 This will be given, which will be given by A.J. White today, and it's a second of two talks. One was last year, with great success, very engaging. And this one, I guess, is a time-adding time and probably more depth insight. And it's about Cahokia, or called actually after Cahokia, post-Cahokia, which is evocative by your images there. Indigenous repopulation and depopulation of the Horseshoe Lake watershed, 1400 to 1900 C.E. So thank you very much, A.J. We're all looking forward to it. Thank you. I think the lights like this here, kind of like that. Lights on? Yeah, yeah. Is that on, everybody? Oh, that's not here. Oh, yeah. We need to take them off. You don't want to see this? All right. I get it. The problem is seeing the people in the back reading. No worries. That's fine. Just to put that up. Do you, if you want to, is it you need light up here? Yes, it's very, yes. This is great. More light? Yeah, no, that's perfect. I was trying to, all right. Sorry to start off about the light thing. Anyway, yeah. My name is A.J. Thanks, everybody, for coming today. As discussed, I am doing sort of a follow-up to what I discussed last year. I had been thinking I might be able to speak a little bit as I transition to Lisa's project in Jordan. But I don't have anything yet that will keep you in your seats. So I will return to Cahokia, like the sequel. OK. So just to provide some background to those who weren't there or who aren't particularly up on Mississippi in archaeology, Cahokia is one of the most significant archaeological sites we have in our country. More than anything, just for its size, here is its location at a continental scale. And if we zoom in, it's located on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, about a 20-minute drive from modern-day St. Louis. And what's most notable about the site are its huge quantity of these massive monumental mounds. What's shown here is Monk's Mound, which is the largest of them. I think you can get an idea by the scale with those trees of just how big this thing is. It's the largest pre-contact earthwork in all of North America. And so it's just a very visually impressive site. And the general narrative that's been established by decades of archaeological work here is that around the 10th century CE, people really came to this one location in great numbers. And what I mean by Mississippi, and by the way, is the sort of cultural and temporal designation of associated archaeological sites up and down Mississippi River Valley that were occupied between 1,000 and 1,400 CE. Anyhow, in the 11th century, you had this population maximum. What some people estimate reached tens of thousands of people. So this was a city. You have to think of it as just being this bustling place. But within, on the order of decades, it began a population decline that was particularly severe. And it continued to decline all the way to 1,400 CE, which is where we have this minimum. And that's sort of where the book closes. And the archaeologists pack up their bags and say, OK, that's coquia. And that's where the story stops. Now, we as an archaeological community have been particularly interested in this Mississippi and decline. And the way that we describe it often involves sometimes rather harsh terminology. So we talk about degradation, decline, bust, collapse, abandonment, words that imply a degree of finality. And when these terms are sort of interpreted by popular science works and the larger media, sometimes it gets romanticized. And so the story becomes this long lost site of this city, what happened to them. When Europeans arrived, there was no one there. What caused this ghost town? And our fixation on the decline might lead to some bad things, such as terminal narratives and the idea of the disappearing Indian, for example. So I wasn't familiar with this body of work until last spring when I took a class with Dr. Lightfoot, as well as Jari, and Trent, and Mike. And this was on the archaeology of colonialism. One of the things that we read that was particularly drawn to is the work of Michael Wilcox out of Stanford, who in his book, the Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest, established these ideas rather nicely. And I wanted to share some of his thoughts with you. So he defines terminal narratives as accounts of entering histories which explain the absence, cultural death, or disappearance of indigenous peoples. He goes on to say that most of the information communicated to the public about indigenous peoples is associated with destruction and disappearance. And he elaborates further that conquest heritage, disease, cultural and demographic collapse, and acculturation and assimilation are what end up being associated with indigenous peoples today, which obviously is not the full picture, because there's millions of Native Americans, despite all this emphasis on decline and disappearance. So it's possible that we have a problem on our hands as archaeologists and how we tend to fixate on declines, because they are interesting. So last year, I presented on some of the data that I had obtained in my master's work at Coke. Yeah, and what did I do? I talked about the decline. So I might have been part of the problem in a certain sense. Now, I'm not trying to argue that we should just ignore these important demographic events. Rather, I think that we can learn a whole lot from them. To summarize what I talked about last year around this time, we came to the interpretation that there are several environmental changes that manifested themselves in increased large flooding events, and a change in the timing of rainfall, from mostly