    
Bartholomewcm
hunter
Username: Bartholomewcm
Post Number: 513
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Monday, July 14, 2008 - 9:36 pm: |     |
Posting my latest (of six, so far) newspaper stories on this year's excavation at the Collier Lodge on the Kankakee River near Kouts, Indiana. Dig is starting the second of three weeks, and the historical society president has invited input from anybody online with identifying some of the stuff they're finding, since the focus this year is on the state's Historical Period (post-1816).
/CAT=M /Pri=R kvdigday5 07/14/08
Porter
by Charles M. Bartholomew
Post-Tribune Correspondent
PLEASANT TOWNSHIP – The Kankakee Valley Historical Society is inviting armchair archaeologists to participate in the 2008 summer excavation at the Collier Lodge from the comfort of their computer stations.
Instead of burning gas that costs over $4 a gallon and paying the society’s annual membership dues to sign up at the site near Baum’s Bridge on the Kankakee River , would-be Indiana Joneses can go to www.kankakeevalleyhistoricalsociety.com and click on “2008 Dig Picture Gallery,” according to KVHS president John Hodson.
“We’re finding old bottles and other things that we just don’t know what they are,” Hodson said Monday as the dig began its second week under the supervision of associate professor Mark Schurr, anthropology department chair at the University of Notre Dame.
With Schurr concentrating on what could be a cabin dating from around 1838, well into Indiana ’s Historical Period, volunteers have unearthed hundreds of artifacts, fragments and whole objects, that are generally recognizable, but mostly over 100 years old.
Volunteer Kathy Cervik of Kouts displayed FS (Field Specimen) 797, an intact ten-inch glass bottle found on Level #4 of Piece plot #5, filled with dirt and marked only with a number 2 on the bottom.
“It’s from around 1880 to 1910, when the lodge would have been built, maybe from the drugstore in Kouts. There’s a possibility they were tearing something else down to make room and threw it into a pit,” Schurr said.
Other objects include one that looks like a metal collar with straps attached and some kind of hand-sized weapon or tool that resembled an arrow with the end of a peg stuck in it.
Hodson said he’s going to post photos of this and other large finds on the KVHS website in hopes that one of the thousands of hits on the picture page will be from someone who can help identify one of the specimens.
The daily signup sheets tallied 37 volunteers and eight observers, with new people continuing to show up eager to work in the half-dozen smooth-sided rectangular pits that were dug down one 10-centimeter level at a time to depths of as much as 55 centimeters in the first week.
Dylan Retherford{cq}, 9, came with his father William, an information technology resources manager in Noblesville, to spend his birthday exercising his interest in archaeology.
“He likes Egypt and mummies. We found this on the Internet. It was the only thing that let someone his age participate,” Dad said.
“I found this piece of (ceramic) pipe,” said Dylan, dry-screening a cup of fresh dirt at one of the work tables.
The 2008 Collier Lodge excavation continues 9am to 3pm Tuesday through Thursday this week and Monday through Thursday next week at 1097 Baum’s Bridge Road southwest of Kouts.
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
--Sir James Barrie |
Science Lab