COLLINSVILLE, Ill. — The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is one of the most studied Native American sites in the country.
Recently, Saint Louis University professors, students and visiting scholars took a closer look and made some surprising discoveries.
"I'm not interested in destroying features, just documenting them," said Mary Vermilion, associate professor of anthropology and archaeology at SLU.
Over the last several weeks, Vermilion helped her students find approximately 900-year-old Native American microdrills in excavation units on the western periphery of Cahokia Mounds.
Each unit is shaved centimeter by centimeter. A particular one showcased to 5 On Your Side was at 78 centimeters at its deepest point.
Archaeologists said they get excited even about the soil color and what that might mean in terms of information.
"The structures that we're finding here and the pottery that we're finding here seem to date to the Sterling Phase of the Mississippian Period — which is approximately 1100 AD to 1200 AD — which is a critical point in the development of the chiefdom because it's like the apex," Vermilion said.
Some of the 11 students from Saint Louis University or visiting schools were already laying the groundwork for their senior thesis research.
"I'm looking at wood usage," said Hal Nalamliang, a student from the University of Vermont visiting SLU for a month on the dig. "There's sort of a commonly accepted hypothesis that the people of Cahokia used a lot of wood from their area and that caused degradation to the soil, which caused flooding."
Rising SLU junior Gus Krussel is already planning to become a professional archaeologist.
"It'll keep me in good shape, keep me active," Krussel said. "I wouldn't want a desk job. Plus, you can learn a lot about past cultures doing this, so that's what got me hooked."
"Think about 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now, somebody else could be digging above your house," said Brittany Murray, who was a SLU archaeology student on this same site in 2011. "What you think is trash or was just a house, becomes treasure and research to somebody else to learn how we lived. That's what we're doing for the Cahokians."
Tuesday was the last day of the dig, but the hard work was hardly done. SLU professors will be taking their discoveries back to the lab next week to use diagnostic tools and categorize every centimeter of the site.