[Stuart Carlton]
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to Teach Me About the Great Lakes, a twice monthly podcast in which I, a Great Lakes novice, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes.

My name is Stuart Carlton and I know a lot about the rubber capital of the world, but not the fun type. But I don't know a lot about the Great Lakes. And that's the point of this here show.

I'm joined today by the one, the only, the special Carolyn Foley yourself. It's the Fole dog. What's up, Carolyn?

[Carolyn Foley]
Not much, doing well. Yep. Spent too much time thinking about the rubber capital of the world, but that's not what we're talking about today.

[Stuart Carlton]
Akron, Ohio is the rubber capital of the world.

[Carolyn Foley]
I was like, oh, that's Akron, right?

[Stuart Carlton]
That is Akron. That's where I'm spending my summer vacation. Beautiful Akron.

[Carolyn Foley]
Sweet, sweet, sweet place. But yes.

[Stuart Carlton]
That it is. That it is. You can also go to the park and that's, that's really it.

That's really it. Those are the things. Maybe there's some LeBron James kind of memorabilia spread throughout town.

[Carolyn Foley]
Cool.

[Stuart Carlton]
Anyway, if I had the stuff, I would make Akron being the Great Lakes capital of the world into our Great Lakes factoid, but alas, I don't have the stuff. So that'll be next time. All right.

Anyway, but that's not why we're here, Carolyn.

[Carolyn Foley]
Not to talk about Akron. I know we haven't done this in a while, so we're a little bit rusty, but we don't have anything. We're recording a new episode.

Yay.

[Stuart Carlton]
Episode, yes. First one since the last one. Anyway, enough of that, enough of the preliminaries.

Let's just jump straight into our interview. But first, of course, anytime we interview a researcher, it's time for the Researcher Feature. Our guest today is Dr. Susan Koiman. She's an assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. This might be her first anthropologist. I can't believe we've gone five years without an anthropologist.

Six, six. Wow. Anyway, Susan, welcome.

[Susan Kooiman]
Thank you. It's great to be here.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yes, we're so glad to have you. Now we're here to talk about anthropology and we're here to talk about agriculture, but not sort of the traditional, well, maybe the very traditional agriculture in the region.

Let's start big picture. So you've worked a little bit in the Upper Great Lakes region during the woodland period is my understanding, based on the notes we have. So first of all, what do you think about Upper Great Lakes?

That can mean a lot of different things. And what is the woodland period? I'm not actually familiar with that time.

[Susan Kooiman]
Yeah. So the Upper Great Lakes is a term that I guess I don't personally use for my research all that often because it is pretty all-encompassing. It really refers to all the Great Lakes, except for Lake Ontario.

It's more of like a geological geographic kind of term. I think it has to do with drainages and landforms and things like that. Yeah, all that fun stuff.

So I'm sure if I said, oh, I do like the research in the Upper Great Lakes, that some of the geologists and geographers out there would get a little annoyed with me. So I usually refer to my research area as the Northern Great Lakes. And I define that as Lake Superior, the lands around Lake Superior and Northern Lakes, Michigan and Huron.

And this is more of a region that's kind of a shared environmental and cultural zone. Of course, there's a lot of cultural and environmental variation across this space as well, now and in the past. But there's a lot that's also shared with this region.

The colder weather and all the stuff that we envision when you talk about Southern Ontario and Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And so I study the late woodland period or the woodland period in general in this area. And woodland period in the eastern woodlands of North America, which is essentially everything east of the Mississippi River, is referring to the time period where we see the use and manufacture of pottery.

So before this, the indigenous peoples, the occupants of eastern North America, got along just fine without pottery. They just roasted food directly over the fire. Sometimes they would like, you know, dig out holes and line them with like hides or whatever.

And throw hot rocks in there to like cook food kind of from the inside out. But it's not until about 1000 BC that we see people starting to use pottery across the eastern woodlands area. Now in the Northern Great Lakes, we actually don't see this until a little bit later, because it's really cold and wet in this area, right?

And that's not the ideal conditions for making pottery. Pottery, when you make it, you have to, you know, you have the wet clay, and then you have to let it dry completely before you fire it or else it'll explode. Anyone who's ever done anything with pottery can attest to that.

So...

[Stuart Carlton]
My 10-year-old son would love to watch some pottery explode. He's big into explosions.

[Susan Kooiman]
Yes, yes. So it's very fun to watch. But if you're reliant on that pottery to act as your cooking vessels and storage vessels, it's a little less exciting when your pottery bursts.