occurring in the summer to then occurring in the winter, which you need summer rain to grow maize crops. So that was detrimental to the groups. And so those environmental problems in association with political, economic, and other social things may have contributed to this decline that we see. So that's what I talked about. But I ended it right around 1400. And so after taking Dr. Lightford's class, the kind of thinking about these terminal narratives and stuff, it was kind of crazy that I had data from 800 CE to the present. But I truncated it right at 1400, almost unconsciously. I just said, well, this is where everyone's looking is at the Mississippian period. So that's what I'll talk about. So I think it's kind of easy. Maybe it's because I'm just starting off, and I kind of wanted to do what everyone else is doing. I'm not sure. But I definitely did sort of, without thinking, just immediately fixate on this decline. But I have over 500 years of data that we're just kind of sitting there. So that's what I'd like to talk about today is the leftover data, which is actually quite important. And I'd like to sort of try to take up Dr. Wilcox on this challenge, which I think he presents to all of us, which is, what if archeologists were asked to explain the continued presence of the semi-communities 500 years after Columbus, instead of their disappearance from marginality? So I don't know how we'll all be able to get it that completely, but we can start at least by taking a look at what happens after Cahokia, and maybe that will get us a little bit closer to that goal. So that's what I'd like to do for the rest of our presentation. And before getting too much into that, though, I'd like to kind of give an explanation on how we obtain that data. I went over this in depth last year. I'd still like to touch on it so that people who weren't present will get an idea, but I like to do it in a slightly different way. But just first, in terms of where we obtained the sediment for our data, we went to Horseshoe Lake, which is located just outside of the boundary, as noted by the extent of the mounds, basically, of Cahokia. And I got sediment from a previously obtained core by a colleague, Form 12, and then went out and also collected a core. And between these two cores, we looked at pollen data. We looked at charcoal. The core was dated with nine radiocarbon dates. And I particularly focused on changes in fecal molecules over time, with the idea of being that changes in their concentration related to the amount of people present on this watershed. And so to explain a little bit more about that, I was hoping I could get a volunteer from the audience, maybe someone who is adventurous and eats meat. Doesn't mind potty humor. Anybody in my, maybe in my bed's in the back. Okay, yeah. Yeah, there we go, there we go, there we go. So, Danny. Where do I stand? Right there's time for now. So I have a laboratory tube and some reading material. Our bathroom is just through the atrium. And to the left, what do you need? Like five minutes, is that okay? Do I need to drink water? No, no, just that. So you just come back when you're ready. Okay. No, I'm just kidding. I wasn't sure how that would work, but I want to give it a try. So instead, you're okay eating meat, right? Yes. Okay, so we have some jerky. This is the good stuff. It's Whole Foods. It's like eight bucks. So why don't you grab and enjoy a piece of jerky? Okay. So go for it there. Okay. Anyway, so Danny has just obtained, oh, there we go. There's also whole basket again. There you go, perfect. Thank you so much. All right. So Danny has just obtained some meat, right? Which is sustaining his body for your own metabolism purposes. But it also is sustaining billions of other organisms that are inside of your gut, as well as all of our fats. And so what's happening is that they are sort of taking a piece of the pie, not literally in this case, taking a piece of the jerky for their own meat. And they're very good at breaking down almost anything. And so they can take cholesterol molecules, which are in that meat because, you know, meat of any sort of source will contain cholesterol. And they can break it down partially. And so they start off with cholesterol and they take a small part of the cholesterol apart. But they can't break it down because cholesterol is a very rigid molecule. It's a lot more complex than a carbohydrate or just a fat chain. And so what they produce is something called proprosanol, which is now a different molecule than cholesterol. And so right now, Danny is making, or I should say Danny's organ is sometimes making some proprosanol. Now, do you need proprosanol? Do you have anything that you can get out of it? Probably not. It's a good deal. You can get anything of it. It's a waste product to the microbes, so it goes out. And we'll just leave it there. The our fresh one is just to the left. Now, if, let's pretend Danny that you were here like 4,000 years ago. Where would you go to the bathroom? I don't understand anything. Right when you said, okay, that's correct. So let's say that this is 4,000 years ago. Here's where the arc was. And here's the bay. We're on a slope as in this is going west. And so if this is where Danny was, he was business right here. Don't, don't, don't please. But if here's the idea is that some of that proprosanol would eventually get washed in after rain today. It would partially dissolve and collect in some sort of catchment. In this case, the ultimate catchment of the world is the ocean, right? And so it would enter some sort of catchment. It would, it would get buried into positives. And once