NEW DATA ON THE LATE WOODLAND USE OF WILD RICE IN NORTHERN WISCONSIN Charles R. Moffat and Constance M. Arzigian ABSTRACT Test excavations at the Robinson site, a large multicomponent village and mound com- plex in the upper Wisconsin River drainage, identified a Late Woodland Lakes phase midden and four features. An uncalibrated eighth-century A.D. radiocarbon date was ob- tained on charcoal from a feature that contained carbonized wild rice. This find is consis- tent with the previously postulated expansion of wild rice collecting during the early Lakes phase. Additional pit features containing wild rice were excavated at two small campsites located nearby. An eleventh-century radiocarbon date is associated with wild rice and maize from the Fishers Island site, and three twelfth-century dates were obtained from the Ghost Shirt Island V site, indicating the continuing importance of wild rice through the late Lakes phase. Introduction The importance of wild rice (Zizania aqunrica) to the subsistence economy of several Upper Great Lakes Native American tribes, including the Chippewa, or Ojibway, the Ho Chunk (Winnebago), the Menomini, and the Santee, or Eastern Dakota, is well documented. The historical and ethnographic accounts of wild rice exploitation by Native Americans in this region led some early-twentieth- century ethnologists to designate Wisconsin and adjoining portions of Michigan and Minnesota a distinct "wild rice culture area" (Jenks 1900:1036; Kroeber 1939). The ethnographic record for this region provides much information con- cerning the methods of harvesting and processing wild rice. However, the antiq- uity of intensive wild rice gathering has not been firmly established. The eth- nologist Albert Jenks (1900: 11 14) supposed that it was a recent development and that the Upper Great Lakes tribes had gathered wild rice for only 300 to 500 years. More recently, archaeologists have argued that wild rice collection must have begun at a much earlier date. Elden Johnson (1 969b:35) and Robert Salzer (1974) suggested that wild rice became an important resource for prehistoric Late Woodland cultures in the upper Midwest after around A.D. 800. Salzer (1974) inferred that wild rice exploitation resulted in a shift in site location preferences .from riverine settings to lake shores during the Late Woodland Lakes phase in northern Wisconsin. Arzigian (1992) reviewed previous reports of prehistoric Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 25, No. I 0 2000 by The University of Iowa