The 12,000 Year Garden
Introduction: A 12,000 Year (or 12 K) garden is an exhibit of living plants illustrating the kinds of plants that have grown in an area over the last 12,000 years since the end of the Ice Age.  The exhibit is typically about 50 to 100 feet long with plants similar to those that were growing about 12,000 years ago at one end and modern plants at the other.  In other words, it begins on one end with the tundra plants, moves through the development of conifer forests and then prairie and ends with modern plants such as corn.  The exhibit typically features plants that people have used and grown over that span of time.

Below is an outline of what was happening throughout those 12,000 years.  To put those events into a global perspective, the outline also includes a few notes about events happening elsewhere in the world.  Those notes are indented and in smaller type.

If you would like to consider creating a 12 K garden, or if you would just like to learn more about the specific plants that make it up, see http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/12klist.htm

Of course, this material can also be used (and has been used) as the basis for a variety of exhibits that do not feature plants.  Feel free to use it for such things as Earth Day projects, local history celebrations, environmental exhibits, or whatever.


The Paleo Period:
Hunting and scavenging big game on the tundra
12,000 years ago
Paleo people hunted Ice Age mammals such as wooly mammoths, mastodons, bison, and giant beaver. Wooly mammoths looked like shaggy giant (or mammoth) elephants with overgrown tusks. Giant beavers were rodents seven feet long and weighing 475 pounds. The prehistoric bison were not the same as the modern bison, and they became extinct. White-tail deer were also hunted.

Cordage and Fiber
12,000 years ago
The very earliest stone artifacts already show evidence of the use of fibers or cordage. The stone artifacts have survived, but the fibers or cordage decomposed relatively quickly, so we have little or no evidence of its exact nature, but the early cordage was probably made from animal sinew. Cordage can be made from some of the common weeds today such as milkweeds, cattail leaves and velvet leaf.

Use of the Spear
12,000 years ago

The Archaic Period:
End of the Ice Age
10,000 years ago
Ice age tundra vegetation such as Arctic poppies and dwarf willow gave way to spruce and fir forests.

Gathering (and hunting)
9,000 years ago
Gathering foods such as roots and tubers, berries and a variety of nuts-- walnuts, pecans and hickory nuts-- became more important, as did game animals such as white-tailed deer, elk, bear, cottontail rabbit and turkey.  Earlier Paleo people had hunted (or scavenged) and gathered after a fashion.

Development of the atlatl
9,000 years ago
The use of the atlatl or spear hurling stick greatly increased the "firepower" of archaic hunters.

Spruce and fir forests give way to prairies and deciduous forests
8,000 years ago

Grinding Stones
8,000 years ago
Sites in Illinois offer some of the oldest evidence in North America of the use of grinding stones to crush and grind food.

Domestication of Dogs
8,000 years ago
The relationship between dogs and humans began when grey wolves started hanging around and scavenging from humans and became very useful to humans for their acute senses of hearing and smell. They were also used for beasts of burden and food. This relationship became so close that some early people of Illinois sometimes gave dogs honorable burials.

Discovery of Planets & 7 day week in the Mid-East
7,000 years ago
”Planet” is Greek for “wanderer.” The discovery of the seven “wanderers” (Sun, moon and 5 planets) across the sky in predictable cycles gave rise to marking time in seven day intervals, a practice we follow today. We even name those days after the planets or the deities associated with them: Saturn’s-day, Sun-day, moon-day, and so on. Aboriginal astronomy or archeo-astronomy is a very interesting specialty within archaeology.
Semi Permanent Villages
7,000 years ago
Hunters and gatherers began choosing to settle by major river valleys and flood plains, and building relatively large permanent shelters as well as facilities for storing and processing food.

Growing of ‘Egg’ or Gourds
6,000 years ago
The first crop grown in Illinois was a species of gourd-like squash. It was small and hard-shelled, and it was grown for its seeds and to be made into utensils.

Reappearance of bison
6,000 years ago
The establishment of modern bison (not to be confused with the earlier Ice Age bison) took place after the establishment of the prairie itself.