And so there's a delayed kind of adoption of pottery in the Northern Great Lakes. And it's not because they're behind the times. It's really just because they didn't need it.

And so that's one question I and some of my colleagues have kind of started to think about. Why did they finally begin to adopt pottery around 200 BC and later in the Northern Great Lakes?

[Carolyn Foley]
When you were talking there a second ago, it sort of sounded like it would be really, really hard for them to make pottery. But why do you and other researchers think that they didn't need it at the time? Like, what were they using instead?

Or was it the type of food they were cooking or different things like that?

[Susan Kooiman]
Yeah, I mean, you can cook food a wide variety of ways, right? Just like put it over the fire. But as we all know, it's really nice to be able to put stuff in a pot and cook it, right?

You can retain, you know, roasted meat is great. But if you just have it on a spit over the fire, it might be tasty, but you're losing a lot of that essential fat. These are hunter-gatherers.

At this time, they're hunter-gatherers. They are hunting wild foods. They are gathering wild foods.

At the dawn of pottery, there's not really agriculture yet, although, you know, there's little bits of that that we'll get to that later. Indigenous folks across the eastern woodlands starting to fiddle with domestication and farming. But in general, you don't really need it.

But it does help keep in essential nutrients when you're cooking foods. And you can make stews. You can cook foods that you wouldn't have been able to cook and eat before, like wild rice, things like that.

So there's advantages to pottery, but you don't need it. You can cook foods a variety of ways. And like I said before, they could cook stews and boil things, but they would have to kind of do those lined pits.

And then they would heat rocks in a fire and then drop them in and then heat the contents, essentially using those rocks. But then again, you get little bits of rock in your food. So it's not as tasty.

It's a lot more immediate.

[Stuart Carlton]
So interesting. I never thought about pottery as like it, but I mean, thinking of it like almost in ecological terms, it's a fitness improvement, right? In terms of durability, because you're getting a course.

The reason braises taste so good is because all that stuff stays in there. I'd never really thought about it like that. I see.

And so pottery moved its way up and you're still doing research as to how that happened or why that happened. Do you have any speculation or is it just too early to tell? Were these mobile societies, if they're hunter-gatherers, might there have been like an envoy that came up and they sort of shared knowledge?

Is that even a reasonable thing to suggest?

[Susan Kooiman]
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think we think of ancient societies as being kind of isolated and not in contact with each other, but we know that they had, in some cases, transcontinental trade routes throughout pretty much the entire occupation of North America and across the world. So even if a mobile hunter-gatherer, which is part of the description of hunter-gatherers, they're usually constantly on the move in search of resources.

And they're following resources as they come available based on the season. And yeah, they're absolutely interacting with each other. In the Northern Great Lakes, I think people probably already knew about pottery just from contact with other groups that they had.

And they just, for various reasons, they were like, yeah, it's not worth it at this time to invest in manufacturing this technology. But why did around 200 BC did they finally kind of give in? And it may be exactly what we're talking about.

They realize, oh, like if you're able to just, you know, stew foods, it makes a lot more nutritious. You can capture a lot more of those delicious fats. You don't have little bits of rock in it.

One of my mentors, James Skibo, he used to teach at Illinois State University and then was the state archaeologist for Wisconsin for a few years before his untimely death. But he had done research that he thought like processing acorns, boiling acorns, to kind of get the fat out of acorns may have been a major advantage for people in this area. Like if you're a hunter-gatherer, you want fat.

We're very fat adverse in our society, but you want fat in your diet if you're a hunter-gatherer because you just want as many calories as you can take in, right? And so if you can get a lot of fat, like go for it. So they thought that they were maybe extracting nut lipids.

Other people have investigated the origins of pottery in other parts of the world as well. And some people have proposed that it's, you know, for cooking aquatic resources, you know, in Japan and parts of Canada, there's been some research that suggests that. So you really have to kind of look at it regionally.

And that's still something that I may kind of investigate down the line. But my current focus is a little bit different right now. But it's still a very interesting question.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, sure, sure. Thinking about the region, though, and the geography. So this is a Great Lakes show, right?

So these were societies settled around the Great Lakes. How did, around Lake Superior, is like a cultural region, if I understand what you're saying correctly. Northern Lake App, which, anyway, focus Stuart.

How did the lakes, how did the lakes like influence their society? How did they interact with lakes? Was it like a fishing scenario or do you know, do you have information on that?

