| The Willow Drive Mounds and Habitation is a multi-component cemetery and habitation site located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin – Madison along the southern shore of Lake Mendota. This mound and habitation complex consists of four burial mounds (three of which are effigy mounds) located within a 3.18 acre multi-component habitation area.
It was first inhabited sometime during the Middle Archaic stage (5,000 – 1,700 BC) and was re-visited regularly during the Late Archaic stage (1,700 BC – 400 BC), Early Woodland Lake Farms phase (ca. 250 BC – AD 100), Middle Woodland stage Waukesha and/or Millville phase (AD 100 – 400) and Late Woodland Horicon phase (ca. AD 700 – 1000). Substantial additions were made to the site complex during the Late Woodland Horicon phase with the construction of five earthen relief sculptures used for a number of purposes, the primary being as sepulchers for the dead.
At the present time, the most obvious features present within the boundaries of the Willow Drive Mounds and Habitation Site Complex are the four earthen burial mounds (Figure 25). Three of the four mounds have been restored to the condition that Brown observed them in 1909 when he made his plat of the mound group. The mounds are oriented roughly west to east with the bent-winged goose mound at the western end of the group followed by a small conical mound, an unusual bifurcated-end linear mound and finally an elongated mound that has some characteristics of what has been defined as a “water-spirit.” These mounds are on the western edge of the site complex that extends along and around a beach ridge that runs parallel to the south shore of Lake Mendota from Willow Creek to approximately Elm Drive. The artifact distribution used to delineate the boundaries of the complex is bounded on the west by Willow Creek, on the north by the south shore of Lake Mendota, on the south by Lot 57/Natatorium and on the east by Willow Drive and the DeJope/Goodnight Hall complex and associated parking lots.
While the burial mounds illuminate facets of Late Woodland ceremonialism, cosmology, social structure, artistic conventions, and mortuary ritual during the period AD 700 to 1000, the habitation area has archaeological components that reveal important facets of the evolving lifeways of people in the Four Lakes Area for the period 5000 BC to AD 1200 related to cooking, hunting and butchering, hide preparation, wood and bone working, flint knapping, as well as resource procurement and regional trade. |
