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In a grassy meadow on Loyola University Chicago’s Retreat and Ecology Campus (LUREC) in Bull Valley, Illinois, eight Loyola students knelt before a shallow rectangular trench, plunging trowels into the clay-rich soil in search of buried history.
As part of a three-week Field Work in Anthropology course in May, the students were digging for evidence of a schoolyard within the former 1,000-acre farmstead of Christopher Walkup. The late sheriff and postmaster purchased the property in 1835 under the U.S. Government’s Homestead Act and moved there from Virginia with his wife and six children. The family, who are believed to be among the first European settlers in McHenry County, Illinois, provided land for a rural school that operated from 1861-1940 and has since been converted into a private residence.
“We just don’t know the extent of the schoolyard or the property that would be with the school,” said Laura Gawlinski, a professor and the undergraduate program director of the Department of Classical Studies. “So that’s something that archaeology can tell you. Even if you aren’t finding the find of the century, you’re touching material that hasn’t been touched by anybody since the late 1900s. That’s pretty cool.”
By the end of the dig, the students had turned up several intriguing artifacts—a flat stone that could have been used as a child’s writing slate, small pieces of graphite that may have chipped off of pencil tips, an iron fence pin from an agricultural plot, and two curious glass specimens: one with a printed design on the surface and the other with markings suggesting it was made from a mold.
“Historical glass has been studied and catalogued extensively, so these little fragments will be a big help in dating the layers we were exploring,” the faculty instructors reported. “The school remained spatially connected to the Walkup home and agricultural plots, and [these plots] must have been an important part of how working and learning was experienced there.”
Later this year, student researchers in Loyola’s Archaeology Lab will examine the material collected during the excavation, with the hope of laying bare new knowledge about the early settlement and informing Loyola’s ongoing investigation of the homestead.
“What’s different is we’re getting at this through the material culture,” Gawlinski explained. “Because we know the names of all these men and what they experienced from the property record. But here we have a schoolhouse where kids from the area would go. How do we get at that history of childhood, and the teachers, who were almost certainly women?”
Engaged learning in the natural world
The Field Work and Anthropology course is just one of four hands-on, place-based learning experiences Loyola offered this year at LUREC, a sprawling 99-acre campus comprising prairie, woodlands, oak savannahs, and wetlands. Others included North American Environmental History, Agrosystems, and Field Ornithology. For three weeks in May, students in the program stayed in the Retreat Center dormitory, ate meals together in the cafeteria, and engaged in fieldwork on campus and at nearby natural areas and farms.
“Many of us in this course took the Principles of Archaeology class, where you get the general highlights of what goes on in an archeological dig. But it’s very different going from, basically, just books and studying and taking a written test to actually sitting and doing the work,” said Maggie Black (BS ’27), a senior anthropology major. “You can read about something all you want. It’s so different from actually getting down and doing it. And I think that’s invaluable.”’
“It’s also really nice because we get to work together and be in the same space,” she added. “I think the personal, non-work time helps us cooperate better in the field because we’re comfortable with each other.”
Co-taught by Gawlinski, a scholar of ancient Greek religion and dress, and assistant archaeology professors Christopher Hernandez and Emily Yuko Hallet, who have done extensive excavation work at sites in Mexico and Africa, the Field Work in Anthropology course is centered on on-the-ground education and training in GPS-coordinate mapping, shovel-test pitting, field documentation, and artifact analysis.
It’s not just what students find, it’s what they find out.
— Laura Gawlinski, professor and the undergraduate program director of the Department of Classical Studies
During the first week, students conducted a surface survey, walking in a straight line at equally spaced intervals across the site to search for surface artifacts and structures. Later, students troweled soil from the ochre-rich excavation site layer by layer, cleaning and setting aside notable specimens and pouring extracted soil through a sieve to isolate smaller, undetected artifacts. Much like practicing archaeologists, they used field notebooks to record the precise latitude and longitude of each find, along with the time of collection, personal observations, and stratigraphic details about sediment deposits and soil layers and colors.
“Field notebooks are a big thing across all the classes at LUREC,” Gawlinski said. “The bird people keep a journal of their bird observations. And so, for us, it’s stratigraphic stuff. Each week they either hand in their notebook to one of us or upload images from their notebook so we can go over them.”
“It really has allowed them to take ownership and responsibility for the process and…. act as real archeologists, knowing that their notes are the permanent record of what we’re finding,” Gawlinski said. “Because archaeology is a destructive technique. It’s a science, but it’s not able to be replicated like other sciences because once that dirt’s gone, it’s gone.”
Gawlinski says the course also stressed a “community archaeology” framework. To deepen their understanding of the region’s history, students visited the McHenry County Historical Society and Museum, and met with Jeff Kruchten, the principal archaeologist at the Illinois State Historic Preservation Office.
“Being on site in person, as well as learning from our School of Environmental Sustainability colleagues, was so instructive for understanding the appeal of this area,” the faculty instructors wrote in an email. “Professor Stephen Mitten, S.J., shared his extensive knowledge of the local environmental history, explaining that glacial activity during the Ice Age left McHenry County with some of the most productive farming soils in northern Illinois.”
Growing demand for archaeologists
By infusing applied research and archival skills into the curriculum, the Field Work and Anthropology course, like others at LUREC, is closely aligned with the evolving needs of the workforce.
The skills students learn, Gawlinski says, are directly applicable to careers in museum curation, archaeology, public history, and cultural resource management (CRM), the last a booming professional field in which practitioners evaluate heritage and cultural sites before construction firms clear and grade them for buildings or infrastructure development. The rapid expansion of data center construction, for which spending has tripled in the past three years, along with a raft of new transportation and utility projects under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), has intensified the demand for trained archaeologists whose work helps protect and preserve ecologically sensitive landscapes and historic artifacts.
“Most archeologists in America, that’s [the field] they work in because it’s required, basically, for any kind of land development or construction work,” Black, who plans to pursue a career as a contract archeologist, said. “I took this course for the fun of it, but also because of the field experience, which is required for some jobs, but also just helps on your resume.”
Ana Rosaslanda (BS ’27), a history and anthropology double major with a minor in theology, has similar career goals and says she is thrilled about what lies ahead.
“Museum, archeology work, archiving, all that jazz is really, really interesting to me,” she said. “And so, I thought this would be a wonderful experience and opportunity that is kind of unheard of. I’m from Illinois, so having such close access to the campus and to home is great. And to have graduated with this experience is really powerful.”
As Gawlinski observed, “It’s not just what students find, it’s what they find out.”
