Macoupin County Historical Society

The monthly program of the Macoupin County Historical Society will be on Monday, July 10, at 7 p.m. in the Ruyle Building on the Historical Society grounds in Carlinville.

The speaker for this month is Jason King from the Center for American Archeology and his topic is "The German site and Jersey Bluff Phase in the Lower Illinois Valley." The Late Woodland period (ca. 400-1200 CE) in the Illinois Valley is frequently overlooked and under-appreciated by archaeologists and the public, in part because of the often spectacular Hopewellian and Mississippian assemblages and mound building traditions that precede and follow it. However this timespan is important in its own right as a transformative period of pre-Columbian Midwestern societies.

In this presentation, the focus is on the latter portion of the Late Woodland period in the Lower Illinois Valley, the Jersey Bluff phase (ca 800-1200 CE), and the Center for American Archeology’s recent fieldwork at the German Site (11C377). The German Site is a Jersey Bluff residential site located in a tributary valley to the Illinois River. Focus is placed on the excavated houses and domestic artifacts at the site, particularly pottery, and the site’s relationships to the broader cultural record in the Lower Illinois valley during this time. The program is open to the public and the Ruyle Building is handicapped accessible.