[Susan Kooiman]
Yeah, I mean, it's very through time. So by the time we get to the woodland period, which is marked by pottery, but also some other things, people further south, and even in certain parts of the northern Great Lakes, people are building mounds. They're making earthen mounds and burying individuals in them. And there are people which, you know, we'll get to, I'm sure, in a minute, people dabbling with agriculture.

But before and after all of this, they are absolutely interacting with the Great Lakes. They are, we have evidence of pretty large settlements along the shores of Lakes Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, where it seems like seasonally, maybe multiple bands, multiple groups of hunter gatherers are coming together. Normally, in other places, we find small campsites, but these are large.

So it's lots of people coming together all at once. And maybe fishing, like in the fall, getting fall spawning fish, like whitefish and other things like that. And coming together to do these like massive fishing endeavors and just like, you know, pooling labor to collect maybe nuts, wild rice, fall spawning fish, and an effort to kind of collect enough food to get everybody through the winter.

And then we see some of the things that I've been pursuing more recently are some of those interior lakes. So, you know, you go even just a couple miles in from any of the Great Lakes, you have little lakes, right? And so we've been investigating what are people utilizing in these smaller lakes, as opposed to when they're at these larger settlements on the shores of the Great Lakes.

What are, how do both of these types of lakes, how do they play into their seasonal rounds and their seasonal movements and their settlement patterns? What resources are they gathering and eating at the shore of the Great Lakes, versus those by the smaller lakes? So that's some of the things we've been excavating some smaller sites along these smaller lakes to try to understand both the full breadth of the various occupations that we see among the woodland peoples in the Northern Great Lakes.

[Carolyn Foley]
That's so cool. That's so cool. Okay, so you've hinted at it a couple times, so I'll throw it to you. You've mentioned that there was a bit of an exploration into agriculture in this period.

Why don't you tell us a bit about that?

[Susan Kooiman]
Yeah, yeah. So agriculture in the eastern North America has been something that, you know, archaeologists have been kind of fascinated with for a while. And there's a deep history of agriculture, indigenous agriculture in this area as far back as like 3000 BC.

People here, closer to where I work and live, which is down kind of by St. Louis, and in places that I would call the Mid-South, so Southern Illinois, Arkansas, parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, they are playing around with domesticating local plants. So these are local plants like squash, sunflower, and then a few different plants that we probably aren't as familiar with because now they're just weeds. We don't have the domesticated versions of them anymore, but they're plants like chinopodium, which is actually related to quinoa, and then another kind of oily weed called sumpweed or marsh elder.

It goes by both names. And so people for thousands of years have played with domesticating plants and growing them and having small garden plots. We don't get more intensive agriculture, generally, until a little bit later when you have the Mississippians.

Mississippians are a more complex, more socially stratified society that rise up actually around here, again, in the St. Louis area. There's a major site called Cahokia that's 10 miles from where I live. And if you've never been there, I highly encourage people to check it out if you're visiting St. Louis. It is a Native American site that was occupied from approximately 900 to 1300, 1350. And it was a city that housed 10,000 to 20,000 people. Some people say it's a complex chiefdom or even a state-level society, like as complex as you can get with powerful rulers.

And they are the ones who kind of ushered in what we envision as more intensive maize agriculture or corn agriculture. But they were also using eastern agricultural crops, those ones that I talked about that were domesticated here in the Mid-South. They were farming ketone podium squash, all that kind of stuff.

And all this maize is coming up from Mexico. So it's not domesticated here. It works its way up from the Southwest and then across the plains and works its way up to the Midwest.

The question is, when do we see maize and other domesticates kind of come into the Great Lakes? And oddly, in the upper Great Lakes or in the northern Great Lakes, we don't really see too many of those homegrown domesticates. We don't see chinapodium very much.

We don't see marsh elder, all those things, sunflower. They're not really messing with those. In the northern Great Lakes and actually across the Great Lakes, getting into the eastern Great Lakes, Quebec, Ontario, upstate New York, we're seeing some evidence really early around the same time that we see the adoption of pottery.

So maybe that is the connection, I don't know, of maize. We have really poor preservation. All that kind of soil in those tiny forests is really acidic.

So seeds don't preserve very well. But what we do get are microscopic remains of plants. They're called phytoliths and starches.

And because they're inorganic to some degree, they preserve a lot better than seeds, right? And so we have these microscopic plant seeds contained in food that is essentially burned to the inside of pottery. We can also extract them from the soil at archaeological sites.

