“Forget re-creating the past,” says historical archaeologist Robert Mazrim. “You can’t do it. But what you can do is build a time machine that will take you back in time for, say, fifteen seconds.” Mazrim plans to open his time machine in late June, 180 miles southwest of Chicago.
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Whenever the government builds a highway or an airport, it has to hire archaeologists to check out the ground first, a process institutionalized through the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program (ITARP). But private landowners who dig basements and swimming pools are under no such restriction. Every now and then a historically conscious owner or bulldozer operator will see something and call Mazrim’s Sangamo Archaeological Center. Then he has a few days or hours to gather volunteers and salvage what he can of the artifacts before construction continues.
When he’s not called to work for ITARP as a historical archaeology consultant, Mazrim is implementing a scheme for the fruits of his informal salvage operations. In a big storefront in the tiny town of Elkhart, Illinois (population 475), he has the makings of a museum–box after box of carefully collected and professionally labeled assemblages of pottery, ironware, bottles, and farm tools. He hopes to run the storefront as Under the Prairie, a museum of frontier Illinois.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Suzy Poling.
