In Illinois, unrecorded history being written in small discoveries Mound Illinois

Submitted by Andy B on Friday, 24 December 2004 Page Views: 4800

Country: United States State: Illinois Type: Artificial Mound

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Christi Parsons of the Chicago Tribune writes: Two thousand years ago, a community of American Indians lived along the Rock River in far northwestern Illinois, where they shaped stone into smoking pipes with such acumen that they were able to ship and trade them all over the Midwestern prairie. This year, archaeologists discovered broken pieces of pipe stone and other debris from the pipe-making process in the area, giving researchers several promising leads on the locations of pipe workshops used by these renowned artisans.

The array of artifacts has been painstakingly recovered by anthropologists from Beloit College and placed into storage, and the spots that produced them have been cataloged along with the 52,170 other archeological sites now in Illinois' official directory.

Forget Indiana Jones. This is how unrecorded history is being written every day, in tiny discoveries unearthed by the dozens.

Aided by new technologies and regulations that require developers to take precautions as they dig, the rate of discoveries has risen so staggeringly fast that scientists could investigate them for a generation and still not run out of leads. This year alone, state archaeologists have added 1,020 sites to the list.

While the emphasis is on the large and earth-shattering new finds, the real work is done out of the limelight, as archaeologists continue to develop the recorded history of a state that once was mostly prairie and now is increasingly subdivision.

The sites in the state's catalog have produced thousands of pieces of evidence from the lives of Illinois' ancestors, from the so-called woodland cultures that inhabited these parts beginning 1,000 years before the time of Jesus to the arrival of Europeans to the early explorers of the far frontier.

No matter how small, each contributes something to modern understanding of earlier times, said Mike Wiant, an archaeologist for the state and director of the Dickson Mounds Museum in Lewistown.

"Many aspects of the written record are incomplete," Wiant said. "The only way to get a complete understanding is to discover the place where people lived. By finding the location, people can find more about what that life was like."

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