Ancestral Menominee Indians Left Their Mark in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

• A new archaeological study shows that the Menominee Indian Tribe once lived in flourishing agricultural communities along the Menominee River north of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

• A team from Dartmouth College has uncovered ancestral garden beds over an area much larger than previously realized.

• The site is the most complete and expansive example of precolonial Native American farming in the eastern United States.

A study by Dartmouth College archaeologists, just published in the journal Science, shows that ancient Menominee Indians farmed successfully under difficult conditions at the Anaem Omot (“Dog’s Belly”) archaeological district north of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The area is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property of the Menominee Tribe.

The Dartmouth study reveals that the area was farmed extensively by ancestral Menominee Indians as recently as 1600 CE. They practiced a sophisticated form of agriculture that used raised garden beds to grow maize (corn) in a place where climate and soil conditions made it an unlikely crop. They also grew beans and squash as part of their food supply, in addition to hunting, fishing and harvesting wild food.

The raised garden beds absorbed sunlight and extended the short growing season of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Household waste was used as compost, and rich soil from nearby wetlands was added to promote a better crop.

Aerial surveys using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, conducted by Dartmouth College archaeologists in May 2023, revealed that the Menominee Tribe’s garden beds covered a far larger area than previously suspected.

“We came out and did the LIDAR over the area, and then it just blew us away,” said Prof. Madeleine McLeester, the Dartmouth professor who was lead author of the Science journal report. “The scale of this agricultural system by ancestral Menominee communities is ten times larger than what was previously estimated,” McLeester said. “We’ve excavated only a handful of ridges, and there are thousands of them.”

“This forces archaeologists to rethink the scale and extent of past Native American agriculture.”

The Menominee Tribe has long recognized the cultural and archaeological value of the site, including the raised garden beds that were documented by the new study.

The Dartmouth researchers came to the site at the invitation of tribal authorities, to follow up on previous research by Dr. David Overstreet, a consultant for the Menominee Tribe and, earlier, by Prof. Marla Buckmaster of Northern Michigan University, who mapped part of the Anaem Omot in the 1990s. The Dartmouth team had already documented similar garden-bed agricultural sites on the Menominee reservation.

The LIDAR survey, and later on-the-ground investigations, revealed that the Sixty Islands section of the Anaem Omot is the largest and best-preserved site of its kind in eastern North America, McLeester said.

The fieldwork also revealed burial mounds, a dance ring, and other subtle features that are difficult to spot without LIDAR enhancement.

Such an extensive area of preserved archaeological features is a rare find. Conventional farming and urban development have wiped out most early Native American settlements and agricultural sites.

“These are very delicate features, and so the second a plow goes over them, or even a lot of cattle walk on top of them, they disappear forever and they're gone,” McLeester said.

“So, this is an exceptionally unique site, and our efforts here are not only to understand how those ancestral Menominee farmers practiced this agriculture, but also to understand what we can do to help preserve these sites and to make sure that we're documenting them for future generations.”

Archeological research at the site continued this summer.

A quarter-mile hike through dense undergrowth brought Dartmouth researchers to a clearing near the Menominee River during fieldwork on June 28, 2025. At this worksite they were excavating a small plot of ancient soil, uncovering more evidence of the Menominee Tribe’s agricultural practices in precolonial times.

Here, the research team had dug out a cross-section of a garden bed, showing a thick layer of charcoal placed there as a soil conditioner. The raised bed is unusually large: 18 inches high and three feet wide.

Along with other, similar ridges, it demonstrates that the Anaem Omot wasn’t just passively lived upon by ancient Menominee hunter-gatherers. It was a place where large numbers of people came together to grow lots of food for their communities, said Jonathan Alperstein, a Dartmouth graduate student doing fieldwork at the site.

"And that really kind of makes a paradigm shift in our understanding of what this area is, this far in northern North America, especially in Michigan and Wisconsin,” Alperstein said.