it's down there, it can persist for hundreds of thousands of years. Now the reason that is is because it is now in a form that's not attractive to other microbes. The microbes in your belly took off the easy part of the molecule. And what's left is this very complex molecule. They're trying to break it down. They only get the tiniest amount of energy in return. And so it's basically ignored. So microbes eventually will get desperate enough to perhaps eat it at some point. But it's only after most other molecules have been exhausted. And so we can identify this molecule in an old context. And that's what makes it a piece to archaeology. So thank you, Danny. You're welcome to have that derpy. Thank you for a very good little hand for me. Thank you. Thank you. Now, if we were to plot the concentration that we have of the process all over time, if this was concentration and this was, let's say this was the present and this is going back in time, our data would look something like this. And this is basically a decay curve, which is to say that although a lot of the caprostinol still persists, some of it does degrade and go away. So that makes it hard to distinguish small changes. They might say, here, that might actually impact significant changes in the regional population. To account for this, we present our data as a ratio of caprostinol to something called 5-alpha-cholestinol. And what 5-alpha-cholestinol is, is the breakdown product of cholesterol outside of the human gut by the more common route that microbes break it down into. And so what we have is a ratio of what's happening from more of a sort of human derived presence to what's sort of the background sort of environmental presence. And that makes it easier to see sort of changes, because 5-alpha-cholestinol is decay at a similar rate. And so at any given time, if these two curves are closer, that would suggest that there might be more people in the environment than at a time where they're further apart. So, just want to give you that background. Thanks again, Dave. You're the mayor, I owe you one. Now, this method is not foolproof at all. The most notable setback regarding it is that other animals we know can produce it as well. If you look at this graph, proposal is shown in blue. The first thing that you note is that humans produce it overwhelmingly more than other animals that we've tested. So, we are the dominant producer of this as far as we know. But you can see that things like maybe pigs or cows or cats even can produce maybe a tenth of what we make, but that could be significant. So how do we know that we're not looking at a city of cats? As fun as that would be. And we don't. So that's the end of my lecture. It's just Cochia, it was just a cat city. No, but we can use a process of elimination. So in pre-contact North America, large domestic kits like cows and pigs simply were present, so we don't have a problem. You know, there's still to be the occasional possum and stuff, but we make the assumption that this is a background input that's relatively constant throughout time. And that since we know that there were major changes in the amount of people in the watershed that that is what's kind of driving changes in the fecal-stable record that we have. So I will leave that to you how much you want to take to have confidence in these data, but I just wanted to be upfront about that. So let's have a look at our data. This is sort of where I presented to last year. And the two different points, the one's gray, it was squared, one's black with circles, those represent the two different cores that we tested from in the lake. And the maximum around 1,000 is where we'd expect it based on that narrative that I just told you about in terms of the population in street Cochia. And we also get a minimum about where we expected at 1,400. And we actually use that correlation to sort of justify the utility of this method as something that other people should try. So once we get past here, we're kind of into unknown territory. There's very little evidence as to what was going on in the area. And so we kind of just have to, you know, make some guesses as to what might have happened next. So we know that at the time of European contact and settlement around the 17, early 1700s, there was a small population of Illinois, of the Illinois people, particularly a subgroup of that tribe called the Cochia. And so that group actually gave its name to Cochia the site. That's gonna be confusing and I'll do my best to distinguish between what I'm talking about, Cochia as a people or Cochia as a site, because there's several hundred years of difference between those. But anyway, so what we might expect is something like this, where you have this kind of period, like some hundred years where no one's there and then we have the Europeans arrive and it kind of picks up. That's not what we see. Instead, the abandonment of Cochia was short-lived. We find a rebound within a hundred years going off these air bars. And by the 1600s, and I have this kind of, this area is blown up right there. By the mid 1600s, there's a sort of local maximum. I can see that it is modest. It's not merely the sort of magnitude that we're looking at when Cochia was at its height. But nonetheless, it is a reversal of that famous decline. So this is important for several reasons. One is we can completely attribute it to an indigenous repopulation. I'm not going to speculate too much as to the heritage of those who did come back. It is thought that the people most associated with the Mississippian occupation of Cochia ended up going south towards the Gulf, and that those