Whenever federal or state agencies undertake a new building project, they are required by federal, and often state, laws to consider their impact on any historical resources in their vicinity before they begin.<\/p>\n
Those laws help keep Allison Densmore employed.<\/p>\n
Densmore is a graduate student working toward her Master\u2019s in anthropology at 51ÁÔÆæ. She\u2019s also an archaeologist with the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS), an agency that provides cultural resource management services to entities like the Illinois Department of Transportation and others that must comply with historic preservation laws.<\/p>\n
She sat down to talk about her education, her work, and her love of archaeology.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m from Elgin, Illinois, which happens to also be where my job is. I came (to 51ÁÔÆæ) for my undergrad in 2017 and graduated in three years, and then went straight into the Master\u2019s program.<\/p>\n
For anthropology \u2013 I\u2019ve always thought people were cool. I originally started out doing cultural anthropology, which is more like ethnography and (studying) living people, but then I did an archaeology field school through 51ÁÔÆæ at Aztalan State Park in Lake Mills. I was like, whoa! This is so much cooler.<\/p>\n
To me, it was cool to be super handson. I like writing; I like the academic side of things. But I think practice and getting dirty \u2013 literally \u2013 on the archaeology side of it is really cool. It\u2019s cool to find things that no one else has found before, and to put yourself in the shoes of the people that used to live there.<\/p>\n
(We also worked with) groundpenetrating radar and instruments, and that\u2019s how I got into GIS, which is Geographic Information Systems (working with software to attach datapoints to points on a map). I\u2019m doing a certificate in GIS as well.<\/p>\n
ISAS is actually run through the University of Illinois at Champaign. There so happens to be a field station in Elgin, Illinois, which is 10 minutes from my house. \u2026 I found out about the job last year and was like, duh, of course I\u2019ll do that! It makes it really easy to live at home for free.<\/p>\n
Cultural resource management is all about finding archaeological sites before people destroy them. At ISAS, we are contracted through the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). Any time they are expanding a road, building a road, doing anything with roads, we go out there ahead of time and check out their proposed building site. That way, we can be sure that we\u2019re protecting what we can and recording whatever information we can collect before it gets destroyed.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a pretty long process. We get documentation (from IDOT) that says, hey, we have plans to build this road. From that point, we\u2019ll look at maps. We\u2019ll look at historic aerial imagery \u2026 We\u2019ll refer to our (files) with known archaeological sites..<\/p>\n
Once we have our study area figured out \u2013 and that can be tricky because the Department of Transportation changes their mind about what they want to do all the time \u2013 then we\u2019ll send people out in the field. We can do a pedestrian survey, which is just walking and scanning the ground, or shovel testing, which is digging a hole every couple of meters.<\/p>\n
From there, depending on what we find, we write up a big report that will contain an essay about the history of the area, what we ended up finding, what the ecology is like, and then we send it off to them. There are a few different reasons why we might say, \u2018For sure, don\u2019t dig here!\u2019 and we\u2019ll put that in a report.<\/p>\n
They literally have to pay us to look at these areas. It\u2019s good job security in that sense. \u2026 So much destruction has taken place already, so a lot of cultural resources are far-gone at this point. Our field station does (contracts) in the northern Illinois counties. A lot of the (sites) near Cook and Will County, everyone has built everything up. A lot of times, it\u2019s really too late to make much of a difference. But, there are times when we do find things, like mounds or projectile points. Or if we do find human remains or whatever it may be, we have the opportunity to protect what they may otherwise build a road over.<\/p>\n
There are a lot. In a lot of the field projects I did this summer, we would find nothing \u2013 or if we did find something it would be a lithic flake. Essentially, someone 1,000 years ago was making a projectile point by hacking away at this rock, and part of it flew off, and that\u2019s what we find. It can be hard to tell who it\u2019s from and what\u2019s going on with that. A lot of times, it isn\u2019t necessarily discernable. But when we do find stuff, like projectile points, those can be diagnosed to a specific time period, and you can get an idea of the cultural group in that area at the time.<\/p>\n
When you get further out to the northwestern corner (of Illinois), like in Jo Daviess County, there are a lot of cool mounds. Those are from about 1,000 years ago. It\u2019s hard to wrap your head around how many people have been in the same area throughout various centuries.<\/p>\n
Over by Six Flags (amusement park in Gurnee, Illinois), there is a little tiny airport. They are changing a runway, so we spent a lot of time walking through the woods in Lake County, which was horrible. I sprained my ankle in the woods and then was out for a month. We did projects along different rivers to make different trails.<\/p>\n
There was something I was able to take part in, with my GIS background. ISAS is compiling a dataset about every diagnostic projectile point found in Illinois. I was responsible for putting all of the northern counties together. It\u2019s going to be a really cool project when it\u2019s complete. We can get a better idea of which points come from where, and that gives us an idea of who was where and when.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s helping a lot with networking. Our department is great. We have good connections to Midwest archaeology, and that helped me get this job. But even the education to get here \u2026 I learned everything I know about archaeology through 51ÁÔÆæ. I really owe them literally everything. And they made it really easy to do the GIS certificate alongside the Master\u2019s. It\u2019s been a great opportunity and I\u2019m very grateful for my time here.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t look for dinosaurs! That\u2019s the biggest thing. Even my own family has been repeatedly confused about that.<\/p>\n
Not a lot of people realize that archaeology is everywhere and why it\u2019s important. What people have done in the past is still what people do today. We\u2019re all the same. We haven\u2019t changed much at all. You can learn a lot from how people lived in the past, and I think it\u2019s a really cool way to connect to your local area.<\/p>\n