If a group of hikers in a Lake County forest preserve stumbled upon an archeological excavation site, they might wonder if they`d suddenly stepped onto the set of an Indiana Jones movie or into some South American jungle.
Yet at such an excavation site, they would`t find hundreds of sun-soaked laborers toiling in mile-deep pits in search of gold- and jewel-encrusted statues.
Instead, they might run across Rochelle Lurie and several staff archeologists screening soil through a fine mesh screen, searching for remnants of the prehistoric cultures of northern Illinois.
The Lake County effort is an especially exciting project for Lurie and her assistants, who excavate potentially significant archeological sites in northern Illinois for a living: The digs they`re screening near the Des Plaines River are in a prime prehistoric settlement area where a number of original sites remain intact.
Before a 25-mile bicycle path can be completed through the forest preserve, though, the county must have the area examined for artifacts. Lurie and the crew from her Harvard-based Archaeological Research Services Inc., have found six sites already that are undisturbed, a rarity in this heavily developed part of the state.
Lurie`s company, which surveys land for government agencies as well as private sector companies, has already completed about 40 projects this year in Lake, McHenry and Kane Counties. Often those are small jobs that involve nothing more than examining farm fields for remains that may have been brought to the surface by 150 years of repeated plowings.
The forest preserve project, though, has become much more intriguing.
Lurie and her team began the job in mid-April by digging holes, called shovel probes. The holes, a foot and a half across and deep, are dug every 10 meters along the trail. The soil is then screened through quarter-inch mesh.
What`s left? What looks like rocks to you gets people like Lurie a lot more excited.
”Primarily, the kinds of things we`ve recovered are stone materials,”
Lurie said. ”There were a few tools, which were really not the kinds of things people could identify as arrowheads or spear points, but much more crude than that. These are the kinds of things we find most often.
”People don`t realize there are archeological sites in Illinois that go back 10,000 years,” Lurie said. ”It goes on right in the United States. You don`t have to go to China or Egypt.”
Just go to Lurie`s basement. It is filled with hundreds of specimens that are cleaned and cataloged. Many are sent to the Illinois State Museum in Springfield or the Northwestern University curation department. The types of artifacts Lurie hopes to find in the forest preserve site are stone tools, food debris, specific pottery pieces, animal bones and remains of charred wood.
Remains ranging from pioneer settlers to 10,000-year-old Paleo-Indian man exist throughout this part of the state.
”Most of the sites are in plowed fields,” Lurie said. ”Plowing and erosion move things around.”
In the last 15 years, archeologists have been uncovering a crazy-quilt of sites in Lake, Cook, Du Page, Kane and McHenry Counties that were in large part unknown before.
Because of a new state law requiring all land, public or private, to be surveyed for archeological artifacts before building can begin, archeologists are doing more excavation work in this area than ever before.
”It`s not the size of the site so much as it really is the number of sites you find that gives you clues as to how prehistoric peoples lived,”
said another contract archeologist, David Keene, who works out of Chicago.
”This area was ignored until the early `70s, for one reason, because southern Illinois was a little more exotic and it was thought the development had destroyed a lot of sites.”
Development sometimes impedes, sometimes aids and sometimes serves as a catalyst for discoveries.
In Kane County, Lurie was hired to survey a section of land near south Elgin earmarked for a key piece of development. They found a 19th Century pioneer home.
The land, between McLean Boulevard and Randall Road and Bowes and Hopps Roads, is the site of the planned multimillion-dollar Bowes Road Interceptor Sewer, a public works project that, upon its completion, will allow development for a six-mile-plus stretch west to Illinois Highway 47.
Because of the passage of the State Agency Historic Resources Preservation Act in 1990, the proposed public works project was subjected to an archeological survey.
What Lurie`s team unearthed was the foundation of the frame house of George Marshall, a farmer and carpenter whose home may have been Elgin Township`s first frame structure. Pieces of pottery, ironstone and nails lay about the field where the house stood. Nearby, they also dug up a spear point and a tool that Lurie estimated dates from 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. More than 6,000 pieces of debris were found at the Elgin site.
It has not been unusual for the routes of major roads to be slightly altered to accommodate archeological finds. The National Historic Preservation Act, passed in 1966, covers any projects involving federal land or money, including all projects under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers.
In the case of the Elgin sewer project, the main pipe was blueprinted to bisect the 15-foot-wide Marshall home. The archeological work has now been completed and the site covered over. This project was approved as originally designed.
”We`re not in the business of holding up development,” Lurie said.
”One shouldn`t use archeology as a reason for holding up development.”
One thing is certain: The land George Marshall purchased for $1.25 an acre in 1844 is worth a lot more now. With land in Lake, Kane and McHenry Counties now at a premium, developers who foresee further filling the rural landscapes with homesites and suburban-like enclaves where no suburbs actually exist want to do it as economically as possible.
When the Historic Resources Preservation Act was passed last fall, it required state-funded, state-licensed and state-permitted projects to submit to archeological surveys. Licenses or permits requesting permission to modify the landscape must be reviewed by the Illinois State Historic Preservation Agency, which may ask for a survey. That means real estate developers may have to have land surveyed before they can build.
”This is another environmental law in the same vein as the wetlands and endangered-species laws,” said Paula Cross, senior archeologist with the state preservation agency in Springfield. ”Our main point is that archeology sites are non-renewable resources. If something`s lost to development, we cannot replace it. But the good thing about archeology is that it never stops development. If we find something, it can be excavated if we need it.”
The Illinois Homebuilders Association has not cottoned to the idea of more regulation on its industry, however. Members argue it places an extra cost on a development that must be passed on to the home buyer.
Lurie, for one, reports fair and smooth dealings in her relationships with developers to this point.
She said the surveys often take no more than a few days, sometimes just a single day, and cost no more than from a few hundred dollars to $5,000, ”a drop in the bucket” to developers, as another archeologist put it.
If something is uncovered, barring an extremely significant historical find, the important artifacts can be extracted and the developer is back to business as usual.
Why, then, is the Homebuilders Association seeking to overturn the portion of the 1990 legislation that pertains to them?
According to Mark Harrison, executive vice president for the association, speaking from Springfield, ”It was never the intent of this bill to include private construction.”
Because only about 20 companies in Illinois are qualified to do archeological studies, Harrison said, a surveying logjam will result that will cost developers because of delays. One developer testified in Springfield to losing $25,000 a month since November in interest alone and that the survey on the land has yet to be finished.
”This is a hidden cost which should be put before the public,” Harrison said. ”The consumer ends up paying.”
”No one find we`ve made is terribly significant as a single instance,”
Lurie said. ”It`s taking the picture as a whole that really is important.
There are potentially fascinating places that have yet to be studied in northern Illinois, Lurie said, such as the Volo Bog, south of Fox Lake. The bog is protected by conservation laws and thus from development. Bogs can preserve remains remarkably well.
”I would expect to find something like a 12,000-year-old Paleo-Indian settlement, perhaps the remains of a mastodon,” Lurie said.