[Stuart Carlton]
So that was the question I was going to get at is, so how do you figure this out? But so you'll find an archaeological site and there'll be leftover pottery, if it's of the right era, no leftover pottery. And you actually get the seeds, and I guess you'll get some lab nerds to analyze those.

For those who are at home, I'm pretending to type on a computer with two fingers.

[Carolyn Foley]
It would be a little bit weird. There's no pipettes involved, so you've got to pipette it instead.

[Stuart Carlton]
I'm pipetting, but it looks like I'm milking a cow kind of grotesquely. Anyway, okay. So you'll hire some nerds and they'll do that.

And then they'll give you the results and you kind of Yeah, absolutely.

[Susan Kooiman]
Yes, I am friends with lots of lab nerds, luckily. There are experts who-

[Stuart Carlton]
The use of nerds is a term of endearment, to be clear.

[Susan Kooiman]
All of my friends who I work with and collaborators, I will not take offense to being called a nerd. I hope. If you do, I'm sorry.

Yeah, so I collaborate with a lot of people who are experts and specialists. There are some who are experts in looking at seeds that are found, the very few that preserve in this area. So we do get information because we do have some preserved seeds sometimes.

But then I've worked with people who identify, they look under a microscope, they process these, you scrape the food gunk off of these pots and they process it and they look under a microscope and they're able to identify these microscopic, these microfossils from plants. And we're finding evidence of maize across the Northern Great Lakes and into the Northern Eastern Great Lakes very early, 200 BC. And some people don't really trust the microfossils.

There's people, archaeologists in Illinois who don't really buy that narrative because they think that you need the physical remains, the seeds to also support the presence of maize. But we just don't have the preservation for it. So we're finding this evidence.

So there's competing narratives. But there are people using maize. We don't know if they're growing it.

That's the big question. Are they growing it? Are they trading it in from somewhere?

And what's the history? And so we find maize, we find evidence of squash as well in these microscopic remains. The site that I did my dissertation on, which is called the Clowman site, it's on Drummond Island, which is as far east as you can get in Michigan without being in Canada, essentially it's in Lake Huron.

And this site was occupied periodically over 1,500 years, beginning around 100 and up through about 1530 and even after that. But prior to European contact, it has this really long history of being repeatedly occupied by hunter-gatherer groups in this area. And we find evidence very early on dating to about 100 AD of squash and maize and wild rice.

And they're continuing to use it, but they use it less according to our evidence as time goes on. And then they start using wild rice, a local wild resource, more as time goes on. And that brings into question this new research that's been all over the news.

My friend, Madeline McLeaster out of Dartmouth, along with the Menominee Nation in northern Wisconsin, they discovered that the extent of these ridged fields that we know from various evidence from seeds and hopefully soon microscopic plant evidence, that they had very extensive fields for growing crops. And this dates to probably after 1,000. So it's a little later.

And maybe they're influenced by the Mississippians further south and other people in Wisconsin, other groups in Wisconsin that we know are also engaging in growing corn to some degree. And we knew about these ridged fields, an archeologist named Marla Buckmaster had identified them years ago. The Menominee Nation asked Dr. McLeaster and her colleagues to come and do LIDAR, which is like doing satellite imagery with lasers. And it gets really amazing coverage of topographic variation. And they discovered that these ridged fields are just much more extensive than we thought. And it is amazing to have such large scale agricultural fields that far north.

This is the very southern part of the upper peninsula of Michigan. So like kind of where it dips down and is almost in Wisconsin. So it's as far south as you can get in the UP, but it's also a lot further north than we really expect these types of agricultural fields to be.

You can see a really complex thing going on here that we're really still trying to tease apart and understand about who was engaging in agriculture. Are certain groups trading maize with others? Why are they investing this much labor into making these specialized ridged fields to make sure that corn, a tropical plant, can actually grow this far north?

That's a lot of labor. A lot of clearing trees with stone axes and bringing in soil from other places to make sure it's fertile. It's an incredible, if you haven't read the news story yet, it's in the New York Times, it's in the Smithsonian Magazine, it's in Science and PR.

Check it out. It's a pretty incredible discovery. I'm very excited to see what they find in the future related to this site.

[Carolyn Foley]
I've been thinking through this as you're talking about that area. We talk to physical scientists a lot and ecologists and things like that. I feel like this just fits with that whole area that everything's complicated, it's super influx.

