Apology

As some of you may know, after the last post was written exciting things started to happen. We opened two units in the southwest area of the property, finding what seems to be refuse from the destruction of the last house on the property. Excavation has stopped for this year as it gets colder, darker, and the obligations of school hold us captive. I'll slowly tell various aspects of what we found, how we did it, and what it means. Most of the analysis lies ahead and interpretation will be slowly coming together as we piece together all of the various lines of evidence.

Who Lived Here?

One of the most common questions I get about the site is: Who lived here? And, honestly, I have to answer that I don't know. We have some historical documents and oral stories that give us hints, though...

Above is a picture of the hand-written records of the transfer of property from the County Clerk's Office of DeKalb, back to the early twentieth century! The first record we have is a Mr. MS Overton selling to Annie Bates on October 8th, 1910. It takes some patience to go through all of the records and try reading the cursive writing. Earlier than 1910, DeKalb Countyrecords are by the grantor/grantee (seller/buyer)'s names rather than by the property. This creates a much more laborious process, especially if the property goes through the family or if there are people with similar names.

Even if we are able to track the transfer of property, however, that does not tell us who was actually living on the land, if they built on it, or what they did with it at all. It does give us hints, however, of the social structure throughout time, so when we have more information we can try to understand more about the situation in which the people at West and Short lived.

The above is a picture of a hand-drawn map that was made by a former resident of Shabbona Grove. Although it isn't as formal of a document as historians are used to, it provides much more detail about what we're interested in: the people who lived here. This document represents a memory of a childhood long past; we must give allowance to accidents and inaccuracies. Many historical archaeologists rely on fire insurance maps to accurately show where buildings were in the early part of the 20th century. Shabbona Grove was in decline by the begging of the 20th century, however, so only the part of town closest to the railway was recorded. We have no formal documents that record the building, distruction, or inhabitation of the properties between West and Short that I know of. (But if you think differently, I'd love to be proved wrong!!)



We still don't know who lived on these properties. But hopefully our investigations can shed a little bit of light on this murky situation.

Surface Collection

After getting the grid set up, I guess we didn't get enough of getting lost in the blackberry bush woods! We did a thorough walk-over to look for concentrations of artifacts on the surface. Above is what we found after they had been washed. Highlights include: a kid's plastic shoe bottom, buttons, electric resistor and dial, brick, glass bottle bottoms, whisky and wine bottles, ceramic serving dishes, and a figurine piece! I'll do separate posts on the really fun stuff!

First Week Pictures

Finally uploaded the pics! Here we are shooting points into the woods.

This is the alleyway between the two properties. We cleared the brush out of the way and then started to set up the grid.

Me using the total station.

My volunteer Ayn holding the rod.

Ayn and Sadie measured out 50 cm by 50 cm test pits scattered across the grid. We measured out 10 and will hopefully stumble across our privy!

The grid all measured out. Isn't it pretty! Now the digging can begin!

Day 1 (Pictures to come later)

Day 1 of a new project is almost always one of the most frustrating. It's long, mentally and physically taxing, and there's geometry involved. We had to find old property lines to reconstruct the placement of an alley, as that is the most likely place to find a privy. We had an aerial photograph with the property lines superimposed, and a few places of permanent reference (i.e., a few telephone poles and a permanent property marker). First we measured the distance between the telephone poles to make sure that they were accurate proxies for the property lines. We then used pull rules (or roll tape, or whatever you want to call them) and a compass to extend the property lines to the place where they alley should be. Midwestern towns are almost always set along the cardinal directions, which made our job much simpler.

The interior north-south property boundary was used as an alley at least in the early 1920s, as reported from a former Shabbona Grove resident. Along the alley we set up a grid system- 3 meters to either direction (east and west) of the alley. (This will all make more sense when I add pictures). We had to climb through a dense second-growth forest with diverse undergrowth to do much of this work. Luckily for us, however, the area we are interested in is situated nicely in a clearing. This will make the excavation much easier, although we will still have to deal with a lot of roots. We still cleared away lots and lots of the bushes, grass, and prickilies that had colonized the alley. After lunch we used a total station (a piece of survey equipment that is an evolved transit, for those of you who have worked construction) to more precisely map exactly the places that we marked. This will allow us to create a 3D picture of the site and allow us to know the spatial relationships between our grid and the property lines. You need a line of sight to and from each point in order for the total station to get a reading, however, so we were not able to get many shots because of the dense overgrowth. We were, however, able to get the western edge of the property line and our grid. From these points we should be able to extrapolate to our other places of interest on the property.

Overall, the day went well! The weather was nice and our measurements seem to make sense. It may thunderstorm tomorrow so it's nice to know that the grid is set up and ready to go for shovel test pits! Pictures will come soon when I find the energy to search for my USB cord. :)

Archaeology

To understand what we as archaeologists do, I encourage you to check out the blog posts at Day of Archaeology, where professionals and enthusiasts across the world blogged about their day and their work in archaeology. Check it out!

A Proposal

A 1908 rendering of a privy.

I want to excavate an outhouse.

Now to explain the “why” inherent after that statement, I have found that a narrative is in order. The town of Shabbona Grove, Illinois, was founded in the winter of 1836 when Edmund Town and David Smith moved from the “abandoned” residences of the Potawatomi Indians into the first permanent wooden house. In less than 20 years, Shabbona Grove exploded to a population over 900 with immigrants and frontier families, boasting of two school houses, a couple of trade stores, a saloon, a blacksmith, and other necessary businesses. However, when the railway came not 4 miles north of the village in 1871, the town quickly became defunct. The new town of Shabbona, sitting on the rail to Chicago, boomed as new schoolhouses, churches, businesses, and residents moved onto the prairie. By 1900, only 100 people remained in Shabbona Grove. Today, 4 houses on gravel roads mark where this prosperous town used to be.

I grew up in Shabbona proper and I never encountered this history. Shabbona Grove represents the story of little towns all across the Midwest whose growth and decline depended on the flow of people and goods from the East. In this small place, the interaction between material culture and networks of exchange become crucially important. I am interested in how and from where the people of this small place received, used, and interacted with the material artifacts of everyday life.

In order to attack these questions as an archaeologist, I must look into the reminants of those everyday practices. These experiences may be understood through the base truth of human existence: garbage. In the pre‐twentieth century that I am most interested in, garbage condensed in two places‐ in garbage pits for kitchen refuse and outhouses. I have chosen an area within the town of Shabbona Grove itself, on the corner of West and Short Street (of which Short Street no longer exists). Though my research talking to current residents, I have found that a house did stand on that location well into the 1920s, though there is no map to my knowledge that shows when the house was built or where it exactly stood. Today there are no above‐surface indications of the foundation. However, there is a good chance that privy remains intact, as there has been no further use of the land after the house was removed. We can guess that the privy was located near the back of the lot, near the alley, as was common practice.

The Shabbona Grove Archaeological Project is aimed at locating, recording, and excavating the remains of outhouse or midden (garbage) deposits as associated with the house at West and Short. Further investigations with the local historical society may be able to associate those remains with the residents themselves, providing a very intimate study of rural life in the mid to late‐1800s.