PRIMITIVE PEOPLE.

aboriginal artifacts, and, with others collected, now possess about
5,000 specimens. It is desirable to make this a county repository
of all finds in this county for a representative collection.
   It is possible to make some separation of the nations into
distinct tribes or periods of occupaney.  First among these
were the very rude Paleolithic people. Their chipped argelite
implements are found along the Fox river and Lake Winnebago
at Menasha. They are the same class of implements found on
the surface all over the United States but identified as to age
by the Trenton gravels in which they have been discovered.
Those who made them have been called the River Drift men.
When they occupied our county we cannot say; but reasoning
from other evidence would suppose they followed closely the
foothills of the retreating Ice Age, which may have been many
thousand years ago.
  After a wide interval then came the Neolithic people. These
were the first in all the world to domesticate the wild corn,
potato and tobacco plant. They are generally known as the
Mound Builders.
  The Clam Eater seems to come next in ancient chronological
order, though he may have been a modern habitant. The muscle
shell heaps, which mark the refuse left from his barbaric feast,
recklessly dropped on the floor of the tepee, are not numerous
elsewhere in the state. They are here found around the shores
of Lake Winneconne at the R. Lasley place, one and one-half
miles north of Winneconne, where there were eighteen sites. In
the village of Winneconne there were a number of shell heaps fifty
years ago. At the Boom, on Lake Poygan, there is an area of
three hundred acres which has numerous shell heaps, the evi-
dence of a very extensive village, and including a large burial
ground. There was a small village with possibly a dozen tepees
on the west shore of Little Lake Butte des Morts. The prin-
cipal food of these people was the muscle of the same species,
still to be found in the adjacent lakes and rivers. Their tepees
were often circular, but frequently very long and narrow, some
of them 180 feet long and fifteen feet wide, as indicated by the
shell heap left on its floor. Some of the shell heaps are still
four feet high.
Of the art remains of these people, found in the shell heaps,
their pottery was of a high grade, some tempered with black
quartz and decorated with rush matting and cloth, as well as
the usual conventional marking of aboriginal pottery of our

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