You've got the Straits there and the water's all going crazy and stuff like that. That's a really, really, really interesting part of the Great Lakes to study from all aspects. It's really cool.

[Stuart Carlton]
It is. But beyond that, and then we'll transition, I think. But thinking about this, now I'm a middle-aged dad, so the history is inherently fascinating to me.

It could use more summaries, but maybe there's a part you haven't told us. Beyond being of interest to middle-aged dads, what is the so what of this? Now, I don't know the research needs a so what, so if that's an offensive question, I get you.

But thinking about that, what is learning about this teach us about either ourselves, our society, or transitions in general? Is there a big picture take-home, if that makes sense?

[Susan Kooiman]
Yeah, no, and that's a great question. I think that there's a few things that I could, you know, I of course think that this is important. But, you know, first of all, I think understanding and communicating, and that's part of why I'm very happy to do this podcast.

I think first and foremost is just to inform people that Native Americans did in fact live in the Great Lakes for thousands of years before Europeans came over. I do a lot of research events as an archaeologist, or a lot of outreach events as an archaeologist, and very often people are just surprised that Native Americans and traditions groups have been there for a long time.

[Stuart Carlton]
Haven't they been there, let me go back to like our first episode, haven't they been there longer than the lakes themselves? I'm pretty sure that's true.

[Susan Kooiman]
Yeah, I mean, they, you know, they couldn't necessarily occupy that area because it was covered by a glacier, but you know, as soon as the glacier just kind of receded, you know, and you know, they, people were coming in and occupying the land that was inhabitable. So yeah, absolutely, they've been there forever. They've been in North America much longer than the other Great Lakes have existed.

But, you know, more broadly, the thing that this new 60 miles site with the ridged fields has kind of brought up is that all the archaeological evidence that we have around this area suggests that these, these are still just kind of small, less complex groups. They're not, they don't seem to have huge populations or, you know, leadership or lots of social stratification. Things that we definitely see in other agricultural societies like the Mississippians, but we don't see that here.

And so I think there's been an assumption that if you're going to do large-scale agriculture, you're only going to see it with societies that are more complex, meaning that there's more, you know, social differentiation within that society, more kind of bureaucracies to organize labor and organize the economy. We're not seeing, we don't have evidence that this was the case in this area. So it also emphasizes that people who are in less complex societies, which doesn't mean that those societies are inferior by any means, and I think this demonstrates it, they can absolutely organize labor and, you know, do amazing things without having, you know, a formal leader or all the things that we normally connect with more complex societies.

They are perfectly capable of organizing labor and clearing land and organizing enough people to work and, you know, collect these fields. So that's been something that I always enjoy when we find evidence that kind of challenges our assumptions, because there's always an exception, right? And there's probably many exceptions.

So, you know, I always really enjoy when we discover something like this, that kind of throws that in the face and really tells us that we really can't make assumptions when it comes to looking at the past. We really have to investigate each region, each society in its own right to fully understand what was going on.

[Stuart Carlton]
Well, this is fascinating stuff. And I could talk all day about the growth of agriculture. We didn't even get into archaeology, which is too bad, because anytime we get into that, we can talk about the coolest archaeology, which is underwater archaeology, although yours is probably very cool too.

But we'll get to that some other time. But yeah, it's really fascinating stuff to learn about. But Susan, that's actually not why we invited you on Teaching About the Great Lakes this week.

The reason that we invited you on Teaching About the Great Lakes is to ask you two questions. And the first one is this. If you could choose to have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which one would you choose?

[Susan Kooiman]
Oh, well, I love researching food. I made it my career. And I love to eat food.

So this is, I love this question. That's fantastic. So yeah, donuts.

Can I answer both? Can I talk about donuts and sandwiches?

[Stuart Carlton]
You can talk about both, but you can only answer one. So it's a hard choice, but it's a...

[Susan Kooiman]
Okay. So I'll go with donuts. Mine might be a little of a cheat.

I love an eclair.

[Stuart Carlton]
Oh, no, that's not a cheat.

[Susan Kooiman]
Technically, I think it's choux pastry, maybe not a donut. So if we want to go purest donuts, I would go eclair adjacent. So something that's coated with chocolate and filled with like cream.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah. You want Jay Begley's cream stick. I know what you want.

That's fine. All right. Anyway, so if I'm over in Evansville.

[Susan Kooiman]
Edwardsville.

[Stuart Carlton]
I was like, I know it's not Evansville. Edwardsville. So I'm going to go there and I want to get a good donut.

