

    I’m saying it’s not likely the knowledge of many of the plants of the deciduous forest, like how to prepare acorn mush, originated in Michigan. To get the exact origin you might as well ask where fire first burned.

    Another kind of people followed the oak up to Michigan, we call them Archaic after a ridiculously long period called the Archaic Period. Others have complained about this so I will, too. We need to logically and temporally break up the Archaic Period into smaller units. It would do human kind a great honor.     

    Currently in North America the period covers 8,000 years from 11,500 to 3,200 Before Present. There are three sub-periods but, they too are too vast. The Early Archaic is from 11,500 to 8,900 BP, 2,600 years. Can we say what the world was doing during Christ’s time is what we do today? That's about a 2,000 year span. Point made! Onward up the Mitt.

    I’m on a tangent about preparing acorns and this KCRW does the trick. In their interview with Heidi Lucero she explains, “Native Americans would first roast them to kill weevils eating any of the nuts. They would them shell the nuts and grind them into flour. She says acorns have tannic acids in them and are too bitter to eat right out of the shell. To remove the tannic acid, Indigenous people would leach the flour, flushing the tannic acid out with water in a creek or stream.”

    She admits it was an “arduous process. But when you have something that can last through the winter season, it is really worth having that as a food source.”

    Our source says, “The Archaic hunters and gatherers are the first peoples in Michigan who manufactured tools such as mortars, pestles, and axes for the processing of wood and seeds.” Pestles and mortars are needed to mash the roasted acorns into flour so we can expect they came up from the south with the hardwood trees starting as much as 10,000 years ago. I think the same can be said of the axes. But maybe not.

    We know Paleo campers were in Michigan 13,500 years ago and they were the first people of Michigan because they followed the glacier up. While the archaeologists did not find an ax stone among the camp site, it is reasonable they had the need to take down trees but maybe not in Michigan yet. Depending on how close they were to the actual glacier, which we know now was the receding Valders substage, the subsoil may have been frozen. If so, no trees.

    But then again, scientists say the glacier was completely out of Ohio 14,000 years ago. The first Michigan man, probably from Indiana, appears five hundred years later. The boreal forest follows the glacier at the exact distance the tundra ends. Man follows the forest. The question is whether that first man would have had a need to chop down a tree.

    I assume firewood would be everywhere but maybe not. In the youth of the forest there are not many branches gone to waste. But 100 years in and a forest would have plenty of firewood for the picking. More than likely this first Michigan man didn’t need to chop a tree down for firewood. Hunters wouldn’t do that anyway because of the drying time it takes to cure the green wood. On the other, other hand, if I knew I was coming back to a hunting spot year after year, I’d chop down a tree so I had plenty of future fire wood. Bingo! I like that one.

    From all this, I’m saying it’s likely the Paleo hunters carried an ax as well as these Archaic hunters. So the difference between the Paleo man’s gear and the Archaic dude’s stuff is mortar and pestle, the tools for turning acorns in something of annual sustenance. Hurray! A tangible distinction between Paleo and Archaic based on our source’s statement of fact that Archaic people were the first in Michigan to create and therefore utilize the mortar and pestle.

Behind the Green Door, I take up to Arthursburg Hill for the signs of ancient life.

    Speaking of same, and since I mentioned the place where the Maple meets the Le Grande Riviere there you’ll find a place called Arthursburg Hill. It overlooks the Maple just above the conjunction. In the apex of flatland where the rivers meet is where the Green Corn Dance was held for over a thousand years.

    Across the Grand is where Generaux had his trading post when this was New France. He chose this spot because it had been a traditional trading place of the Indians. If years can be counted in pounds of mortar to pestle, Arthursburg Hill is ancient. When I worked at the Ionia newspaper, I explored Arthursburg Hill. You have to climb up to it and immediately as your face reaches that upper plateau you feel the presence of something sensible. Not exactly ghostly at least not in the shimmering heat of a sunny afternoon. The sense of the place comes to light when I found the first pestle rock. There were several around and with that the realization, this is a kitchen, or maybe a workshop. And once you configure your seeing to the shape of this place, you see how the rock around the place is arranged with some intention. What that is is not clear, then or now. But the face of that first pestle rock had been beaten into a bowl, as had the others. It struck me standing there how many beats it must have taken to reach that state. Enough acorn flour to last the winter, times how many winters?

    By the pestle, if not the mortar, Arthursburg Hill is an ancient place.