The Ranelius site

The focus of the 2010 field work is on the Ranelius site, which is located on a terrace overlooking the south shore of Spring Lake.  During the 1950s, the Science Museum of Minnesota excavated a series of archaeological sites along the shores of Spring Lake.  To date, these are the only professional excavations conducted in the area, with the exception of a Minnesota Historical Society project on Grey Cloud Island in the 1970s.  

The Science Museum carried out large scale excavations of five sites (Lee Mill Cave, the Sorg site, the Bremer Village and Mounds, the Ranelius site, and the Schilling site).  Additionally, three other sites were tested on a smaller scale (the Hamm site, the Joseph site, and the Schaar Rockshelter).  Of the large scale excavations, all were analyzed and reported on with the exception of the Ranelius site.  The fact that this collection is curated at the Science Museum of Minnesota but has remained unreported for 50 years is what drew me to it.  

Ranelius has long been assumed to be a small Late Woodland (ca. 500 - 1000 A.D.) campsite similar to the nearby Bremer Village.  However, as I initially sorted through the collection and the notes, I realized that there is more to it.  First of all, a great deal of the pottery in the collection was misidentified.  Before I go on, I should first point out that archaeologists love to study pottery.  There are several reasons for this.  First of all, pottery is nearly indestructible.  Sure, POTS are broken very easily.  But the fragments survive for thousands of years.  Pottery fragments (called sherds) are one of the most common type of artifacts found on archaeological sites in Minnesota after about 1000 B.C.  Pottery is extremely useful for identifying both when a site was in use, and who was there.  Archaeologists study the decorations on the sherds, the treatment of the surface of pots, the material components of the sherds (the clay and the temper that is added to the clay), and the forms of the vessels of which the sherds were once a part.  These are all data that can be used to determine who was at a site, when the site was occupied, and the relationships between a site and other sites in the region.  This is because pottery is an art form that was passed on from one person to another based on the artists’ experiences and relationships.  And pottery can be made into almost any form you can imagine.  So, from an archaeological perspective, pottery changes over time and according to the cultural experiences of those who produced it.  

Now back to the misidentified sherds in the Ranelius collection.  The site had been identified as a Late Woodland site, based on the pottery that was found there in 1954 and 1955.  However, as I examined the collection, I noticed that a lot of pottery that had been identified as Late Woodland was actually Oneota.  I will explain what these two Pre-Contact cultural complexes are in a future post, but suffice it to say at this time that suddenly the site was more complex than originally thought.  There were two separate cultures represented at the Ranelius site.  The relationship between the two is one of the things we are trying to figure out.  Are they simultaneous, or are they sequential?  In other words, were people who made Late Woodland pottery and people who made Oneota pottery at the site at the same time, did the Oneota use the site after the Late Woodland occupation, or, less likely, was the same community making two different kinds of pottery?  

The next thing I looked at were the original field notes and maps from the 1954 and 1955 excavations.  There are a lot of interesting things about what they discovered, but what stuck out most was an unusual spiral-shaped ditch formation.  Since only a part of this was uncovered, it is equally possible that it is a set of concentric circles of ditches.  The ditch complex appears to measure approximately 30 feet in diameter.  From the notes, and because the artifact collection hasn’t been analyzed, I can’t yet say if the ditches are related to the Pre-Contact occupation of the terrace or if they were created during the last couple centuries.  This will be determinable based on whether Pre-Contact artifacts were found beneath the ditches or within the ditches and the areas where the soil was mounded up when the ditches were dug.  

The next thing we did was to visit the site itself.  The site visit was quite enlightening.  The Science Museum’s old Ranelius excavation was a relatively small area on the northeastern corner of the terrace.  A very similar terrace, separated by a deep ravine, extends to the east.  The Bremer Village is located on this terrace.  It was surprising to learn that the Ranelius terrace extends to the west for about a quarter mile, is extremely level, and several springs outlet from the terrace edge into Spring Lake.  The whole terrace seems to be a likely location for habitation.  We suspect that the 1954/1955 excavation did not find the edge of the site, and that it is quite a bit larger than originally thought.  A review of the old notes and the collection confirmed that a number of additional artifacts had been found on the surface to the west of the excavated area.  

So, what we have here is a site that has been excavated but never analyzed, one that is more complex culturally than thought, and possibly much larger than originally believed.  Add to that the fact that the dynamics of Late Woodland cultures in Southeastern Minnesota and Oneota at Spring Lake are simply not well known.  Any additional information that can be uncovered will be of value to the interpretive and management efforts of the Spring Lake Park Reserve, the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (National Park Service), and the people of Minnesota.  These are the reasons why I decided to pursue this research.  

This research is funded by a Minnesota Historical and Cultural Grant through the Minnesota Historical Society.  The Minnesota Historical and Cultural Grants program is funded through the Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment.  

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