new acquisition LIFE DURING THE END OF THE ICE AGE

Life During The End Of The Ice Age

The Cardy site could inform archaeologists about how humans dealt with a challenging environment.

The Conservancy has obtained a two-acre lot in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin that contains a 12,700-year-old hunter-gatherer campsite. At that time, near the end of the Ice Age, glaciers had largely retreated from what is now the United States, but northern Wisconsin remained largely under ice. The Cardy site is unusually far north for this period of time, and may have been within walking distance of the edge of the continental ice sheet.

An archaeological mystery lay hidden in Clayton Cardy’s garden for almost one-half of a century. For many years the Cardy family had collected chipped stone implements while raising vegetables here at their homestead on the outskirts of Sturgeon Bay. Interest in the chipped stone tools was rekindled in the 1950s when Clayton’s son Darrel left Sturgeon Bay to pursue a degree at the University of WisconsinMadison. Armed with new information from his archaeology textbook, Darrel surmised that the projectile points found in the Cardy’s garden were similar to those found at Clovis, New Mexico, and hence among the oldest artifacts known in North America. Darrel took the artifacts to Madison seeking confirmation, but local scholars quickly pronounced this unlikely, since it was “known” that northeastern Wisconsin was ice-bound and uninhabited some 11,000-13,000 years ago when Clovis-like artifacts were in use. Interest in the site waned.

In 1979, some 20 years after the denial of the Cardy site’s antiquity, interest was sparked anew when a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration brought David F. Overstreet, then director of the Center for Cultural Research at Marquette University, to the Cardys’ doorstep. Clayton expressed interest in the archaeologist’s desire to confirm or deny the presence of Ice-Age people at Sturgeon Bay and he understood the great significance of this issue, but he was unwilling to disturb his garden. Another 23 years would pass before, at the age of 88, Clayton decided to give Overstreet permission to excavate in order to resolve the nagging questions about the site’s validity and its antiquity.

In 2002, the long-awaited test excavations commenced.

Gainey projectile points, scrapers, and bifacial tools are examples of the worked stone recovered from the site.

A series of 17 test pits were carefully excavated within the garden and the surrounding property. The test pits yielded a bounty of chipped stone tools including four broken spear points, scrapers, flake cutting tools, and chipping debris from stone tool manufacturing. Much of the material used to make these tools was nonlocal stone that was quarried near Moline, Illinois, or perhaps even as far distant as central Ohio.

The projectile points recovered by the excavations are classified by archaeologists as Gainey points, a type closely related to the Clovis points that caught young Darrel Cardy’s eye in 1959. These points are known to date to about 10700 b.c. so we know the Cardy site was used at about that time.

Paleoenvironmental studies carried out near Sturgeon fall • 2010

(From left) Clayton S. Cardy, Donna L. Wolske, Midwest Regional Director Paul Gardner, Darrel E. and Margie A. Cardy at the site. The Paleo-Indian deposits have been found in this section of the site.

Bay and elsewhere in Wisconsin indicate that the environment at that time was much different than it is today. Lake Algonquin, which occupied the Lake Michigan and Lake Huron basins at the end of the Ice Age, would have been about 25 feet higher than the nearby city of Green Bay is now. Hence the Cardy site would have been closer to the shore of Lake Algonquin than it is today, but not right at lakeside. The vast forests that greeted the first white settlers of Wisconsin were not as yet established. Rather, treeless tundra like that of modern northern Canada would have dominated the landscape. It is uncertain exactly where the edge of the continental ice sheet would have been located, but it was probably quite close.

We can only speculate about what drew these people to this spot. Was it simply a sense of adventure to roam and occupy new lands? Were they drawn to the tundra at a time when mammoth, caribou, and muskoxen grazed on the sedge meadows and grasslands? Did they compete with the big-toothed cats, dire wolves, and short-faced bears for these prey animals?

Archaeologists will be able to examine these and other questions because of the Cardy family’s generous donation of the site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, to the Conservancy. By preserving the site, researchers will have an opportunity to study human adaptation to the rapidly changing climatic conditions along the margins of the continental glaciers at the end of the last great ice age. —Paul Gardner and David Overstreet