Ferrel Anderson
Finishing the Job Elaine Bluhm (left) talks to people visiting the Crawford Farm site in July, 1960. In the foreground of the photograph are several Sac storage pits.
It was a worst-case scenario: the excavation of a significant site ended abruptly when the site was destroyed. The incomplete excavation uncovered important data, but it remained unknown because a report was never written. Some 50 years later, archaeologists are working to piece the data together and make the public aware of this project. By Susan Caba american archaeology
Mark Wagner picked up a 50-year-old matchbox and slid it open, revealing a scattering of lead shot. He put the matchbox down, exchanging it for a small carton that originally held artists’ pastels, soft sticks of ground pigment; its contents now are a few ceramic pipe fragments. Popping the cap of a 35-millimeter film canister, he revealed tiny brass charms nestled in tissue. More items, their inked catalog tags faded with time, are arrayed on tables under florescent lights. Rusted knives, thick chunks of handblown green glass, a large section of a brass kettle—these are artifacts from Saukenauk, once the home of Black Hawk, the Sac warrior-chief who fought doggedly to preserve his tribe’s claim to ancestral lands along the Rock River in what is now Illinois. His last battle, a three-month effort to stave off white settlers and the U.S. military, took place in 1832 and is known as Black Hawk’s War. Saukenauk sprawled across the landscape near the confluence of the Mississippi and Rock Rivers in the northwest corner of Illinois, where that state abuts Iowa and Missouri. 33
