`Archeology is something that happens in a far-off, exotic place, not in your own back yard.” Or so Sheri Rubin, a special education teacher at Naperville`s Ranchview Elementary School, thought before she signed on to become one of 60 suburban teachers taking part in an archeological excavation in a Naperville cornfield this summer.
Dig buckets in hand, these intrepid local researchers are at work on an archeological project that may prove to be among the most significant ever conducted in northern Illinois, because of its clues into the area`s prehistory and its rich payoffs for suburban school children.
Six archeological sites, dating from the Paleo-Indian period of 12,000 to 10,000 B.C. to the late Woodland period of 1,500 to 500 B.C., are under excavation on a 62-acre farm owned by Naperville School District 203.
Among the dig`s most important rewards will be the experiences the teachers take back to their classrooms, said Michael Harkins, director of program development for the school district and coordinator of the effort.
”That is one of our big missions,” said Harkins, ”to have a commingling of talents and expertise between teachers and archeologists. What we want to know is how do we take something as specific as a Clovis point (a primitive weapon) or Woodland Indians and make this applicable to students in the 5th or 6th grade or in junior or senior high school?”
Harkins thinks an appreciation of our prehistory has been sorely missing in schools.
”Just open any book and where does it start?” he said. ”It starts with Columbus. It starts with all the written records. We don`t do anything with prehistory.”
The Naperville dig is supposed to help change that.
”People are interested in dinosaurs and mastodons, but these animals didn`t survive. What about the early man who did?” Harkins said.
He thinks that the study of prehistory will help us understand ourselves and our future, ”especially when it comes to the environment.”
Sheri Rubin agrees. ”If we get our students interested in the past, that`s our future,” she said, dressed for the day`s dig in the requisite camp hat, shorts and T-shirt.
Like all the teacher participants, Rubin is working in the field for two weeks and will get college credit from Northern Illinois University for her effort.
Mornings are spent in the classroom, learning the basics of archeology:
how to recognize and date artifacts, how to locate and lay out an excavation site, how to draw conclusions from what is found.
Afternoons she and her fellow researchers are at the site, laboring under the trained eye of a professional archeologist.
Assigned in teams of two, the amateurs painstakingly measure off a small patch of earth one meter square, then trowel off the dirt, leaving a pattern on the field that looks like a giant chessboard.
One member of the team digs, the other pushes the dirt through a screen, searching for tiny artifacts. When something is found-particularly anything bigger than a dime-the others cluster around to admire. The exact location where it`s found is carefully measured and recorded.
Thumbnail-sized flakes, smooth stone shavings of chert left over from the making of tools, are the bulk of the spoils. Not much to look at until one considers that the people who left them behind may have lived here 12,000 years ago.
It`s laborious work but strangely compelling.
”What will we find? That`s the unknown that makes it exciting,” said Tom Ross, an eighth-grade earth science teacher at Lisle Junior High School who thinks that by ”finding out more about cultures that are now extinct, we`ll find out what those people did to their environments, and maybe we can learn from their mistakes.”
This fall Ross plans to add a chapter to his students` study of the geological development of North America, which now stops at the point in time when the glaciers retreated.
The next chapter is about early man, and that`s exactly who Ross and his fellow amateur archeologists are looking for in the cornfield.
Piecing together the story of these early Paleo-Indians, hunters and gatherers at the end of the Ice Age, is like solving a mystery with only a few tiny clues.
Harkins, in cooperation with professional archeologist Doug Kullen, has developed an idea of what life might have been like back then-at a site that is now located between Naper Boulevard and Oleson Road, just south of Chicago Avenue.
”Our thoughts are that there was a pond area, a good water source here,” said Harkins. ”That means fish, maybe small game. The larger animals- woolly mammoths, mastodons and forerunners of our modern-day moose-would have been attracted to the site and so would Paleo man. This is what we are hypothesizing.”
Holding a chiseled piece of chalky white stone in his hand, he explained how early man might have used such primitive weapons-archeologists call them points-to survive.
”They would attach this point with sinew to a shaft,” he said. Armed with such a tool, the hunters could drive animals into a swampy area. ”Once the animals were caught in the mud, they were killed by dropping bigger stones on their heads and legs.”
Not a pretty sight, perhaps, but early Du Page County man was bent on survival in a hostile environment. ”Remnants of the animal bones would be used for fish hooks and needles and all kinds of interesting tools,” said Harkins, who believes the Paleo-Indian site is the earliest discovered in the area.
”There may have been other sites that have been destroyed, but as far as we can determine this is where Naperville`s earliest inhabitants lived. They lived in a very lush environment that was warming yet tundra-like. They probably clothed themselves in skins and had a lot of stone tools.
”They may or may not have come back on a regular basis, or maybe they were just passing through going somewhere else. But they were, indeed, our first visitors that we know of,” said Harkins, explaining that a fortunate set of circumstances led to the discovery of these early sites on what is known locally as the Wohead farm.
Now squeezed by a ring of suburban homes, the 62-acre tract was purchased by the school district in 1974 as a possible location for a third Naperville high school.
When population patterns changed, the school board voted to sell the farmland, but not before following up on stories of local farmers about archeological artifacts found on the land.
Mike Harkins was assigned to check the stories` validity. A veteran of a number of archeological digs in Egypt, England and at the Kampsville site in southern Illinois, he had studied enthnographic research techniques in graduate school to find out if they could be used to improve education (the answer is yes), and he took to his new assignment with enthusiasm.
Time was short. The school board had agreed to delay the sale, but only until fall, 1989.
Harkins called in contract archeologist Doug Kullen, a Downers Grove native, whose specialty is the prehistory of the Du Page River Valley.
Kullen walked the Wohead field and found an exciting clue: a chiseled piece of smooth, milky white stone, flecked with light brown, not much bigger than a teaspoon.
It was a Clovis point, named for the archeological site in New Mexico where the first such point was accurately dated. Experts agree that Clovis points date from 12,000 to 10,000 B.C. That was all the evidence Harkins and Kullen needed to convince them that the site was worth further exploration.
Although longtime county residents have been collecting prehistoric relics for years, most are stashed away in shoe boxes, and the record of where they were found is long gone. An archeologist likes to find the evidence in the ground, exactly where the primitive hunters left them. Only then can scientists accurately rebuild the story of early civilization.
The six Wohead farm sites will be sold at auction in September. Such a fate was all part of the agreement, Harkins said. ”The school board has already passed a resolution to sell the land,” he said, explaining that
”unless we find something we don`t expect, we should be able to excavate the bulk of the artifacts and have the research done by September.”
The collection will be housed permanently at the Naper Settlement or the Northern Illinois University Anthropology Department museum. And for the 60 teacher participants, their experiences will enrich their teaching for years because as a sign on their Naperville classroom wall attests: ”WE DUG IT!”
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On-site public tours of the Wohead farm archeological sites will be conducted at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. daily, Aug. 21-31. Call Mike Harkins at 420-6558 for reservations. A lecture entitled ”Can You Dig It-Naperville 10,000 Years Ago” is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17, at Century Memorial Chapel, Naper Settlement, 201 W. Porter, Naperville. For information, call 420-6010.
