Archeology

              Two skeletons surface....

You don't have to travel to Egypt
to unearth an ancient civilization. Just
pull on your Levis, an old pair of
sneakers and hie yourself down to a
class at the diggings on 31. . .there's a
whole lot of sherd right in our own
backyard!

To the uninitiated, "sherd" is the
term archaeologists use for fragments of
broken earthenware turned-up in the soil.
Lance Linguist, one of the young instructors
from the College of DuPage in charge of the
St. Charles digs, tells us that pieces now being 
found along the Fox are from the early 
to middle woodland culture. . .a period dating 
back to. . .would you believe, 600 BC.

The digging operations were started here early 
last spring by the archaeologydepartment of the 
College of DuPage, and during the summer a class 
sponsored by the Tri-City Youth Project is hard a
t work every week with shovels andpails.

Saturday morning was the big find! 
After months of sifting for pottery fragments and 
painstaking digging and scraping and sorting and marking, i
t all paid off. Two complete and intact adult skeletons were un-
earthed . . . buried side by side in crouched
positions scarcely four	beneath the original surface level of the land.

Then the fun began. After pictures were taken 
the students began the careful work of digging up 
the ancient Adam and Eve, marking each bone and 
packing the couple away in boxes for 
reassembly later at the college.

Actually, the sex of each has not yet been determined, 
but in the course of cleaning and Oozing and putting 
them all together and everybody's happy at the
diggings again the archaeology experts will be able to
determine a great deal about the pair. 

Northern Illinois University authorities
who came to view the skeletons over the 
weekend estimated the remains to be about 2,000 years old.

The purpose of all this digging and study, 
Linguist explained, is to determine the level of 
culture and the nature of adaption the people of the 
woodland period made to their environment.

Ifyou wander about the diggings long enough, 
watching housewives, college students and youngsters 
alike quietly systematically working away in the mounds
and gullies of dirt, the excitement of the
project begins to get to you.
 
Who were these people who roamed the Fox Valley 
so many centuries ago? What will the students discover today? 
Hand me a shovel. . . .throw me a trowel!

The brownpaper bags you see are not a sack lunch. 
Each student places his treasures for the day. . .
bits of pottery, arrowhead, chips. . into a bag, 
and these later are cleaned and studied and glued together to
form, hopefully, pitchers and pots.

There are currently about 25 students�of all ages�enrolled in 
the Tri-City Youth Project class. In addition to working at the
diggings they meet evenings to study their
findings, and field trips of archaeological interest 
are planned tor later in the summer. Anyone interested in 
joining the happy crew may contact the 
Tri-City Youth Project office on North 
Second street.

Only persons enrolled in the class or authorized by 
the college may dig, and curiosity-seekers are asked 
not to tamper with or touch anything. 
Many hours have been spent by the classes to 
work the ground systematically and with care. 
Hands off, please�history is in the making!