Page 7 - ImmenseJourney

House floor plan, excavated rivers. At the northern end of the Loess Hills where

lodge, Mills County. the Big Sioux and Missouri rivers meet is another fo- Plymouth
Woodbury
cal point for a late prehistoric settlement called Mill

Creek.

historic period, however, that

stands out, offering the visitor Although the numbers of known sites in the Big

a spectacular and contrastive Sioux locality are overshadowed by the astonishing

view into the lives of ancestral number of dwelling sites in the south, the compact, Monona
Harrison
Plains Indians. fortified Mill Creek villages formed virtual mini-tells

similar to ancient Mesopotamian mounds. And like

Of all the known sites scat- their Near Eastern counterparts, Mill Creek villages

tered throughout the seven developed as palimpsests of village debris and mud-

Loess Hills counties, a major- walled houses that over time elevated the surround-

ity are prehistoric houses—earthen lodges—occupied ing flat valley floor 6–10 feet.

between A.D. 1000 and 1400, and antecedent to Pottawattamie

the 19th-century villages described and illustrated While both Mill Creek and Glenwood people lived

centuries later by in semipermanent

Meriwether Lewis, “What the cliff dwellings of the ancestral communities, grew Recorded archaeo- Mills
William Clark, Pueblo peoples are to Southwestern archae- corn, and devel- logical sites in the Fremont
George Catlin, and ology, the lodges of ancestral Plains villagers oped a rich material seven-county region
Karl Bodmer. What culture, they were of Iowa’s Loess Hills.

the cliff dwellings are to Midwest and Plains archaeology—the distinct societies

of the ancestral seminal moment for the emergence of the first based on other fun-

Pueblo peoples are sedentary farming societies.” damentally differ-

to Southwestern ent characteristics. Why these people chose to make this unique region
home, whether they interacted, what circumstances
archaeology, the One of the most shaped their different experiences, and why they
both abandoned the Loess Hills are just a few of the
lodges of ancestral Plains villagers are to Midwest important was community planning. Mill Creek vil- important questions that guided the recent study. In
all their material richness and diversity, these early
and Plains archaeology—the seminal moment for the lages were nucleated and fortified while Glenwood farming societies are nationally significant because of
the unparalleled opportunity they pose to explore the
emergence of the first sedentary farming societies. settlements were dispersed and unfortified. Both Mill varied life ways of ancestral Plains Indians on the eve
of Euroamerican contact.
Creek and Glenwood people maintained contacts

Archaeologists estimate that as many as 1,000 earth with distant communities, including those on the

lodge dwellings once covered the hills and valleys in Plains to the west and the Mississippi drainage to the

the southern Glenwood locality, all within a 10-mile east. Both groups appear to have left the region at

radius of the confluence of the Platte and Missouri slightly different times between A.D. 1200–1400.

University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist 5