By By ANDY HAMILTON / Niles Daily Star
NILES – Moccasin Bluff's surroundings are probably what made it an attractive location for people more than 6,000 years ago.
The terrace along Red Bud Trail north of Buchanan overlooks a wide bend in an area of the St. Joseph River that contains a pair of islands, and may have been a great location for annual sturgeon runs. The area is also protected on the north, west and south by a half-circle of hills.
"For a long time people have thought about [Moccasin Bluff] as an agricultural village where people lived," at least part of the year, said Jodie O'Gorman, assistant professor of anthropology at Michigan State University and assistant curator of Great Lakes Archaeology at the MSU Museum. "My work is questioning that."
Moccasin Bluff was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. It is believed the site is named for Cogomoccasin, a leader of one of the permanent Potawatomi villages.
The earliest items found at Moccasin Bluff were projectile points or arrowheads dating from 6,300 B.C., which indicates that spot on the landscape was probably first used by hunters and gatherers, O'Gorman said. As centuries past, and methods of eating evolved to cultivating plants, so did the ways in which the land of Moccasin Bluff was used, she added.
O'Gorman said the perception that Moccasin Bluff was an agriculture village is a result of other sites found south and west of the area where big agricultural villages existed. The belief is compounded by evidence unearthed at Moccasin Bluff in 1948 by a University of Michigan team, which found pottery, skeletal remains and remnants of corn and storage pits, she added.
MSU held a field school there in the summer of 2002 that focused on a wetland area at a lower elevation that had not been examined before and ultimately produced information about earlier time periods that little was known about. The work was done with technologies newer than those used by the U of M team, "to help fill in some of the blanks left over from the earlier excavations," O'Gorman said.
The MSU field school produced two things.
First, O'Gorman said, they learned more about early periods when people were starting to use plants more as food sources, and some evidence showed that on parts of Moccasin Bluff people were experimenting in agriculture. Secondly, the team looked at a small slice of land believed to be used at a later time, but through radiocarbon dating were unable to find traces of corn.
The period between 1,400 B.C. and 1,600 B.C. is where O'Gorman is focusing her research.
"During that time agriculture was starting to play a role and people were starting to settle down and live in villages," she said.
In an attempt to back her theory that Moccasin Bluff was not a permanent agriculture village, O'Gorman said she is joining with a colleague who is a geographer and palynologist – palynology is the study of pollen and spores – to try and find a presence of corn in and around the area of Moccasin Bluff. Determining the amount of corn that was once grown in the area could reveal how much cultivating was done on the site, and therefore if it ever served as a permanent settlement.
The pair hopes to secure a grant from the National Science Foundation and be in the field this summer collecting pollen. The goal is to do a high detailed analysis of sediments from nearby lakes to try and pick up the presence of corn.
"The idea is that the pollen gets picked up and is in the air and falls out," O'Gorman said. "We're looking for little tiny microscopic plant parts made of silicon phytolith," that can identify what plants were growing in the area surrounding Moccasin Bluff.
The method should also reveal if people were cooking corn at the historic site, and how much, she added.
"We're trying to ask the really basic questions: were they growing corn; was this really a village?" O'Gorman said. "We're just saying we don't have enough data to say one way or another at this point," if Moccasin Bluff was an agricultural village.
If the grant is approved and the work is completed, O'Gorman said she and her colleague would present their findings to the public in meetings.
The landscape around Moccasin Bluff has changed because of the construction of the railroad and Red Bud Trail, O'Gorman said. Many of the burial mounds built about 2,000 years ago around the site were destroyed with the additions of the modern transportation routes, she added.
There are no plans currently for more fieldwork at Moccasin Bluff. But, O'Gorman said anthropologists are in search of other possible agricultural villages in southwest Michigan, and some have found evidence of campsites possibly used to harvest certain resources, such as lotus roots.
"The idea is to get sort of this broader view of what people were doing around the edges of Lake Michigan during this time period."