The Last 12,000 Years
Globally and in IllinoisMammoths, mastadons, ...Abstract: Notes to accompany the timeline poster that can be downloaded from the Prairie Nations web site. These notes deal with the events, but not the individuals, included in that poster. The poster is in PDF format and prints out on legal size paper. See Document Information .
12,000 years ago
Ice Age Mammals such as wooly mammoths, mastodons, bison, and giant beaver had been roaming the tundra in some cases for a million years or more. 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. 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 milkweed, cattail leaves and velvet leaf.
Development of the Spear
12,000 years ago
End of the Ice Age
12,000 years
Ice age tundra vegetation such as Arctic poppies and dwarf willow gave way to spruce and fir forests.
Discovery of Planets & 7 day week
10,000 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.
Gathering (and hunting)
9,000 years ago
Earlier Paleo people had hunted and gathered after a fashion, but the 'hunting' was largely scavenging and the 'gathering' pretty hit-and-miss. About 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 to people in Illinois. They also hunted animals such as white-tailed deer, elk, bear, cottontail rabbit and turkey.
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. A "mano" (MAN oh) is a hand-held stone most often used on a stationary rock slab or "metate" (meh TAH teh).
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.
First cities (Mesopotamia)
7,000 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. These written records, in turn, gave rise to one of the earliest centers of urban civilization.
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.
Gourds
6,000 years ago
The first crop grown in Illinois was a species of gourd-like squash. It was probably small and hard-shelled and, like gourds of today, was grown more to serve as utensils and storage containers than for food.
Stonehenge
5,000 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. Perhaps it was also used to predict other astronomical and seasonal occurrences.
Egyptian Pyramids
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.
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
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 used red ochre in burial practices. (See the "Algonquin Migration" downloadable poster from the Prairie Nations website.)
Algonquin cultures developing
2,700 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 Menomini/Cheyenne, Cree, Miami, Illinois, Ojibway, Potawatami, Fox/Sauk/Kickapoo/Mascouten, and Shawnee languages as well as a Proto-Eastern Algonquian language. The culture the Proto-Algonquians brought to the Midwest dramatically surpassed anything that had previously been achieved in the region. 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 some 1,700 years earlier. The 'Red Ochre' culture spelled a transition from 7,000 years of Archaic culture to the subsequent Woodland culture.
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 is now extinct. 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 Cararygrass 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 was also grown.
'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.
Pottery
1,500 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 potttery."
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.
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 sev eral principle mounds and perhaps marked other astronomical, seasonal, or ceremonial events. The last Woodhenge was built about 1,000 years ago.
Bison Hunting
800 years ago
Buffalo crossed the Mississippi into Wisconsin about 1,000 years ago and through Illinois into Indiana about 800 years ago. The buffalo quickly became the center of Prairie Nations cultures because one successful buffalo hunt could supply an enormous amount of food and hides compared to a similar effort hunting deer or elk. The tool of fire took on new applications, such as "baiting" the buffalo by burning off a patch of prairie in the early spring to encourage early spring growth of grass and entice the game to the area. These practices also lent themselves to the ever expanding cultivation of corn.
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.
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.American Revolution
1776Dredging 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 that would cut to ribbons any man or beast foolish enough to walk into it and with mosquitos carrying the "Illinois shakes" – malaria.
Document Information
This document: http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/timenotes.htm
Referring document: http://www.prairienet.org./prairienations/posters.htm
Prairie Nations homepage: http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations
Author: Jim Fay, Ph.D.
Posted: 5/10/02