The LCARC was founded by R. Clark Mallam in the fall of 1969 with the acquisition of several thousand Native American artifacts donated by Gavin Sampson. To professionally organize the influx of new items, Mallam turned to the Smithsonian for assistance. George Metcalf, their Chief of the Processing Laboratory, came as a consultant for two weeks, after which the LCARC was fully functional. With the addition of a field school and more donations, LCARC became the “largest [archaeological] research program in Iowa” at the time (Status Report, 1983: 1).
The job titles and duties have changed over time, but LCARC has always had a director. In order to accommodate NAGPRA and supervise student workers, a lab technician or collections manager was added to the staff in the early 1990s.
Student workers process a soil sample from Luther’s archaeology field school by using the flotation method which dissolves soil to recover seeds and other micro-sized objects which may be contained within the soil.
According to Mallam’s status reports, the original goal of LCARC was “to use archaeology as an instrument for promoting the anthropological perspective–the study and appreciation of other cultural adaptations and beliefs – within the context of the liberal arts.” This was accomplished by training and teaching students how to conduct research, excavate sites, and complete archeological conservation projects led by Luther’s anthropology staff.
The completion of contract work, the process of excavating archaeological sites, and researching for the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist were special aspects of LCARC from 1970-1987. Through the meaningful contributions of students and faculty, the LCARC was able to complete over 50 projects resulting in 32 published reports. At the time, only large universities had the resources to pursue archaeological contracts, so it was impressive that Luther was able to give undergraduate students a chance to participate in this work.
At the time of its creation, LCARC and its collections were located in the stacks area of the old Koren Library-four floors of workspace and storage. When Koren was renovated in 1987, the collections were moved to their current location, a 1250 square foot climate-controlled storage facility in the basem*nt of Preus Library. The workspace, now known as the Anthropology Lab, resides on the third floor of Koren. It comprises several computer workstations, scanners, cameras, transcription machines, GPS equipment, a 3D scanner, the teaching collection, and a wide range of relevant books and reports.
The Anthropology Lab is supported through the contributions of its student workers. The Lab employs an average of thirteen students per semester, most of whom are anthropology majors, but also students who study history, museum studies, and classics. Workers update databases and practice techniques for collections management, exhibit creation, and archaeological data analysis.
Some specific examples of student projects include: digitization and transcription of ethnographic interviews for the Chiwere Language Project, designing exhibits across the Luther campus, and writing archaeological reports based on LCARC excavations, like Drahn Farm. They have also been processing new acquisitions into the collections, digitizing paper-based collection records, transferring the old database and object records to a new online collections database, and inventorying and photographing the anthropology collections.
Currently, the Anthropology Lab curates three distinct collections: the Archaeological Collection, the Ethnographic Collection, and the Numismatic Collection.
For the last two decades, students have used the Anthropology Collections to hone their research skills and supply objects for student exhibits. Luther’s anthropology program uses its collections as teaching tools in classes and to provide learning experiences outside the classroom. The collections are also available to outside researchers. In addition, Luther’s archaeology field school utilizes the lab’s resources for analysis before adding artifacts to the Archaeological Collection.
In the 2012-2013 school year, our Koren display cases featured the story of the lab’s history, its founder, Dr. R. Clark Mallam, and its work. Exhibit creators were Dan Hess (’13), Kirk Lehmann (’13), Cassie Kubicek (’13), and Lisa Stippich (’14).
Dr. Richard “Clark” Mallam (1940-1986) was the founder of Luther College’s anthropology program (1969). Here we celebrate and highlight the many contributions and connections made by this beloved professor.
Journey from Education to Educator
Mallam’s educational experiences taught him to critically assess what others had said about the Native American cultures he studied. Because the American educational system exposed him to “distortion, inaccuracy, and misrepresentation” regarding these groups, he felt the desire to rectify these problems by educating others.
In 1969, Clark accepted a position at Luther College where he founded and expanded the new anthropology program. He created the Luther College Archaeological Research Center (LCARC), which soon housed the largest collection of northeastern Iowa Native American artifacts at the time, and he began to direct and teach anthropology classes. In these, he encouraged students to closely analyze their sources, evaluate evidence, and to draw their own conclusions.
