Michael Bie - It Happened in Wisconsin

When the Wilson brothers put their boat in Rock Lake for a day of duck hunting, they had no idea they would be stirring up a mystery dating back thousands of yearsa mystery that lingers yet today.

Rock Lake, located near the community of Lake Mills in south central Wisconsin, was unusually clear that day in 1900 when the brothers ventured out, shotguns in hand. A lack of rain had dropped the water level, and as they paddled their skiff across the lake, the Wilsons noticed something strange below the surface. It looked like rocks stacked neatly in the shape of a pyramid.

Back in town, word spread quickly about the discovery. Indian legends about rock teepees built by mysterious ancient people were well known to locals. Dozens of residents took to their boats. Some dove into the water to touch the formation, described as a tent-shaped structure about one hundred feet long.

Within days the lake silt was up to its usual tricks. Water clarity dimmed and the structure disappeared into the watery depths once again, taking with it proof positive that there was some truth behind the legends.

In the decades that followed, aerial sightings were made of the Rock Lake pyramid. When a local teacher recruited members of the University of Wisconsin swim team to dive on the site, their confirmation of a rock structure drew considerable attention from the press. It also drew the attention of the state archaeological office, which conducted its own dive and found nothing. The authorities declared fraud and the teacher was forced to resign his job.

In 1937 a famous diver named Max Nohl found another tall, coneshaped pyramid on the south end of the lake, but the strange pyramids of Rock Lake were forgotten again until 1967, when a skin diver found a structure about one hundred feet long and twenty feet high on the murky bottom. His discovery was published in a diving magazine.

Yet again the pyramids were forgotten until a diving team, this time using sonar technology, located the structures and the first images were recorded. That was 1991.

Ongoing research has yielded the identification of at least five artificial structures in Rock Lake. Experts hesitate to date the constructionswhich are made of fitted, stacked rocksbut one prevailing theory suggests they were built by prehistoric copper cultures three thousand years ago.

One thing is certain: The area is rife with mysteries generated from the remains of a lost civilization known as Aztalan, Wisconsins premier archaeological site located just a few miles from Rock Lake. A marker at Aztalan State Park attempts to accomplish in one paragraph what archaeologists have filled volumes trying to explain:

Indians of more advanced culture than surrounding tribes occupied a village on this site around the year 1500. They were strangers to this region and their cannibalism made them unsatisfactory neighbors. The strength of their stockade walls proves they lived in a hostile world. The original village had a population of about 500. The area enclosed by the stockade contained about 21 acres and within the stockade were cornfields as well as houses and temples.

Eventually the village was destroyed by other local Indian tribes, leaving no known survivors of the Aztalan people.

Whoa there. Just one second, professor. What was that?

Their cannibalism made them unsatisfactory neighbors.

Well, we guess so. Cannibalism rates somewhat worse than borrowing your neighbors snow blower and returning it in the spring with an empty gas tank.

Modern studies link Aztalan to the Mississippian Indian civilization, which flourished along its namesake river region from Wisconsin to the Gulf Coast. Sometime around 1100 AD, a group of Mississippians migrated north to the Crawfish River in southern Wisconsin. They lived there for roughly 150 years before mysteriously disappearing from the Midwest, leaving behind tens of thousands of artifacts and more than a few unanswered questions.

Samuel Barrett, the first anthropologist to work in the state, spent two years digging at Aztalan in 1919 and 1920, publishing his findings in a book considered the definitive work on Aztalan archaeology. The book focuses on the walls and small houses that once existed on the site. He also discovered the elaborate burial site of a young woman who was wrapped in thousands of beads.

Barretts findings went from academic to sensational when he concluded that the people of Aztalan were cannibals. Barrett based this extraordinary claim, wrote contemporary Aztalan experts Robert Birmingham and Lynne Goldstein, on his discovery of many hundreds of butchered, broken, and burned human bones in refuse areas; severed limbs in fire pits; and discarded skulls, including one that clearly had been cut from the torso.

The early excavations unearthed a surprising number of human bones showing clear signs of cutting and dismemberment. Some had been opened to extract marrow, a practice normally reserved for animal bones.

Paul Parmalee, an expert on animal food remains, wrote in 1960 that there was evidence some human bones had been processed like animal boneswhile noting that the communitys major source of protein had come from deer, fish, and other animals.

In their 2005 book, Aztalan: Mysteries of an Ancient Indian Town, Birmingham and Goldstein refute the cannibalism theory unequivocally. Early twentieth-century researchers erroneously described the ancient people as cannibals who used their neighbors as food. Cannibalism remained part of the official interpretation for many years because the behavior represented by the remains was so different from anything archaeologists had seen to date.

The current line maintains that some of the people here had been victims of violent customs associated with intense warfare, including the taking of trophy heads and other body parts, the torture and mutilation of prisoners, and lastbut certainly not leastthe consumption of body parts as ritual. These rituals were part of well documented funerary customs of the Mississippian culture.

While its not as unsettling as having had true cannibals living in the backyard, the talk of trophy heads, body parts, torture, and ritualistic taste-testing ranks fairly high on the weird scale.

What is so unusual about Aztalan compared to other period sites, however, is that so much fragmentary broken and cut human bone was discarded, according to Birmingham and Goldstein. Indeed, while much has been learned about this spectacular site over the years, many great questions remain.

Why did the Mississippians come here in the first place? Where did they go, and why? And what about those pyramids in Rock Lake?

Prevailing wisdom goes that ancient peoplesearlier than the Mississippians, perhaps as early as 3000 BChad built rock pyramids and tombs for their dead near a small lake. This would coincide with the low lake levels of the time period.

Pioneers coming to the area in the 1830s discovered the Aztalan ruins and heard Winnebago Indian legends of a sacred site in the lake. Postglacial activity apparently had filled the lake, and the structures were submergedexcept for strange protrusions just above the water. When sawmills dammed up the flowage of Rock Lake, the water levels rose significantly, and the structures disappeared far below the surface.

That is, until two duck hunters began to stir up the mysteries of Rock Lake.

French explorer Jean Nicolet was lost. Really lost. Half-a-world lost.

Wearing a full-length silk robe and firing pistols to announce his arrival, at least he had style on that summer afternoon in 1634 when he stepped out of his canoe to ask for directions.

Only fourteen years after the pilgrims landed on the Atlantic Coast, Nicolet advanced seven hundred miles west through the Straits of Mackinac, across Lake Michigan, around the tip of the peninsula separating the great lake, and into Green Bay.