First cities (Mesopotamia) in the Mid-East
5,500 years ago
In Mesopotamia, in the “Fertile Crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, those rivers furnished water for irrigation but also transportation for invaders intent on capturing the resultant fertile lands. The need to organize the irrigation canals and walled settlements gave rise to cuneiform records written on mud tablets which, in turn, gave rise to one of the earliest centers of urban civilization.
Burning of the Prairies
5,000 years ago
Indians regularly burned the grasslands to revitalize and enlarge the prairies.  If the grasslands of Central Illinois are not burned off every 2-5 years they revert to timberland in a very few decades.  Modern prairie restoration efforts demonstrate it is very labor intensive to maintain even a small patch of prairie without regular burning.
Pyramids in Egyptian
4,500 years ago
Egyptian culture was based on the annual flooding of the Nile, which deposited fertile soil on the flood plain each year. The Pharaoh, supported by an army of astronomers and mathematicians, was able to predict this annual flooding and then re-establish property lines after it. This power to impose order on the watery chaos was so great that the Pharaoh came to be regarded as a deity, and the Pyramids were the stone monuments to that divinity.

Stonehenge in England
4,000 years ago
Stonehenge is one of many similar megalithic monuments in England. It consists of four concentric circles of stones. It is believed to be a calendar for marking the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes and perhaps to predict other astronomical and seasonal occurrences.

Long Distance Trade
3,800 years ago
Illinois has been called the most accessible place on the planet because of its access to rivers and the Great Lakes. About 4,000 years ago the people of Illinois began taking advantage of this position. Trade changed from occasional local trading to formalized, long distance trade from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the Great Plains, the Ozarks and the Great Lakes region.

Proto-Algonquin migration from the Pacific Northwest
3,800 years ago
Sometime between 3800 and 3400 years ago, a socially and culturally advanced people of Columbia River area of the Pacific Northwest began a migration from their homeland toward the east. They spoke an Algic language, had a distinctive style in the lithic tools they made, and they used red ochre (a rusty red mineral) in burial practices. (See the “Algonquin Migration” downloadable poster from the Prairie Nations website.)

The Woodland Period:
Algonquin cultures developing
3,000 years ago
This migration from the Pacific Northwest took several centuries and left in its wake the western Algonquian cultures such as the Blackfoot and the Arapaho. In the Midwest over the course of some thousand years Proto-Algonquian developed into the an array of Algonquian languages as well as a Proto-Eastern Algonquian language. The diagnostic traits of ‘Red Ochre’ culture of the Midwest during this time were very similar to the distinctive traits of the the pre-migration Western Idaho culture of 1,700 years earlier. The ‘Red Ochre’ culture spelled a transition from 7,000 years of Archaic culture to the subsequent Woodland culture.

Pottery
2,500 years ago
Pottery-making people from the Great Lakes region and from the Mississsippi Valley to the south made temporary settlements in Illinois. The Early Woodland period is sometimes characterized as “Late Archaic with pottery.”

Circumference of the Earth Measured in Greece
2,300 years ago
Eratosthenes, an Ionian scientist -- and historian, poet, philosopher, theatre critic and mathematician -- calculated the circumference of the earth to about 93% accuracy based on the differing angles of shadows at noon on difference places on the earth.

Qin Dynasty in China
2,200 years ago.
The Qin Dynasty,  also known as Ch'in, was the first true empire in Chinese history and gave rise to the name "China."   A ruthless but efficient bureaucracy and and widespread use of conscripted labor produced infrastructure such as finishing the Great Wall.  Some 700,000 conscripted laborers and artists built the first emporer's mausoleum, an underground complex containing several thousand unique, highly artistic life-size terra-cotta warriors.  The laborers and artists were also buried in the complex.  All books and histories of the empire other than those having to do with agriculture or medicine were burned.

