The Gull Lake burial mounds mark the burials of ancient people who once lived in villages near this location. Archaeologists excavated the mounds and found the fragmented remains of 38 people, along with pottery, stone tools, and animal bones, which provided clues to burial customs, disease, and early life at Gull Lake. The people buried there were of the Woodland tradition, a general term used by archaeologists for later prehistoric peoples of the eastern North American woodlands. Pottery from the mounds is characteristic of particular prehistoric Woodland groups between 800 B.C. and A.D. 900. Accounts by early explorers and Native American oral tradition link the Dakota people to the Headwaters Region, suggesting that many prehistoric Woodland sites may represent the ancestral Dakota. The Woodland tradition began with the use of pottery vessels, the construction of burial mounds, and plant cultivation, and it was marked by population increase, decreased mobility, and stronger ties to particular places. Villages supported by horticulture, or in northern Minnesota by gathering wild rice, were occupied for longer periods and became larger and more established. At Gull Lake, earlier burials appear to have been placed in pits, with evidence that a fire was built over the pit before mound construction, while later burials were placed on the ground surface and covered with earth. About half of the burial areas within the mounds contained more than one person. Most individuals were represented only by skulls and long bones, suggesting that mound burial was the final step in a custom in which bodies may first have been placed on a scaffold or treated similarly before selected remains were gathered for interment in the mound, a practice archaeologists call bundle burial.