Raised agricultural beds cover an estimated 70% of the lidar survey area at Sixty Islands archaeological site along the Menominee River.
Credit: Madeleine McLeester
Hidden beneath Michigan’s forests, researchers have uncovered vast ancient farmlands built by ancestral Menominee communities, revealing a complex agricultural system.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with its cold weather, brief growing season, and thick forests, has long been considered an unlikely place for large-scale farming.
However, a new study led by Dartmouth researchers has revealed strong evidence that ancestral Native American communities once practiced intensive agriculture at the Sixty Islands archaeological site along the Menominee River. This discovery identifies the area as the most complete ancient farming site found in the eastern United States.
The site contains an extensive network of raised ridge fields dating from roughly the 10th century to around 1600, many of which remain well preserved today. These ridged garden beds, measuring between 4 and 12 inches tall, were cultivated by the ancestors of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin to grow corn, beans, squash, and other crops.
The findings, published in Science, reveal that the scale of farming was far greater than previously recognized.
“The scale of this agricultural system by ancestral Menominee communities is 10 times larger than what was previously estimated,” says lead author Madeleine McLeester, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. “That forces us to reconsider a number of preconceived ideas we have about agriculture not only in the region, but globally.”
Researchers have so far examined about 330 acres of the site, but they believe this represents only a portion of the full extent. Their estimates suggest the surveyed area covers roughly 40% of the total site, indicating that much more remains to be explored.
Map shows Sixty Islands and other archaeological sites along the Menominee River, and the lidar survey area.
Credit: Carolin Ferwerda
“When you look at the scale of farming, this would require the kind of labor organization that is typically associated with a much larger, state-level hierarchical society,” says McLeester. “Yet, everything we know about this area suggests smaller egalitarian societies lived in this region, but in fact, this may have been a rather large settlement.”
The Cultural Landscape of Anaem Omot
The site is part of Anaem Omot, which stands for the “Dog’s Belly” in Menominee. Anaem Omot is a cluster of significant ancestral Menominee archaeological sites that includes several burial mounds and a village that were excavated from the 1950s through the 1970s. It was initially mapped in the 1990s by Marla Buckmaster, an archaeologist at Northern Michigan University, and excavated by Jan Brashler, an archaeologist at Grand Valley State University, who found and radiocarbon-dated a corn cupule (the cup-shaped structure on the cob that holds a kernel in place) during excavations. Given the site’s cultural significance with its burial mounds, dance rings, and agricultural ridges, it is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
Building on earlier work and upon the request of the Menominee tribal authorities, archaeologists from Dartmouth were invited to survey and document the area using new technologies that were previously unavailable. Through this partnership, the team collaborated with David Grignon, tribal historic preservation officer for the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and the late David Overstreet, a consulting archaeologist for the College of the Menominee Nation.
In May 2023, after the snow had melted but before the leaves were out, the team conducted an innovative, drone-based survey of a 330-acre area using lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses pulses of light from a laser to map objects on the Earth’s surface. Lidar provides a dataset that’s like a giant cloud of points with the locations of the trees and rocks, which can be filtered out to see the ground.
Lidar data detected other cultural features at Sixty Islands archaeological site in addition to agricultural field ridges, including: A) a newly documented dance ring; B) a historic building foundation; C) a 19th-century logging camp; D) looted burial mounds; E) remains of previously unknown burial mounds at Backlund mound group; and F) a burial mound.
Credit: Lidar images by Carolin Ferwerda and Jesse Casana
“Lidar is a really powerful tool in any kind of forested or heavily vegetated region where the archaeology is hidden below trees—where no kind of optical imagery can see what’s underneath the tree canopy,” says senior author Jesse Casana, a professor of anthropology who uses remote sensing technologies regularly in his work.
“Forests are really confounding to archaeology in a lot of ways, so a lot of archaeologists rely on publicly available lidar that has often been obtained from a plane that flies really high. But the resolution of the data is usually too low to see many archaeological features. Drone lidar enables us to collect the same kind of data but at a much higher resolution,” says Casana.
Hidden Patterns Beneath the Trees
The lidar uncovered sets of parallel ridges at the site that create quilt-like patterns stretched across the landscape. The ridges were constructed in various directions, illustrating that their locations may have been determined by individual farmers rather than the direction of the sun or other environmental factors.
The results also revealed: a circular dance ring, a rectangular building foundation that may have been a colonial trading post, two 19th-century logging camps, looted burial mounds, previously unknown burial mounds that were thought to be destroyed in the 1970s, and a burial mound on privately owned land that is currently owned by a mining company.
In August 2023, the team excavated three raised agricultural ridges at various distances from the Menominee River. Through radiocarbon dating of charcoal samples obtained during excavation, they found that the ridges had been rebuilt over a 600-year period, with construction initially around the year 1000, which was during the Late Woodland period.
“All three ridges showed a similar picture in terms of their construction, history, and reconstruction,” says Casana. “Most field systems have been either lost or destroyed due to intensive land use across most of North America, through farming, including pastures, and the cutting down of trees for urban development.”
“Through this research, we get this little window of preservation into pre-Colonial farming in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” says Casana.
Evidence of Soil Enrichment and Agricultural Ingenuity
Through the excavations, charcoal, broken pieces of ceramics known as sherds, and artifacts were recovered, suggesting that remains from fires and household refuse were likely used as compost in the fields. The results also showed that wetland soils had been used to enrich the soil.
“Our work shows that the ancestral Menominee communities were modifying the soil to completely rework the topography in order to plant and harvest corn at the near northern extent of where this crop can grow,” says McLeester. “This farming system was a massive undertaking requiring a lot of organization, labor, and know-how to maximize agricultural productivity.”
“We’re seeing this kind of landscape alteration in a place where we wouldn’t expect it,” says McLeester.
“This may be just a little remnant of what must have been a much larger system,” says Casana.
The findings have made the researchers consider if perhaps the majority of eastern North America was once covered with agricultural ridges. Findings also challenge the existing forest history of the Upper Peninsula, since Sixty Islands would have been deforested during this 600-year period.
The team is continuing their work with the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin at the Menominee Sixty Islands site, with upcoming plans to survey the site and locate ancestral Menominee villages.
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