that were associated with the Illinois were coming in from the Northeast. But because it is before European's really arrived here, we know that this is being controlled by a Native American sort of signature, I guess you could say. And that that population max is reached before Europeans arrive. So we have this sort of new repopulation story to tell. Now. What's the European arrival time? So the first European to come through this area was Marquette in 1670. But the first Europeans to actually stay in this area was just after 1700, with a French mission that was established about eight miles to the south of Cochia as a site. And I'll get into sort of the historic period a little bit more as we go on. So, all right, so I'll just go on and say it. That repopulation that I just showed or interpreted is not supported by archeological evidence. So when I looked into the academic sort of literature in this area, there's very little, that I can find at all, about what happened after the Mississippian occupation at Cochia. So as I turned to CRM data and contacted the Illinois State Museum, it very nicely provided me the records of sites within a three mile radius of the lake, which approximates the lake's watershed. And here's what we find. There's a ton of Lake Woodland, which is a period right before the Mississippian, and Mississippian sat, just a whole ton of them. A handful of upper Mississippian, which is getting close to 1400, and then absolutely nothing, nothing for proto-historic at all. I was shocked, because there must be something there, but I couldn't find a single site that dated to this time period where we have this repopulation I'm arguing for in the 1500s into the 1600s. So what's going on here? It looks like we have this gap in the archeology, and that gap is solidified in the chronology. So if you look at the most recent chronology of the area, presented by Fourier et al, that time period where I suggest that there was a repopulation is a unnamed black hole in the chronology, which I think makes you think there's gonna be nothing there. If it's as official as a black hole in the chronology. So to investigate this, I decided to start with what we knew, and I guess you could say that I did use a direct historical analogy, which I believe is a euphemism for the direct historical approach, which I learned last year I'm not supposed to do. So it's not that, it's a direct historical analogy. So we'll be starting with, so what we know is that, yeah, what I was mentioning earlier that there was a Illinois village basically right in the region where the Cahokia site is at the tail end of the 17th century. And this is this map provided by Morrissey. Morrissey's a historian, but note that it's interesting that he hypothesized a proto-Illinois migration route that comes right by here in the 1500s. So that's not necessarily backed up by archaeological evidence, but I wonder if the fecal-stainable data might work with that. So something I want to say. So we know that there's something there. So let's talk a little bit about the Illinois. The Illinois had a very different subsistence strategy than Mississippian groups. So they were semi-subdentary, unlike the Illinois who were in one spot building, you know, massive mounds in many cases. And so the Illinois practiced agriculture in the spring and fall. And so they were doing some farming, but during the summer they engaged in mobile bison hunts that took them far away from where they were farming. And then during the winter, they break into smaller groups and they would have small hunting camps over the winter. So what I take from that is that for an equally sized Mississippian group and an Illinois group, the Illinois group is likely producing less archaeological material because they're not in the same spot for as much time as a Mississippian group. So there might be just less stuff from an Illinois occupation compared to a Mississippian one. Additionally, Illinois such rarely contained diagnostic material. I have a picture here of some relatively undiagnostic bi-faces from a site that don't give a lithocyst a whole lot to work with for typology. And when you compare that with Mississippian sites, with a fair amount of more diagnostic ceramics and things like that. And so that leads me to conclude that the identification of Illinois sites is difficult. Particularly when you're working in the Mississippi Valley where there's almost no such thing as a surface find. And I mean, I've spent most of my time in archeology in the desert. And so coming to Swampland, I was like, how does people get anything done unless you can see a 100 foot tall mount? Right? And so that's a little more obvious than perhaps this. So all this needs to be to propose a possible Mississippian bias that might be ongoing. So I wonder if everything is telling you that there's only Mississippian sites in this area. If you were to find a lithic scatter without diagnostic material, when you're filling out the site record form, would you be tempted to just check off Mississippian? Because that's what it's supposed to be. And this is a problem that hasn't been raised in other parts of the world. I was reading a paper in Belgium about a Germanic bias with the idea being that the history says that by the late Roman, end of the Roman Empire, they had pulled out and it was all sites from that time period are Germanic. But this author was saying, no, no, we need to reevaluate this. There are late Roman sites here. We're just not identifying them as such. So I wonder if a similar process might be occurring in this area that would sort of shift everything earlier in