The Red Ocher people were an indigenous people of North America. A series of archaeological sites located in the Upper

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lak ...

, the Greater Illinois River Valley, and the

Ohio River Valley The Ohio River is a long river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing southwesterly from western Pennsylvania to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illinoi ...

in the

American Midwest The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of the United States. I ...

have been discovered to be a Red Ocher burial complex, dating from 1000 BC to 400 BC, the Terminal Archaic – Early Woodland period. Characterized as shallow burials located in sandy ridges along river valleys, covered in

red ochre Ochre ( ; , ), or ocher in American English, is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown. It is also the name of the colours produced ...

or hydrated iron oxide (FeH₃O), they contain diagnostic artifacts that include caches of

flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and sta ...

points, turkey-tails, and various forms of worked

copper Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkis ...

. Turkey-tails are large flint blades of a distinct type. It is believed that Red Ocher people spoke an ancestral form of the

Algonquian languages The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically simi ...

. Red ochre has a long history of use in North America; as early as the

Folsom tradition The Folsom Complex is a Paleo-Indian archaeological culture that occupied much of central North America from c. 8500 BCE to c. 4000 BCE. The term was first used in 1927 by Jesse Dade Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. ...

during the Paleo-Indian period, certain localities in New Mexico and Wyoming were being mined for the substance.Tankersley, Kenneth B., et al.
They Have a Rock That Bleeds: Sunrise Red Ochre and Its Early Paleoindian Occurrence at the Hell Gap Site
. ''Plains Anthropologist'' 40.152 (1995): 185-194: 187. The people today known as Red Ocher were first identified by the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

in 1937. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Red Ocher Culture was a topic of great interest among archaeologists who were trying to better define the burial culture through various methods of research. Since then intermittent archaeological works have been published dealing with specific sub-topics within the burial culture and supported by more reliable AMS carbon dates. Nevertheless, many important archaeological questions regarding the Red Ocher burial manifestation and cultural phenomenon are still without answers.

Etymology

This culture used powdered red ocher in their burials. There is considerable variation from site to site in the few sites with this artifact. Robert E. Ritzenthaler, Curator of Anthropology, Milwaukee Public Museum and George I. Quimby; Curator of North American Archaeology and Ethnology; Chicago Natural History Museum Chicago Natural History Museum; Fieldiana Anthropology; Volume 36 March 27, 1962 No.11; Chicago Natural History Museum; Chicago, Illinois; 1962 The term "Red Ocher" was first used in 1937 as a description from three sites in central Illinois. Some additional sites have since been recognized as Red Ocher because of their cultural similarity to these. There is not a broad synthesis of the existing information and it is easily confused with the Glacial Kame culture.

Location

It is found in

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

Michigan Michigan () is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the List of U.S. states and ...

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolitan areas include, Peoria and Rockf ...

Iowa Iowa () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to th ...

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

, and

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

. The sites are from eastern Iowa to central Ohio and from southern Ohio to the Manitoulin District of Ontario. Most of the sites seem are in southeastern

, northern

, and the southern half of the

Lower Peninsula of Michigan The Lower Peninsula of Michigan – also known as Lower Michigan – is the larger, southern and less elevated of the two major landmasses that make up the U.S. state of Michigan; the other being the Upper Peninsula, which is separated by the S ...

. This area of Red Ocher culture is a co-occupant with Glacial Kame. It seems probable that the Old Copper merges into both Red Ocher and Glacial Kame.

References

Archaic period in North America History of indigenous peoples of North America {{NorthAm-native-stub

Etymology

Location

See also

Further reading

References