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Deep within the Palos network of Cook County Forest Preserves are pockets of land that hold secrets to the Chicago area’s past.
Last week, scientists, forest preserve employees and community volunteers converged on the area for a four-day excavation project.
“We’re standing on the site of about a 700-year-old village,” said Thomas Loebel, assistant director and senior cultural resources coordinator for the Illinois State Archaeological Survey.
“This is the Huber site,” he said. “People here lived in large villages. They farmed, they fished, they hunted. You can’t see (evidence of the settlement) on the surface because the people are gone as are the structures they lived in.
“But there are traces of their lives in the ground,” he said.
People have been living in Cook County for 13,000 years, Loebel said, but most of the remnants of earlier times have been lost to development.
What remains, he said, is in the forest preserves.
And so the archaeologists mark off sections, dig down through layers of dirt and sift the soil for relics, in a methodical process of piecing together the story of those who came before.
Pottery tends to be heavy and unwieldy. Fragments of it among the relics tells the scientists that this was once a permanent settlement, not just a hunting station, said Paula Porubcan, coordinator for the Illinois State Archaeological Society’s Northern Illinois Field Station in Elgin.
The materials gleaned also reveal information about Huber’s density of occupation, Porubcan said, as well as what the residents ate and how they spent their days.
The scientists believe the main village existed somewhere between 1400 and 1600 but some items uncovered date back 700 years and may have belonged to other people who lived in or traveled through the area before that, she said.
Tools included drills, arrowheads, scrapers and hoes, she said. From animal bones, scientists can tell that wolves, bears and bobcat, as well as elk and deer, roamed the area.
“They tell us about the people and wildlife that lived here,” she said, “and about what the landscape was like.”
As much as they know already, Loebel said, driving the scientists work is the quest to know more so they want to keep the areas free of development and looters. Identifying the locations of sites enables forest preserve officials to protect the fields of study for future investigation.
“Think about DNA, which wasn’t available 20-30-40 years ago,” he said. The scientists who come after this generation of archaeologists may have an opportunity to apply better tools or knowledge, he said.
And so both groups collaborate to protect both the future of the land and the story of the past.
Loebel said the survey works with the Illinois Department of Transportation in the same manner.
John McCabe, director of the department of resource management for Cook County Forest Preserves, said when the preserves devised its Master Plan in 2015 there was a very clear mandate that archaeological sites be protected.
“They’re unrenewable resources,” McCabe said. “Once they’re damaged or looted, you can’t get them back. So we’re making sure we’re not negatively impacting this resource that we have a legal obligation to protect.”
The information the archaeologists provide helps forest preserve officials manage the land by steering features such as paths, canoe landings or boat ramps away or around protected sites.
Forest Preserve District Superintendent Arnold Randall said whatever historical sites are left in Cook County are in the forest preserves system.
According to the master plan, nearly 46% of the estimated 1,200 archaeological sites recorded in Cook County are located within the forest preserves system. So far, less than 20 percent of the preserves have been systematically surveyed, the plan states.
“When I came on board in 2010 we didn’t have a plan. Now there’s a master plan that tells how to address these Native American sites and really protect them,” he said.
The partnership, Loebel said, is a “win-win” because there’s pressure on what little remaining space is available in the Chicago area.
“This is the last remaining piece of undisturbed land,” Loebel said. “The forest preserves has done a great job of recognizing what is a not very visible resource and managing that. It’s all about balancing the pressures. We need a bike path but let’s make it in the best way.”
Mark Ryan, executive director of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois, where Illinois State Archaeological Society is located, said the day’s work revealed insight into a civilization that was on the edge of encountering western culture.
As they unearthed trade items from the early 1600s, the scientists were able to denote that European goods had made their way to Huber through tribal networks even before the French arrived in the area.
“They’ve found some metal objects and beads. That gives us a sense of the exchange of culture that went on back then,” Ryan said. “It’s fascinating that these things are in our backyard.”
An amateur archaeologist, Dan Bauer, of Crestwood, is a member of the Illinois State Archaeological Society.
As a volunteer at the Huber site, he ran piles of dirt through a sifter, picking out bits of history.
The morning’s haul included flecks of flint, bones and pieces of broken pottery.
Bauer recalled a lifetime of hunting for relics in the south suburbs.
“Back in the ‘80s I would go to sites in Lemont that were farm fields. There was a lot of stuff there before they built the houses. I’d ask for permission to walk the fields when they plowed,” he said.
Bauer said when he was a kid growing up in Hickory Hills, his dad found an ax buried in the backyard.
“That ax went to school with every family member. It started out in perfect condition but little by little, it got dinged and dented up, broken in half and glued back together,” he said.
Bauer has donated many of the items he’s collected over the years to the archaeological survey.
Loebel said, on their own, items that relic hunters find and take are one person’s treasures; Together, they become a settlement’s story.
From the design of arrowheads and the decorative markings on pottery, archaeologists can tell much about a society’s culture, he said.
As it is now, the southern Lake Michigan basin was an important area hundreds of years ago because many people traveled along the water system, he said.
That’s part of the reason the Huber group settled here, Loebel said. He believes the settlement was several acres with several hundred people calling it home.
“That makes this little corner that is still protected (by forests),” he said, “that much more significant.”