time, particularly if there's not that much diagnostic material available. So that might be, that's sort of my interpretation of what might be going on for that difference between what the fecal stables are showing and what the archeology is showing. Now I'd like to get some possible explanations for why people came to this area in the 1500s. And since we're looking at cores, we have a fair amount of paleo-environmental proxies. And what I interpret is that the population rebounded during a pretty significant ecological transition in this area, which I would like to point out by having a look at the increase in grass pollen counts associated with an increase in charcoal counts that occur right when we have our population high. So I remind you that the Illinois were engaged in bison hunts. And so if we return to this map that we saw earlier, here's a projected bison range in the 1500s that goes actually past Cahokia. So Illinois had an ecotone between grasslands to the west and woodlands to the east. And that boundary would shift. So if we have a shift towards grasslands allowing habitat for bison to come in, that might be a suitable area to visit if that is something that you are engaging with as part of your subsistence strategy. So it's quite possible that we have bison hunting, bringing people coming in, possibly some management through charcoal, which I guess you can hear a lot more about this week if you'd like to. But that coincidence I think is suggestive to say the least. I also threw in some option isotope data here. I think it's less strong. So I'll just make a very brief mention that the population maximum is bounded by a negative excursions in Delta 18, which we interpret to mean less summer rainfall, which is not good for maize agriculture as I said. So it could be true that if you were looking to do some farming as well, this wouldn't be a bad time to do it. I'm not proposing as much if that's a big reason for why someone would be here. But since I have the data, I might as well use it I guess, or put it up there. So I do think that that's a potential reason for why people could have come to this area at that time. So now let's kind of look at this second half of the population proxy. And looking at how we have a decline, there is a outlier, I'm not really sure how to explain that, but in general, you see the trend from about the late 1600s towards the present, it's kind of getting negative. And so what I've tried to do in this graph is at the top show various historical events that happened in relation to this population decline, which I'll discuss right now. So the orange uppermost rectangles relate to historic events of Cahokia, which is a subgroup of Illinois groups. So not the sight of people living there. I'm interpreting it in the late 1600s and onwards. The purple rectangles are historic events of European groups. And the yellow rectangles are Eastern North American epidemics, what you can talk about. So to put some context to this, let's start by looking at, I'm sorry, these are really tiny numbers, if you can't see in the back, I'll try my best to point out what I'm referring to. This large orange rectangle at the top refers to a period of intermittent warfare and skirmishes by Illinois groups in a very complicated series of alliances, both with other native groups. And then during the time of European arrival, primarily allied with the French actually against British and other native groups. It was incredibly complex what was going on here. And so we had a long period of warfare that started actually before European arrival and continued all the way up to 1800 or so. So obviously that would involve a degree of population loss through warfare. However, warfare at this time was very based on taking slaves as sort of a way to sort of refill the population. So it was complicated because although there was population lost to death, there was also raids that brought people in. And so it's possible that this plateau that we see for a while maybe is associated with that. So warfare isn't a straightforward down. It's kind of down, but kind of comes back up at times too. In terms of where the Cahokia people are, they were moving around. And so there was originally a village about eight miles south of Cahokia in a city called Cahokia to make it even more complicated. And by the mid 1700s, they moved up to Pursue Lake. And the French established a mission on top of Monk's Mound. And that's been excavated. But there's no archeological evidence of that Cahokia village, which I think helps support my idea that if there was an Illinois presence there, it's hard to find archeology, archeologically. We have historical evidence of there being a entire village in the area of Cahokia. And despite all the decades of archeological work, no one's identified it. So I think that could perhaps help interpret that interpretation. I think I said interpret that interpretation. Anyway, so I have a scattering of some sort of historical things to mention. So we had basically intermittent French involvement through largely missionary involvement in the early half of the 1700s. But by the end of the 1700s, we had more settlers coming who were there to come in bigger numbers. So European population really didn't come become a major demographic concern until almost the Euro-American period when people really started to arrive from the East of European descent. So the last thing to consider too is there were multiple significant epidemics around this time. You'll note that I have an epidemic plotted from the 1520s and the 1530s. And the 80s, scholars such as Dobbins and Dunnell had to