We have reason to believe that the Big Game Hunters wandered over
Illinois and the adjoining states during the last advance of the
glaciers. Around 12,000 B.C. the climate in the Midwest became milder,
the glaciers “retreated,” and the mighty torrents—the Mississippi, the
Ohio and the Illinois that had torn irresistibly down their
valleys—shrank into smaller, less turbulent rivers that occupied but a
fraction of their former beds. The great shaggy mammoths, musk oxen, the
ground sloths and the giant beavers moved westward toward the mountains
or to the north.
Some of the Big Game Hunters with their families may have followed the
retreating glacier and the herds; others stayed behind in country to
which they had grown attached. With the great herds gone, the human
families remaining in Illinois had to hunt the game animals that now
frequented the area—deer, elk (wapiti), bear and smaller mammals. The
large hunting party was no longer practicable. The game roamed over the
country singly or by twos or threes and had to be stalked by one or two
hunters. Families were compelled to live widely separated one from
another in order to secure ample food throughout the year. Thus
developed a new way of life which we call the Archaic phase or culture.
The hunter, as time passed, learned the secret habits of the deer, bear
and raccoon and the more sluggish fishes. His wife and daughters learned
the haunts and ways of the smaller animals, the rodents, turtles and
lizards, discovered where edible greens, wild tubers, nuts and fruits
grew and where mussels and snails abounded in creeks and rivers. With
increasing knowledge Archaic man made better and fuller use of his
changed and changing surroundings, food became more plentifully
available, life easier and less hazardous though still very difficult
from our standpoint.
[Illustration: Fig. 4. Hafted primitive stone adze and grooved ax,
with modern steel-bitted ax in the background. (B.B.)]
With new needs and some leisure from the labor of providing food,
Archaic man invented specialized devices, new methods of making tools
and weapons, the more skillful among them shaping the objects carefully
into symmetrical forms pleasing to the eye of others and strangely
satisfying to the maker.[7] He pecked a hollow in both sides of his
cobblestone hammer so he could grip it securely and use it more
skillfully. He pecked and ground diorite and granite into adzes,
hatchets (celts), and axes with a groove for hafting. These were a
decided improvement over flaked choppers. He ground and polished banded
and highly-colored shale (“slate”) into prismatic and cylindrical
spearthrower weights and bored them with a tube, sand and water. His own
person he decked out with necklaces and oval pendants (made by boring a
hole in smooth flat waterworn pebbles) and with bone ornaments cut to
shape, ground, engraved and polished. These he and his wife wore as had
their forefathers but not the skin robes of glacial times.
As life grew easier, the family or local group increased in size. Sons
brought their wives to the family dwelling place and built windbreaks
near those of their parents. With food abundant the little settlement
became a small cluster of households or a hamlet consisting possibly of
sixty to seventy persons.