Dr. Robert Birmingham, an author, educator and former state archaeologist for Wisconsin, is the featured speaker for the Oct. 15 Thursdays at the U program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire – Barron County.
Dr. Robert Birmingham
His presentation, “Indian Mounds of Wisconsin,” will run from 12:30-1:30 p.m. in the Blue Hills Lecture Hall in Ritzinger Hall and will be livestreamed at ricelaketv.com.
Ancient Native Americans built more than 15,000 earthen burial mounds across 1,000 sites in Wisconsin. There are more burial mounds in Wisconsin than anywhere else in North America. Birmingham will share the history of mound building with an emphasis on effigy mounds — those built in the form of animals, supernatural beings and humans that are important in Native American culture.
Birmingham is a writer and lecturer who taught for the Universities of Wisconsin. He is the author of eight books on archaeological and historical topics as well as numerous scholarly articles. His most recent book is “Ancient Effigy Mound Landscapes of Upper Midwestern North America” (2025), which he co-authored with Dr. Amy Rosebrough. Now retired, Birmingham continues to write and conduct research from his home in Madison.
The Thursdays at the U weekly series is free and open to the public thanks to support from the UW-Eau Claire – Barron County Foundation. Neither seating reservations nor parking permits are needed for in-person attendees.
While in-person attendance is encouraged, most presentations in the series are livestreamed and archived on the Thursdays at the U webpage.
The next program in the series will be Oct. 22, with Dr. Eric Kasper, professor of political science at UW-Eau Claire, presenting “First Amendment Free Speech Protections.”
For more information about the series, contact Laura Holden at 715-788-6207 or holdenlk@uwec.edu.
