Aztalan: Cahokia's walled Wisconsin colony burned around 1200

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Key facts

• Aztalan, on the Crawfish River about an hour west of Milwaukee, was a short-lived walled Mississippian colony broadly dated 1000-1200 CE; it burned to the ground, and archaeologists tie the burning to Cahokia's abandonment around 1200.
• Its palisade wall was about half a mile long, 10 ft tall, with 33 guard towers; a central plaza of about 20 acres held three small earthen mounds, the largest two-tiered, 20 ft tall and 150 by 150 ft at the base.
• Houses within the walls were split into two groups by an interior palisade wall with watchtowers, suggesting internal social divisions; an estimated 500 people lived inside the walls, with thousands more around the periphery.
• About 70 storage pits, each 2 m deep and 2 m in diameter, were cut into a sculpted tiered platform off the main plaza and are believed to have held corn - a practice Cahokia is not known for.
• Cahokia-type ceramics, SECC art, Gulf of Mexico shell, Upper Michigan copper and long-nose ear ornaments appeared in the mid-1000s, supporting a Cahokia colonial origin; the long-nose ornaments are rare outside Cahokia and Spiro.
• A north-south line of modest mounds outside the palisade each held a single thick post; at its north end a conical mound 50 ft in diameter and 6 ft tall held a single grave, the 'princess burial,' found and named by Samuel Barrett in 1919 and removed to the Milwaukee Public Museum - a woman in her 20s with about 2,000 shell beads in three belt wraps, buried outside the walls.
• Wisconsin has the largest concentration of effigy mounds in the world; tens of thousands once existed and about 4,000 survive in public parks and on private land, and a 1980s regional survey recorded about 500 sites around Aztalan whose houses were circular with local ceramics.
• The site was rediscovered in 1835 by Timothy Johnson and named by amateur archaeologist Nathaniel Hyer, who misread Alexander von Humboldt's Aztec northern origin place, Azlan; Increase Lapham made a professional map in 1850 and Samuel Barrett excavated in 1919, 1920 and 1932, first recognizing Aztalan as Mississippian.
• Barrett also claimed Aztalan's people were cannibals based on burned and broken human bones, which the video attributes to burned charnel house remains.
• The state of Wisconsin bought the land in 1948 and Aztalan State Park opened in 1952; Lynne Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee worked at the site for 20 years from the 1970s, surveying over 500 regional sites, identifying Late Woodlands origins and discovering the 70 storage pits in 1996; current work by the Laboratory of Wisconsin uses ground-penetrating radar to map the palisade.
• Aztalan is regarded as sacred by the Ho-Chunk Nation and other First Nations, though no single tribe has federal recognition as direct descendants, and some grave goods have been repatriated.

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