Milwaukee Public Museum

Vessels from the Wisconsin archaeological collections, McClaughry and Schwert mound groups.

The Milwaukee Museum's strong but focused archaeology collections are heavily weighted toward North America (82% of archaeology holdings), with smaller but important collections from Central and South America (14% of archaeology holdings). Most of the remaining material (4%) is from the Old World, primarily from paleolithic sites.

One of the Hopewellian-period Knight figurines, ca. AD 100, from the North American archaeology collections. MPM Archaeology 50673.

Within North America, major strengths are in the archaeology Wisconsin (77% of MPM North American archaeology holdings), Illinois, the American Southwest, and parts of the American Southeast and trans-Mississippi South. Special strengths include material from major excavations in Wisconsin including the Aztalan, McClaughry, Nitschke, Kletzien, Neale, Utley, Green Lake, Buffalo Lake, White, Polander, Walker-Hooper, McCauley, Mound Beach, Osceola, Prawatschke, Cyrus Thomas, Trowbridge, Shrake, Nicholls, Schwert, Trempeleau Lakes, Midway, Schmelz, Raisbeck, Kratz Creek, Karow, Ross, Hilgen Spring Park, Spencer Lake and Spangberg sites or mound groups, among others. Included are numerous type sites and type collections for major periods of Wisconsin prehistory. Archaeological materials from Wisconsin are separately summarized in an index currently running to some 286 pages, and most are separately published as site reports, either through the Bulletin of the Milwaukee Public Museum, or in Wisconsin Archaeologist. While not in Wisconsin per se, MPM also houses important and major excavated collections from the Riverside Site, immediately across the border in Michigan.

Part of North American archaeological collections storage area, Anthropology West Bay 1.


Part of ethnological collections storage area, Anthropology South Main.

Non-Wisconsin North American archaeological collections are organized by state, and include significant collections of Mandan village material, Middle Woodland Hopewellian material from both Illinois and Ohio, a small but valuable collection of material from Spiro Mound in Oklahoma, and sizeable collections of ceramics from both Mississippian period sites in the American mid-continent and ancestral Puebloan sites in the American Southwest. Other areas are more sparsely represented, with forty-seven of fifty states represented (as of 8/2001, Delaware, Maine and New Hampshire are not represented in the collections). In the near term state collections will be the fastest-growing area in Anthropology, with archaeological material from systematic survey and excavations in Texas and Louisiana now being prepared for accession.

The Museum also holds important North American collections by artifact type, including the celebrated George West pipe collection (see Bulletin of the Milwaukee Public Museum, Vol. 17, parts 1 & 2), separately inventoried and stored, and major collections of copper implements groundstone tools, and grooved axes, via the Ringeisen and related collections.

Particularly noteworthy are unique collections such as the Hopewell-period figurines from Knight Mounds, Illinois, and the matched set of large effigy pipes from the Emerald Mound in Mississippi.