hypothesize that in the 16th century, there was this massive population loss through disease that spread throughout the continent. It was continental on scale. I don't think that our data supports that because we have a population increase during that time period. However, when we get into this period, and we do have a decline, there were a lot of almost within a decade, multiple epidemics occurring. So what I'd like to suggest is that although there is a decline, I think it's very complicated. And often, I think scholars attribute it to, oh, it's just disease, oh, it's just warfare. But I think what we're seeing is a mixture of disease warfare and also just people moving around. So if I used an environmental explanation for why people might have come, you'll notice that the grasslands recede and the charcoal recedes and whatnot with that decline as well. So perhaps it also wasn't environmentally conducive to staying in that region as well. So taking all of those together, it's possible that we have this very complicated story that's not attributed to one thing that's very active on the part of the Native Americans themselves. They're just moving away in a certain sense. So I think that could also be part of this story. So getting into the last couple slides that I have prepared for us today. When I was reading, getting prepared for this, I read some pretty scary stuff. A lot of it was out of history, but some stuff that really kind of shocked me. I read a particular quote that said, today the Illinois tribe is culturally extinct. That was the last sentence of the entire article. That's ridiculous because there is a tribe today, the Perid tribe of Indians of Oklahoma who in the 1800s, they moved to Oklahoma and they were one branch of the Illinois, just like the Kohokia were. And they incorporated a lot of other Illinois people. And this is a tribe that's thriving today. They are engaged with Nancra in Illinois. They're consulted with in projects in this area. They have members living in this area. And so what I hope we might be able to do is to look at the following. So I'd like to say that a regional depopulation in relocation, although I think is documented, do not equate to cultural extinction, which has been done. The indigenous depopulation of the watershed shouldn't be interpreted as Native American disappearance, but rather Native American persistence through warfare, disease, and brown change in political developments, which all were a very complicated set of variables that were applied. So to conclude my talk, I'd like to leave you with the following takeaways. One is that the fecal-stale data indicate that the Kohokia region supported an indigenous population, I argue. I know it's based primarily on a single dataset, but I would like to at least put it out there. Following the decline, despite a lack of archeological evidence and research emphasis on being placed on Mississippi and occupations. Additionally, the repopulation of the watershed coincided with environmental changes, which might have been conducive to Illinois subsistence strategies, and may have contributed to a pre-tank population that I'm saying is somewhere around the mid-1600s. Additionally, a complex use of movements warfare environmental change in academics in the 18th century, and most likely led to an indigenous depopulation of the area, but by acknowledging that there was a population rebound following Mississippi and decline, we might be moving closer to a narrative of Native persistence instead of Native disappearance. So thank you very much. And I'd be interested to answer any questions. Thank you. Yes, sir. Yes, I'm wondering about the deposition, we'll call it, of the cholesterol of break-in products. And if there are different cultures living there, like the original creators of those mountains, and so on, is Mississippi a new, you're saying, itself after their population decline, it's likely, I guess, here? So in a new culture, which you said had seasonal agriculture, but you emphasize this, a heavy emphasis on bison, I think, if they'd be hanging out on the watershed of the arched lake very much, in contrast to the previous, what, heavily agricultural, you know, Cahokia Mountbills, you see what I'm saying, in other words, they had a different style, they were only part of the year anyway, and what did they bear about the horseshoe length in the first place, in contrast to the Mississippi and the Mississippi for that? Sure, that's a very fair question about, you know, we have a group of people coming with a very different subsistence strategy, which probably meant that they were not there as often as a Mississippian group would have been. I'd first like to say that that rebound that I identified is modest. It's not a huge bump comparable to what we're seeing at Cahokia. It is, I think, more than zero. And so what I'm trying to say is that it indicates a presence. I don't think that this is perhaps a large presence, but it's possible that there could have been farming activity in that area, which would have led to people perhaps farming in the flood plain near the lake, which we know happened in Mississippi in time, so it could have certainly happened later as well. And additionally, I mean, perhaps there could have been hunting camps in the area where the quantity of these molecules would be lower, but I think it could be there still. So we're still saying, you know, although it's not many people, it's not for a very long time, I still think that could be something to register on this methodology that I presented. Yes. All this. Two things. One, in your course, you should be able to