Grain Domestication
2,000 years ago
Among the first food crops grown in Illinois was sumpweed, which is related to sunflower, as well as sunflower itself. Sumpweed does not grow naturally in Illinois except in the southwestern part, but it was cultivated throughout a much larger area. Goosefoot is a starchy grain that is related to the quinoa currently sold in trendy healthfood stores. Goosefoot can still be found growing as a very pesky weed such as lamb’s quarter. Maygrass or Carolina canarygrass is native to Kentucky but was brought to this area and grown because, as its name implies, it can be harvested in early summer. Little barley and erect knotweed or smartweed were also grown for their grains.
‘Medicine Wheels’ on the Great Plains
2,000 years ago
The Great Plains of the US and Canada are the site of several arrangements stone cairns, usually in a circle, that seem to have astronomical significance. These similarities are sometimes shared among sites. One such site, Moose Mountain Wheel in southeastern Saskatchewan is built on a site carbon dated to 2,600 years old (± 250 years) and is aligned to mark three stars central to Lakota cosmology as they rose about 2,000 years ago.
Bow and Arrow
1,400 years ago
The bow and arrow was an efficient tool for hunting game such as the white-tailed deer. It was also an efficient weapon to use against humans at a time when the clash of developing cultures and growing populations was often becoming more violent.

Corn Agriculture
1,200 years ago
Corn is the product of selective breeding by New World farmers for several thousand years in southern hemisphere. It came to North America and was raised about a thousand years ago by women of Illinois. Although the word for corn in many Native languages implies ‘the source of life,’ in fact, health and life expectancy in some cases deteriorated as people’s diets became overly devoted to corn.

Mississippian Period:
Cahokia Mounds & Woodhenge
800 years ago
Monk’s Mound at Cahokia was the largest human-made structure in North America until huge hangars were built for spacecraft at Cape Canaveral. Cahokia was a larger city than London in 1250 and remained the largest city in the history of North America until Philadelphia of the early 1800’s. Cahokia’s 20,000 inhabitants consumed 10-15 tons of corn every day, which was shipped in by river on large freighter canoes up to 70 feet in length and weighing as much as a ton.

Woodhenge refers to the remains of four, or possibly five, circular astronomical calendars to mark and predict the beginning of summer and winter at sunrise and sunset. These circles of large, evenly spaced poles also figured in the alignment of several principle mounds and perhaps marked other astronomical, seasonal, or ceremonial events. The last Woodhenge was built about 1,000 years ago.

Oneota culture arrives
700 years ago
Red ochre using, buffalo hunting Oneota people of the Great Plains crossed the Mississippi into Wisconsin about 800 or 1,000 years ago and into Illinois and on into Indiana a couple hundred years later.

Columbus
1492
The point is sometimes argued that the Carib Indians on the beach who met Columbus enjoyed better diet, housing, medical care, and social and political liberties and had a more sophisticated and functionally valid view of the natural and social world in which they lived than did the sailors on Columbus’ ship.
The Historic Period:
Marquette & Joliet
1673
When Jolliet and Marquette first encountered natives of Illinois, they met avid traders who already possessed many European goods they had acquired through trade in the Great Lakes area. These people welcomed the Europeans and the trade goods they were eager to trade for buffalo hides. But along with the trade goods came Progress and the end of the traditional native way of life. By the mid-1800’s the buffalo were used up, and the Indians who had hunted them relocated west of the Mississippi.

Dredging the Swamps
Mid 1800’s
We often assume that it was the “iron horse” of the railroad that brought Progress to the prairies, but the dredge boat figured at least as prominently in that process. Before that time much of the land was swamps abounding in cordgrass and with mosquitos carrying the “Illinois shakes” – malaria.

But what about the cavemen and dinosaurs?
Children viewing the 12 thousand year exhibit often ask where the cavemen and dinosaurs fit into the picture.  Of course, except in cartoons and sci-fi movies, dinosaurs and the first humans were separated in time by hundreds of millions of years.

It is not easy to put a date on "the first humans."  According to geneticists, the first human-like beings with distinctly human genetics appeared about two or three million years ago.  On the other hand, the first appearance of "modern" human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens, may have been as recent as 100 thousand years ago.  Dinosaurs, in contrast, roamed the earth and were gone by about 200 million years ago.

So where would these events be on  timeline in which 12,000 years was represented by a 50 foot long garden?  The garden would have to be a lot longer than 50 feet.  Here's how long the garden would have to be to include those events:

And what about the "Big Bang" that created the universe?  Where would it be relative to a 50 foot, 12,000 year garden? DOCUMENT INFORMATION
This document: http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/12knotes.htm
Prairie Nations homepage: http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations
Author: Jim Fay, Ph.D.
Posted: 6/22/04