Indiana Jones can have Egypt. This band of archaeological surveyors has the Forest Preserve District of Cook County.
And the other day they were making their swashbuckling way through a south suburban preserve, battling mosquitoes and underbrush, as they searched for artifacts of human habitation.
The sharp piece of rock one field technician screened from a shovel of soil?
Pete Geraci, staff archaeologist with the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, examined it.
It was pointy. And it was chert, a kind of stone commonly used by indigenous peoples to make tools.
But it was just a pointy piece of chert.
However, the item Halley McLean, another field technician, had found earlier?
Bingo. An unfinished projectile point — a point that had broken while it was being made, and was discarded.
And the day before, someone had found the artifact Geraci now took out of a small brown paper bag. It was a small, gray, picture-perfect point that had probably been on the head of a dart or knife, chipped into shape by someone who had lived long ago but not far away.
The survey team was in the thick brush of this preserve — the district asked that the exact location not be revealed to avoid poaching — helping conduct the district’s first concerted effort at surveying its archaeological resources.
The forest preserves, it turns out, are an archaeological treasure. Their nearly 70,000 acres of undeveloped land boast 550 sites recorded so far. There are believed to be hundreds more yet undiscovered.
People have been living in the Chicago area continuously for at least 10,000 years. And “the entire history of human occupation in Cook County is represented in the archaeological sites preserved within” the forest preserves, reports the Natural and Cultural Resources Master Plan the district released earlier this year
Survey teams at various preserves have found a 10,000-year-old projectile point and 10,000-year-old larch needles.
“Most of the other Cook County sites have been destroyed,” said Paula Branstner, field station coordinator of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey and author of the master plan’s section on archaeology. “The sites preserved on forest preserve property contain virtually our only way of learning about the early inhabitants of northeastern Illinois.”
The Forest Preserve District for years had a semiofficial archaeologist, Edward Lace, a now-retired naturalist who discovered many of the sites. He was a font of knowledge, as I discovered when he led me through what he identified as an Indian quarry — a footpath through LaBagh Woods — for a column I wrote in 1988.
But he was the only one surveying this critical resource, said John McCabe, the district’s director of resource management.
“It’s somewhat embarrassing … to find out that we have really been negligent in our duties as landowners as it relates to the cultural resources that the district possesses,” he said.
Less than 20 percent of the district’s holdings have been surveyed. But now, under the master plan, the district has contracted with the archaeological survey, part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois, to do a concerted study. More than 1,000 acres will be examined this year, with further surveys planned for the next couple of years.
For the most part, the district will use the information to protect the sites — not just from poachers, but from utility work and its own restoration projects that could disturb them.
But some of the sites, including the one Geraci and his team are working, are proving so rich that the district may actually excavate them — and even possibly open them to the public as archaeological exhibits.
“We would be open to that, if we were doing a controlled excavation,” McCabe said.
Geraci and the field technicians were taking the first step, shovel tests to determine whether the artifacts that have already been found were flukes or whether the area is dense with them.
Wearing enough netting to be beekeepers — the mosquitoes have been epic — they fanned out in the brush.
They dug holes in the ground every 15 meters in a grid, screening the earth they shoveled through quarter-inch mesh to find any buried artifacts.
McLean knelt on the ground, ear buds dangling — she bases her music on the weather, and this day had called for The Shins — as she pushed earth through the screen.
Finding an artifact as big as the one she had discovered earlier had been a thrill.
“This was the first thing I found on my own,” she said. “It was really exciting.”
The best days in the field, Geraci said, are when entire teams experience moments like this; “when everyone gets a chance to put their hands on some history or prehistory.”
Their work is a hunt and, to some extent, a mystery. This site was occupied between about A.D. 500 and 1000, and may have been a seasonal campsite. “People would have had to move around in winter and summer,” he said.
But the details are lost in time.
“Why were people here? I don’t know; there could have been a thousand reasons why,” Geraci said. “It could have been that the soil is sandy. Or that a creek is here. Or there were deer here. Or the trees, and they were harvesting acorns.”
Or something more fleeting:
“There could have been someone just passing through 1,500 years ago who took a shot at a deer, missed, lost his projectile point – and he’s gone.”
Geraci and his team screened soil, picked out flakes chipped off projectile points that were small as teeth. Whatever artifact they find, Geraci keeps in mind that it was once in the hands, and the life, of a person.
“You try and pay it as much respect as possible,” he said. “This is somebody’s ancestor.”
The mosquitoes buzzed; the team wielded its shovels; and not far from picnic groves and a parking lot, the forest preserves released their small, tantalizing clues to human history.