Educational Profile
- Associate of Arts degree, Fairbury Junior College, Nebraska (1959)
- Field Infantry Medic, Alaskan Command, (1959-1961)
- B.S. in History, University of Nebraska (1963)
- M.A. in Anthropology, Adams State College (1966)
- M.Ph. in American Indian Education, University of Kansas (1973)
- Ph.D. in American Indian Education, University of Kansas (1975)
Capoli Bluff Mound Group, image courtesy of Lori Stanley
The Effigy Mounds are large earthworks constructed in the shapes of various animal or human forms. There are also other types of mounds such as conical and linear, which can be found in various other regions. However, the effigy form is a phenomenon restricted to the “Driftless Area” of the Midwest, which encompasses northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and eastern Iowa. This area is so named as it escaped the glaciations of the Pleistocene Epoch (2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago) giving it a distinct topography from the surrounding land.
The Inhabitants
The first burial mounds in the United States were conical, built in Wisconsin during the Late Archaic period (5,000 – 3,000 years ago). The oldest evidence of inhabitants in the Driftless Area are Folsom and Clovis projectile points which date back to well over 10,000 years old. However, the inhabitants exclusively associated with the construction of the effigy mounds are from the Late Woodland Period (1400 – 750 years ago). These people were hunter-gatherers who used stone, bone, and antler tools to exploit the rivers and forests of the area. After this period all effigy-shaped mound building ceased, yet conical and linear construction continued on a reduced scale until approximately the 16th century.
The Mound Builder Myth
The Mound Builder Myth was a popular 19th century belief that there was a master race of prehistoric builders who preceded the Native Americans. People of this century largely held the bias that the Native Americans lacked the technological expertise or mental capacity to create such complex structures. Therefore, there must have been a prehistoric people distinct from the ancestors of the Native Americans. Due to this bias, the early research of the effigy mounds was devoted to a larger investigation of this myth, and there was a great amount of ease to which “discovery” was integrated into this idea. The common belief at the time was that the mounds served a sacrificial purpose or as fortifications.
The Hill-Lewis Survey and Ellison Orr
In 1880, the Northern Archaeological Survey was conducted by Alfred James Hill and Theodore Hayes Lewis. Conducting the majority of the fieldwork himself, Lewis traveled for 15 years throughout the Midwest. By the end of the survey he had compiled 40 field notebooks and surveyed 13,000 mounds.
Approximately 50 years later, from 1934 through 1936, Ellison Orr conducted the Iowa Archaeological Survey. During the time of his fieldwork he excavated various conical and linear mounds, along with one effigy mound. In the end, he concluded that “[t]he effigy mounds of Iowa are apparently an overrun from Wisconsin, in the southern part of the state of which they are very abundant,” so from that point forward, effigy mound research was focused solely within the state of Wisconsin.
Both of these early surveys were incomplete, and since then many mounds were destroyed due to expanding agricultural efforts. However, through Orr’s efforts, the effigy mounds were declared a national monument in 1949, largely due to the iconic “marching bears” mound group.
The Transition in Archaeological Ideology
During the time of Clark Mallam’s research, there was the beginning of a transition from a culture-historical approach to a processual approach in archaeology. Previous research on the effigy mounds had focused on describing, recording, or establishing culture-historical sequences with regards to the mounds which portrayed them as a consistent cultural identity that persisted for 1300 years.
The Process of Creating a Model
Discontented with the explanation of the mounds, Mallam began to work on the Iowa effigy as an individual study, rather than as an extension of Wisconsin. Firmly believing that the reason so little was known about the mounds was because people had been asking the wrong questions, he sought to move away from the study oriented in the artifacts associated with the mounds by gathering a more complete, accurate body of data and ultimately creating an interpretive model of the phenomenon.
By working with previous research notes such as the surveys by Lewis and Orr, Mallam began his work to study and preserve the Iowa effigy mounds. In 1971, he pioneered an innovative method of recording and surveying mound formations. He and a student crew began outlining the effigy mounds in lime and taking aerial photographs with the hopes of being able see patterns within and between mound groups. Major aerial photography began in 1974, and by the end of the Luther College Archaeological Research Center survey, there was a complete compilation of 53 Iowa effigy mound complexes which were all located within the Driftless Area. Given this observation along with his own ideology, Mallam staunchly argued for the interrelatedness between environmental and cultural variables as one of the primary contexts for interpreting the mounds.
In order to arrive at an interpretive model, Mallam first had to gather more quantifiable data. In order to obtain data points to be able to categorize individual mound forms, he used a polar grid system. This meant that the categories were contingent on the accuracy of data represented rather than an “individual determination” of a form’s resemblance to an animal. Factor analysis was then used to simplify the variance expressed in the data along with various histograms. This information along with topographic features was used in determining mound complex patterns which, in almost all cases, assumed linear arrangement. These analyses showed that variation of mound forms within an individual site was determinately less than the variation between sites.