track maize, and because maize doesn't move, it would be in the watershed if it was grown near there, so you should see it in the maize pollen, I should say. Sorry, you should see it in the course, and you should be able to follow if it dies out or if they continue growing maize there in your later time periods. You should be able to track that pretty straightforwardly. The other thing is, are you aware of today or any evidence in the course of wild rice? Because wild rice occurred in lakes all the way, it was moved, it's not wild, but they call it wild. It's wild in the sense that it can grow by itself without people planting it like maize, but it starts in the eastern seaboard, right, in sort of Ottawa, in the Canada area, and by the time Europeans arrive, it's in all the lakes across the greater northern area. I don't know if it's in Horseshoe Lake or it grows there, but if it was, it's the kind of thing you could go, one would go there, the Illinois would go there and harvest in the fall. Okay. So if there's any evidence of wild rice today or in the course. Right, I should state, so that's a great, like in terms of looking for more evidence to support this idea through pollen. The pollen data is not my own, so I am dangerously coming at it without a whole lot of knowledge, and so I kind of focused in on grass because I was interested in that. No, no, but what corn's unique? Absolutely. So you should be able to use that if they report it, is there any? Right, what needs to happen, I think, is I need to go back and look at the data. So that's just more on me not looking than necessarily not being there. Because it doesn't move, that's the philosophy that if it's grown in a catchment, it ends up in a lake. It doesn't go to the air, it doesn't move really far. So if it's in your pollen core, which it should be during the Mississippian times, for sure. So the question is how does it track in your later time periods? I will look at that. I'll talk to the person who knows how to look at that. Yes, Junko. So in terms of climatic change data, and do you have any possible explanation of how that may have been related to population increase and decrease, I mean, RADP, that itself doesn't explain much in relation to subsistence factors. It almost looks like you were bringing in the data, but you didn't really explain how it happened. Yeah, so if we just kind of jump back to there. So I probably shouldn't even put this on this graph. So let's just throw Delta 18 out for a second. But if we look to the charcoal and the grass pond, what I would like to argue is that this to me indicates a increase in grass, which I'm interpreting as perhaps more just a grassland, which is the habitat for bison. And so the idea being that that in association with increased burning through increased charcoal might suggest that there was burning practices associated with bison hunting, which would be something that would be evidence of people being there. So that's what I'm getting at. It's just a case, maybe climate is an appropriate, you're not talking about human impacts on the environment. I am, but I'm also talking about an extension of grassland, which I think. It's not because of climate change or because of human impacts, and you just said that it's because of burn. I think that they're happening together. So I think that you have grassland opening up, creating an extension of habitat, which I'm saying is more environmental. And then once that provides that opportunity to be exploited, then the management coming in. So that they happen together, but I think it is both environmental and human. In my interpretation. It's okay. I think you probably need to clarify that part from what I can see. Climate change was occurring at the same time than the charcoal did itself. It's not good enough. You need some backup data. Okay. I'll keep looking. Very good. We're gonna build your army. Okay. Yes, that's what I'm doing. So when is a mission come in, the first French mission? I think that's 1700. Yeah, around 1700. So it's interesting to look at this. When the Franciscans here and all to California, when they came in, there was a lot of evidence of native burning. And then they basically put out a policy of prohibiting burning. And essentially within their areas that they control with Spanish soldiers, they essentially stopped native peoples from burning. And so there's some major changes that are going on. It's not related to the environment per se. It's related to these colonial programs that get put into place. I just wonder because I don't know about the French and how they operated, but a lot of these missions that had, especially agricultural programs, tended not to have people burning out of the hinterland. It was one of the worst things that could happen if you had livestock and other things like that. So they oftentimes would prohibit. I just wonder, that's a pretty market decline there. I just kind of wonder if you've got a situation where the French have moved in and they're now aggravating some of these native peoples into the mission. And whether there's some real changes going on because, again, they're all trying to acculturate. They're trying to change the native life ways to begin with. But they also didn't want burning when they got these agricultural infrastructure put into place. So I just wonder if there's a relationship there, or if you could go back and actually look at the French documents and see if they had, in terms of policies about native burning. All right. Yeah. Does anyone speak French? Do you help me? Yeah, that's good. Very good. Thanks. All right. Well, thank you, everybody.