Perforated skulls in ancient Michigan

Signal ‘Feast of the Dead’--Halloween Special

Huron Feast of the Dead

    Obviously, archaeologists one hundred years ago did not know as much as we do. They spent their lives serving up the spike but never having the satisfaction of winning the point (think volleyball). But maybe because they had a narrower breadth of material available, they could see patterns extant archaeologists today might miss.

    This frivolous wisdom comes from my receiving and reading two short works by Emerson Greenman, ‘The Younge Site: An Archaeological Record from Michigan’ and ‘The Wolf and Fulton Sites: Macomb County, Michigan.’ The first and most extensive dates to 1937, the second is 1939. Greeman was a contemporary of ‘the custodian of Michigan archaeology’ W. B. Hinsdale. In fact, they co-wrote another University of Michigan occasional paper “Perforated Indian Crania in Michigan’ which I received with the others.

    Greenman’s best guess on why skulls were perforated has to do with ease of carrying and mortuary display. Leg bones were also found to be perforated and Greenman thinks the perforations might have been used to bundle body parts together for communal burial in an ossuary as many as 12 years after death. “The perforations of the ends of long bones at the Younge site suggest that they have been tied together in the proper relationship,” he wrote. The Younge site is in eastern Lapeer County.

    It seems it was a Huron Wendat tradition to keep the bodies of their ‘dearly departed’ close to home until it was time for this gigantic ceremony called the Feast of the Dead. Then the bones would be disinterred, carried to the ceremonial place and reburied in a communal grave.

    The Feast of the Dead was a time of mourning and ceremony. There is archaeological evidence that a Michigan Huron Feast of the Dead ceremony was held in Macomb County, near where Mud Creek runs into Anchor Bay aka Lake St.Clair. Mud Creek was once a small river named Riviere au Vase.

    In his Late Woodland Cultures of Southeastern Michigan James Fitting wrote, “The earliest reports on the Riviere au Vase site were reports on the mortuary complex.” Originally in 1936-37 Greenman et al. “uncovered 145 burial groupings containing approximately 350 individuals.” He said other burials were uncovered there in later site surveys. It seems this site in what is now New Baltimore was a place where the Feast of the Dead occurred.

    In another book, The Archaeology of Michigan Fitting makes the direct connection: “Riviere au Vase is a major burial complex and many burials are of a group or ossuary type…Most of the burials are re-articulated and much of the burial practice foreshadows the feast of the dead ceremonies among historic Indian groups.”    

    ‘Foreshadows’ is wrongly placed here. If it looks like the feast of the dead, it is the feast of dead. I would expect some of those bones interred at Riviere au Vase to be from Ontario and even further afield. A ceremony that took place once in a decade is something to travel for, especially if it’s your last trip.

    A Jesuit missionary named Jean de Brebeuf witnessed a ‘Huron’ Feast of the Dead at a Petun village near southern Georgian Bay in 1636. The Younge site people were related to these Petun and when they left southeastern Michigan around 1400 some would have taken refuge among their Nottawasaga Bay brothers and therefore increased their numbers.

   Of what Brebeuf witnessed Emerson wrote, “The ceremony, which took place late in the spring, was attended by some two thousand Indians, who brought to the burial ground from a dozen or more villages the remains of the dead for the past twelve years. The remains were in various stages of decomposition.”

    Brebeuf describes bags of bones which he calls ‘souls’ that were hung from cross-poles over the burial site. Emerson says, “It is possible, however, that in variants of the ceremony which he did not see, skeletons and portions of skeletons were hung by themselves, enclosed in wrappings.” This would account for those perforated crania, and probably nightmares for Pere Brebeuf.

    But the bigger mystery to archaeologists in 1936 was just who these people were. We know now they were the people known as either the Western Basin Tradition or the Younge Tradition. They are Michigan Huron. Both Huron Rivers were named after them because that’s where they lived. (On the earliest maps, the Clinton River is named Huron as well.) They are Iroquoian-speaking people who originated in Michigan around 500 AD and were dispersed from southeast Michigan around 1400. They exist today as the Wyandot, one group of which continues to live where their people originated near Gibraltar. There is archaeological proof that their ancestors built the Springwells Mound Group just south of Detroit. So when someone asks, who built the mounds? You can honestly answer, ‘The Wyandot!’ And why not?

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