Where should I go?

[Susan Kooiman]
There's actually a little shop that's called Very Yummy Donut Shop.

[Carolyn Foley]
Perfect.

[Susan Kooiman]
Yes. So that is a favorite of many for donuts. All right.

So tell me about sandwiches. Sandwiches. Right now, I'm really into a good tuna salad sandwich with potato chips on it, like for that crunch and a little extra salt.

Yeah, I saw it on New York Times. And yeah, I'm just like, I'm really into it right now.

[Stuart Carlton]
I am aware of that recipe and have made it. Yep. Yep.

That's an excellent one. Fantastic. You know what?

I'm going to put a gift link in the show notes just for you, listener, to that very recipe. And you can make yourself a delicious tuna salad sandwich at home. Carolyn, did you want to go with the second question?

[Carolyn Foley]
All right. So the second question. Okay.

We love talking about food as well. So thank you for those recommendations. But what is a special place in the Great Lakes that you'd like to share with our audience?

And what makes it special?

[Susan Kooiman]
I love this question, too, because I love the Great Lakes. Standing on the shore of Lake Superior, personally, is like a zen moment for me. So any chance I get to go up there, I mean, I all have the same experience on Lake Michigan and Lake Huron as well.

I've done work and visited both of those. But Lake Superior, in particular, has special meaning to me. And within Lake Superior, Grand Island is a very special place.

That's where I did my first archaeological project in the northern Great Lakes with Jim Skibo, who I mentioned before. And if you're not familiar with it, it's just off the coast of Munising in the upper peninsula of Michigan. If you've ever been to the pictured rocks, Lakeshore, Grand Island is right there.

You have to take a ferry to it. There's no cars allowed. So you can hike or bike and camp, but you can't drive around it.

And it's just a really, it's an amazing place. It's beautiful. It's quiet because there's very few vehicles.

And it has a ton of archaeological sites on it, places that you can swim. There's waterfalls. So it's not only a fun place to go and camp or hike, but it's also a very special place for me because, again, that's where I got my introduction to northern Great Lakes archaeology.

So it'll always be one of my favorite places.

[Stuart Carlton]
Excellent. Well, Dr. Susan Kooiman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, home of very yummy donuts and other things. Thank you so much for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes.

[Susan Kooiman]
Oh, thank you for having me. It's been wonderful.

[Carolyn Foley]
So that was a really neat conversation about an aspect of the Great Lakes that, like you said, we haven't necessarily thought about as much.

[Stuart Carlton]
And I always forget about, you know, you think about, I always forget about like what a radical technology like pottery is, you know, because like right now I'm downstairs, I'm making a big pot of red beans and rice for something we're doing this week. And it's sitting in there just stewing slowly. And I wouldn't, I mean, it's in metal, I guess, but right.

But you couldn't do that by throwing hot rocks on a fire.

[Carolyn Foley]
No, it's very interesting. And then I wound up thinking way too much about, well, but if you had to, how would you do it? But that's kind of what makes it cool.

So.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, you would invent pottery.

[Carolyn Foley]
I also enjoyed the discussions of, you know, competing narratives and different things like that. I think it's an interesting, I mean, it's science, it's what it is. So.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, it's interesting stuff. And asking these big questions about, you know, our past really helps you. Yeah.

It's nice to see yourself in the long arc of history, I think. And I didn't get into what happened to those people, but.

[Carolyn Foley]
Yeah, nope, nope, nope. That can be a different show.

[Stuart Carlton]
Different time. That could be a different show. Teach Me About the Great Lakes is brought to you by the fine people at Illinois, we encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do at ilinseagrant.org and at ilinseagrant on Facebook, Blue Sky, Insta, and maybe some other social media.

[Carolyn Foley]
Our senior producer is Carolyn Foley, and Teach Me About the Great Lakes is produced by Megan Lake-Lovergun and Greenie Miles. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and fixer. Our super fun podcast artwork is by Joel Davenport.

And the show is edited by Sandra Cifaluda.

[Stuart Carlton]
If you have a question or comment about the show, please email to teachmeaboutthegreatlakes at gmail.com. I just remembered, I'm not sure if I checked that recently. Or leave us a message on our hotline, the hottest of hotlines, 765-496-IISG, that's 4474.

Or if you want to send us a postcard, we love postcards, love getting postcards. Anyway, thank you, oh you, for listening, and keep upgrading those lips. Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee, cha!