Paleoclimate of the Little Ice Age to the Present in the Kankakee Valley of Illinois and Indiana, USA Based on ¹⁸O/¹⁶O Isotope Ratios of Freshwater Shells

ABSTRACT

The cooling associated with the Little Ice Age (LIA) had differential severity across the globe. Within the American Midwest, the local impacts of this cooling have not been established. Our purpose here is to determine its local effects and establish the impacts on the environment encountered at a seventeenth century Native American village in Illinois, USA. We obtained oxygen and carbon stable isotope ratios of freshwater mussel shells from this early seventeenth century site, occupied during one of the coldest periods of the LIA. These data were compared to the oxygen and carbon ratios of freshwater shells from a nineteenth century cabin as well as modern shells. Results demonstrate that shell stable oxygen isotopes capture environmental conditions at the three sites and suggest more arid conditions during the LIA and increased precipitation into the present. Findings also may capture the extensive alteration of the Kankakee region’s drainage between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as contemporary global warming. Overall, this study illustrates the value of archaeological data to past and contemporary climate studies.

KEYWORDS:

• American Midwest
• Oneota
• oxygen stable isotopes
• paleoclimate
• Little Ice Age
• freshwater shells

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Terrance Martin for identifying the archaeological and contemporary shells used in this study. We are also exceptionally grateful to Dr. Dana Biasatti for her assistance with designing the method and its execution. This work would not have been possible without the resources at the Center for Environmental Science and Technology (CEST) at the University of Notre Dame. We also want to thank our colleagues at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, US Forest Service, and Passport in Time, including Joseph Wheeler III. Thank you also to the many volunteers at Collier Lodge and Midewin who made this work possible, and especially Charles Morse for his help collecting the shells. We are also grateful for the reviewers’ feedback, which improved this manuscript, and for editor Tim Mighall’s assistance moving this article through review. This work was funded by the University of Notre Dame Faculty Research Support Regular Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Notre Dame, Faculty Research Support Program Regular Grant.

Notes on contributors

Madeleine McLeester

Madeleine McLeester is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She is an environmental archaeologist whose research focuses on human-environment entanglements in eastern North America. Her research interests include the Little Ice Age, paleoclimate, agriculture, landscape archaeology, and Indigenous-colonial encounters. She is currently directing archaeological field projects in Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire, USA.

Mark Schurr

Mark Schurr is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. His recent work seeks to reconstruct human activities and the environment in the Midwestern USA during the Protohistoric period (when Native Americans and Europeans were first coming into contact). Remote sensing, geophysical surveys and excavations at the Middle Grant Creek site in northern Illinois are providing new insights into this important but neglected era. The project is also providing environmental data, including stable isotopes, which will be used to reconstruct the prairie ecosystem.