Archaeologists dig up the past along the Des Plaines River

Digging for pieces of history is like being a little kid searching for treasure in a sandbox, says Christian Cameron.

"Only now the forest preserve is my sandbox," said Cameron, an intern with the green jobs training program Greencorps.

Cameron is part of a 10-person crew of archaeologists and interns canvassing Cook County forest preserve land along the Des Plaines River for artifacts of local history.

The project is run in conjunction with The Prairie Research Institute's State Archaeological Survey, the Illinois State Water Survey and the Forest Preserves of Cook County. It is part of the forest preserve's Natural and Cultural Resources Master Plan, released in 2014.

Archaeologists recovered settlement sites in the South suburbs earlier this year and are now working along the river in northwest Cook County.

There are about 550 archaeological sites in the forest preserve, said Jenny Benish, a staff archaeologist with the Illinois State Archaeological Survey.

"It represents everything in human habitation from the first paleo hunter and gatherers that traveled the land to the historic periods around World War II," Benish said. "The whole of the human habitation is represented in these sites that have been protected from urbanization."

The forest preserve does more than just protect the ecosystems; it protects the land's heritage as well.

"There's hardly any property left in Cook County where we could find out this information about past life ways and how they used the land and their subsistence strategies," Benish said.

Lauren Fitts, a staff archaeologist with the Illinois Archaeological Survey, was clearing the land's surface along the Des Plaines River when she found a piece of ceramic pottery.

The pottery, likely from the Woodland Period, dates back about 1,000 years, Fitts said.

"As you're looking and you see a little piece of something, you get kind of excited, but you're not always sure if it's going to be something or not," Fitts said. "So when you pick it up and start wiping the dirt off it you can tell it's pottery, that's exciting."

Near the pottery, Fitts also found flakes of debris on the land's surface.

"That means that there's some kind of a site or something going on over there so we just have to work further," she said.

After pieces of pottery and tools are found, Benish says, they go through a washing, labeling and identification process.

"For these pieces, we've done a flotation analysis where you can get out seeds and pollens and grains so you can find out what season they were there," Benish said. "We use water to float out the pollen grains. Then we find out if they were here year-round or just seasonally."

During the Woodland Period, Benish says, groups of people started settling near the Des Plaines River year-round.

"In the Paleo Period, they were moving around, hunting, gathering; they were highly mobile. In the Archaic Period, they were seasonal, but by the Woodland Period they were settling in year-round villages," Benish said.

The Paleo Period began about 14,000 years ago before giving way to the Archaic Period, which began about 10,000 years ago and lasted until that start of the Woodland Period 3,000 years ago, according to MuseumLink Illinois, developed by the Illinois State Museum.

Cameron had luck at the beginning of his second week in the field Monday. He recovered what has been deemed a flake off material that was used to make weapons and arrowheads.

"For maybe about a week I really didn't find anything, I was doing a lot of digging and trying to learn what I was looking for and why I was doing this" Cameron said.

He flipped his sifter over after looking through some dirt and saw a little piece of something that looked different from any other rocks he had seen.

When he brought the piece to the other archaeologists, they determined he had found something of note.

"That just brought everything together, and now I understand what I'm looking for and why I'm here," Cameron said.