The Beginnings of Urbanism? An excavation near the Mississippian city Cahokia has uncovered evidence indicating that it could have been a prehistoric metropolis.
The Exchange Avenue figurine is one of the project’s notable discoveries.
By Susan Caba
12
spring • 2011
Illinois State Archaeological Survey
P
ilots have a description of flying that is, with slight modification, equally apt for archaeological fieldwork:“Long hours of complete tedium punctuated by moments of sheer exhilaration.” Holly Mitchell Nazetta was on her knees in the dirt of a former Illinois hog lot, scooping debris from the floor of a 1,000-year-old structure when her moment came. “My partner and I were cleaning up the floor of that section of the house,” said Nazetta, at the time a student at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. It was 2009, her second summer working at a dig in East St. Louis, Illinois. “Probably just five or six inches down, I started to uncover the edge of a piece of ceramic,” she recalled. As Nazetta pulled it from the soil, she looked down to see…a face. The face had almond-shaped eyes and slightly parted lips. It belonged to a kneeling female figure holding a vessel made of shell. Not quite four inches tall, the figurine had somehow managed to remain intact. “It was incredible knowing I had the honor of getting to see and hold the figurine for the first time since it was buried a thousand years ago,” Nazetta says. The kneeling woman,christened the Exchange Avenue figurine after a nearby road, is a prized artifact of a cultural resource management project directed
