By Lindsey Harrison/WMBD-TV
BLOOMINGTON – An archaeological team, made up of professionals and Illinois State University students, is working at the site of a Native American village that dates back hundreds of years. It’s the first time in decades the site has been investigated.
The village on farmland south of Bloomington is more than 800 years old. It’s located beneath the growing corn on a private farm. Professionals have known about the site since the early 1900s, but this is the first time it’s been excavated in 40 years.
“There was excavation into a burial mound here in the 1920s. And then there was some professional work by Illinois State University in the early 70s,” explained Logan Miller, with ISU’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
For the last month, Miller has been bringing 16 students to the site to get hands on experience.
“Digging stuff, taking notes, and noticing differences in the soil. It’s not really stuff you can read about a book and just know. It’s something you really just have to do.”
The group is teaming up with the Illinois State Archaeological Survey for the project. Right now, they’re focusing on a single house.
“We’re seeing this house, it looks very different from any other house and this time period than anyone else has really ever seen,” Miller explained.
They’ve found thousands of artifacts, like bone, tool and pottery fragments. They’re also taking soil samples to collect things like seeds, which can point to the crops that were planted.
The team will spend months studying what they found, hoping to answer the big questions.
“It’s a place where there were people coming from two different places, from Southern Illinois and Chicago area, who somehow kind of seem to meet up here,” said Miller. “How did they kind of come together? Did they have to form a new social groups and ideas, new roles, new rules?”
But the work is just beginning. Miller and his students will hopefully be back each year to dig further into Central Illinois history.
“You don’t want to just study a whole village, a whole town, whatever it is by just looking at one house,” he said.
The site could take years to dig through.
