Dickson Mounds - Native Life Site

Native Life Site

While the members of most hunter-gatherer cultures travel extensively or even practice a nomadic lifestyle, the exceptional productivity of the Illinois River valley in fish, shellfish and game made it possible for semi-permanent settlements to develop. Archaeological examination of these sites have generated significant insights into the living conditions of Native Americans over time and the levels of technology they possessed.

A large parcel of the adjacent river bottomland is undergoing preservation and ecosystem restoration as part of the Emiquon Project. The Emiquon wetlands generated much of the food eaten by the people who lived on or near this blufftop site. In 2009, an excavation by Michigan State University turned up shards of pottery, arrowheads and the foundations of houses and other structures that date back to about 1300 CE.

Some of the people who lived here were actually buried in Dickson Mounds itself. Their skeletons were excavated and displayed to the public from the 1930s until 1992, when in a controversial move the burial display was resealed due to Native American concerns. It is estimated that there are at least 3,000 burials at this site. The earlier burials were in mounds that were still being built as late as the ninth century, while later burials were in cemeteries. This exemplifies the shift away from the earlier focus on burial mounds as the monumental foci of communities lacking large settlements to the later emphasis on platform mounds at the center of towns. Mississippians decentralized cemeteries, making their communities rather than their burial places the center of their lives. "One group of four Mississippian people buried together appear to have been sacrificed at the Dickson Site". Their heads were removed and replaced by pots. This was not a practice that would have been common earlier.

After the sealing,the museum was renovated as a series of galleries that attempt to portray the history of the site. For example, the River Valley Gallery exhibition attempts to depict indigenous life patterns here since the close of the last Ice Age, while the "Reflections on Three Worlds" Gallery exhibition attempts to describe how scholars have used archeological findings to generate inductive evidence on the residents' life and culture.

Excavators left 248 burials in place after exposure, and these were long displayed inside a specially built museum enclosure. The American Indian objections to the display led to its closure in 1992. After that, three excavated dwellings now remain open to visitors at the site and the museum displays chronicle prehistoric life in the region.