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Prehistoric, historic, and present settlement patterns related to ecological hierarchy in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan, U.S.A.

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Abstract

The distribution of human occupation across a landscape provides informationabout how people use the landscape, about patterns of economic development,and about social interactions of human groups. When the distributions areexamined over several thousand years, we gain an evolutionary understanding,not only of the people and their cultural patterns, but also of physicallandscape development. The focus of this assessment was to examine andcompare settlement patterns of prehistoric, historic, and present timeperiods, based on known cultural sites in the Eastern Upper Peninsula ofMichigan, U.S.A., and to generate hypotheses about the interaction ofsettlement pattern and landscape change at multiple scales. Patterns ofsettlement among the three time periods were compared at three geographicscales: by subregional ecosystems, by landscape ecosystems and by terraincharacteristics. The Michigan Bureau of History database of archaeologicalsites was searched for prehistoric habitation sites of Middle or LateWoodland period (ca. 3000-300 years before present). Historic occupationswere drawn from pre-European settlement landscape data based on General LandOffice survey notes of the 1850s. We extracted “urban” categories from landcover classified from Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery to measure presentoccupations. Spatial patterns and dynamics of settlement areas in each timeperiod were examined using the ARC/INFO geographic information system (GIS).Results showed a tendency for settlement in all time periods on the bedrockand lowland landscape groups near Great Lakes shorelines, generally occupyingslopes less than two percent. The distribution of present occupations, interms of both slope aspect and geographic subregion (multi-scalar), wassimilar to the distribution of prehistoric occupations. Both prehistoric andpresent sites were primarily south facing and were frequently found alongGreen Bay and Lake Michigan shorelines.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164, U.S.A

    Janet Silbernagel

  2. Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, 49931, U.S.A

    Susan R. Martin

  3. School of Forestry and Wood Products, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, 49931, U.S.A

    Margaret R. Gale & Jiquan Chen

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  1. Janet Silbernagel
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  2. Susan R. Martin
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  3. Margaret R. Gale
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  4. Jiquan Chen
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Silbernagel, J., Martin, S.R., Gale, M.R. et al. Prehistoric, historic, and present settlement patterns related to ecological hierarchy in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan, U.S.A.. Landscape Ecology 12, 223–240 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007946907682

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