The Effigy Mound Manifestation
In his 1976 thesis, The Iowa Effigy Mound Manifestation: An Interpretive Model, Mallam published his research. He interpreted the mound complexes as integrative mechanisms, or “large public work efforts,” the cultural means through which political, economic, social, and religious activities were seasonally organized in response to predictable annual occurrences of natural resources along the Mississippi Trench. He concluded that 83 percent of the mounds surveyed were located along or within two miles of this trench, a location which coincides with an environmental zone that possesses a high density and variety of natural resources. Politically, he asserted that the mounds may have functioned as territorial demarcations.
For Mallam, the mounds primarily represented symbolic behaviors; they were places to which people annually returned for social reinforcement and renewal. He hypothesized that groups would scatter and move along the valley to survive, then return to the river where mound building became an integration exercise to reinforce what they commonly believed. According to Harvey Klevar, Mallam saw the mounds as “places thankful to mother earth.”
Mallam’s Hypotheses
Hypothesis I: Each of the Iowa Effigy Mound complexes was constructed by a separate social group. Therefore, similar mound forms from different complexes will be more likely to be heterogeneous in form than similar mound forms within the same complex.
Hypothesis II: The function of the Iowa Effigy Mound complexes is a consequence of the relationships occurring between the distribution of natural resources in northeastern Iowa and the political, economic, and religious needs of hunters and gatherers exploiting these resources.
Hypothesis III: The subsistence-settlement pattern of Iowa Effigy Mound sociocultural groups was characterized by Primary Forest Efficiency, Intensive Harvest Collecting, and annual social coalescence and dispersal.
Current Research and the Effigy Mounds National Monument
Today the Effigy Mounds National Monument also label the 200 plus mounds preserved in the park as “sacred space” and is affiliated with 18 American Indian tribes. They affirm that clues as to what the mounds represent can be found in legends and mythology, which describe the effigy mounds as ceremonial and sacred sites. To a lesser extent, they acknowledge that scientific research can also provide insight and that some archaeologists believe the mounds were territorial demarcations, but much of the data is still inconclusive.
LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)
This remote sensing technology has the ability of mapping features hidden beneath vegetation with the use of lasers, and can give an overview of broad continuous features that might be indistinguishable from the ground. In the years 2007-2010, the University of Northern Iowa conducted the Iowa LIDAR Mapping Project as part of a U.S. geological survey, thereby creating a database of LIDAR images for the entire state. LIDAR is especially gaining popularity within the archaeological community as it is non-destructive and can provide the ability to create high-resolution digital elevation models of archaeological sites that can reveal micro-topography which would otherwise be hidden.
This portion of the exhibit was completed by Lisa Stippich (’14).
The Mystery of the Serpent Intaglio
In 1982, R. Clark Mallam went to Lyons, Kansas for his year long sabbatical to do research on the serpent-like structure in the prairie near the town. Clark believed that the structure was an intaglio built by the prehistoric peoples who lived in the area.
Evidence to Support His Hypotheses
While excavating a section of the Serpent, Clark found two chert flakes (a flake is the debris from making or sharpening a stone tool) which suggests that prehistoric peoples did construct this feature.
Art Bettis, a soil expert who helped on the project, found that the layers of different soil colors show systematic changes across the feature which is supportive evidence for the human modification of the area. However, Bettis did note that the differences were quite subtle and that more research would need to be done on the feature.
Clark also noted that the bluff ridge on which the serpent is located is large enough to accommodate its form in any direction. The prehistoric peoples chose to position it 20 degrees west of north. The serpent’s orientation connects to the nearby village sites, known as the Council Circles.
The Serpent and the Council Circles
Clark discovered that the “jaws” of the serpent included the three Council Circles in the outward extension of its alignment. On June 21st, the longest day of the year, the sun sits in the open mouth of the Serpent. The sun is a representation of life for the prehistoric Great Bend culture and thus the serpent holds life in its jaws. Clark believed that this intaglio served as a metaphor for life.
This portion of the exhibit was completed by Cassie Kubicek (’13).
The New Galena Enclosure
The New Galena Enclosure is one of the last remaining archaeological features of its kind in northeast Iowa. It was originally discovered by Theodore H. Lewis and documented by Ellison Orr as part of his early 20th century survey work. Luther College’s Dr. R. Clark Mallam relocated the site in 1985 using Orr’s information and found it to still be in good condition.
