Indigenous Life around the Great Lakes: War, Climate, and Culture by Richard W. Edwards IV (review)

Reviewed by: Indigenous Life around the Great Lakes: War, Climate, and Culture by Richard W. Edwards IV Rob Harper Indigenous Life around the Great Lakes: War, Climate, and Culture By Richard W. Edwards IV (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Pp. 302. Figures, tables, appendix, references, index. Clothbound, 125. 00; paperbound 45. 00; e-book 35. 99. ) Since 1998, the Center for Midwestern Archaeology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) has held a biannual field school at Lake Koshkonong in southeastern Wisconsin. During and after the Medieval Warm Period (specifically 1000–1400 CE) people living around the lake exemplified the Oneota culture, whose influence extended across the upper Midwest and into Illinois and Indiana. UWM researcher Richard Edwards builds on his 2017 dissertation and presents some of the center's most important findings in Indigenous Life around the Great Lakes. At first glance, the book's title seems misleadingly broad: Edwards's research encompasses only a small geographic area. Nonetheless, his findings challenge familiar assumptions about a pivotal era in midwestern history, when many peoples redesigned their economies and societies around the cultivation of maize. Conventional anthropological wisdom holds that intensive agriculture develops alongside political complexity and social hierarchy: the more a given society farms, the more unequal and exploitative it becomes. Middle Mississippian culture, most notably the city-state of Cahokia, offers a prominent example. Less hierarchical societies, in this view, relied proportionally less on staple crops. But Edwards demonstrates that the Lake Koshkonong Oneota—almost certainly ancestors of today's Ho-Chunk nation—raised maize and other crops intensively for four centuries while maintaining a comparatively egalitarian social structure: farming without tyranny. End Page 72 Edwards builds his argument through the analysis of charred plant residue from soil samples and isotopes found in dog bones. The latter method offers an ethical and legal proxy for analyzing the remains of human ancestors. Both the soil and the dog bones indicate a heavy reliance on maize and other crops throughout the period under study. Since the dogs ate a cornbased diet, it follows that their people did as well. These findings shed light on the communities' risk management strategies. A society's lifeways reflect perceptions of and efforts to mitigate environmental and social dangers such as drought and war. By doubling down on maize cultivation, the Lake Koshkonong communities centralized population and food production. Doing so entailed greater environmental risks but increased physical security. Such a strategy made sense in an era when, according to archaeological evidence, intercommunity violence was on the rise. This context makes it especially noteworthy that they eschewed Cahokia-style hierarchies. Instead, they hewed to a social and economic structure similar to that of the Ho-Chunk who welcomed French visitors centuries later. The book largely neglects such downstream connections, notwithstanding its nineteenth-century cover art. Edwards hesitates to posit a link between his subjects and the modern Ho-Chunk, citing "the lack of historical components on Oneota sites" (p. 24). His own theoretical framework offers a ready explanation: during the Little Ice Age (1300-1800 CE), the risk management calculus shifted to favor mobility (and diversification of food sources) rather than centralization. As Oneota lifeways became less reliable, Ho-Chunk ancestors moved away from that era's town sites. The book's acknowledgments and citations also show negligible engagement with Ho-Chunk scholars or knowledge keepers, relying instead on the dubious century-old ethnographic work of Paul Radin. These are lost opportunities to tell a more collaborative story that overcomes the limitations of the archaeological record. It does not help that UWM still holds a large collection of Ho-Chunk and other Native bones, including two skulls pictured in Edwards's book, decades after state and federal law called for their repatriation. Fortunately, in early 2023 the university made most of the human remains in its collection available for Native communities to reclaim. This action may help Edwards and his UWM colleagues collaborate more fruitfully with the descendants of the people they study. End Page 73 Rob Harper University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Copyright © 2024 Trustees of Indiana University