How I became part of the very first Jr. High School group to visit Koster/Kampsville
Like many remarkable events in History, my involvement with Dr. Stuart Struever, The Foundation for Illinois Archeology, and Kampsville Illinois started in a most unremarkable way.
At the age of 13, I was an eighth grader, living in the relatively well-off suburb of Winnetka Illinois. To put it mildly I was pretty much an atypical student. I was blessed with above average intelligence and thinking skills. But, I was cursed with a form of Dyslexia which completely hampered my ability to work up to the expectations of the amazing teaching staff at Carlton Washburn Jr. High. Yep. I was definitely a square peg in a round hole. Most of the parents of the kids in school were extremely well off. My folks had landed on hard times and were struggling financially.
It also probably did not help that I did not do sports, I was a klutz, socially awkward, and a book worm. Most of the times that I interacted with my fellow students and tried to have a conversation I would awkwardly have to explain/define what I had tried to say. Dyslexia or not I have always embraced words. And, I have never hesitated to try to use the most appropriate ones…even if kids my own age had absolutely no clue what they meant. In the spirit of accuracy, I will point out that life for me was not all bad. I did have a small, but great circle of friends. We did Scouting, Model Rocketry, built model ships with the intention of burning them and blowing them up with firecracker’s and other typical late 1960’s “geek” activities. Anyway, enough about me.
Sometime in Spring of 1971 my Jr. High School had a special all school event in the auditorium. The school had arranged for a noted Archaeologist from Northwestern University to present a slide show of his ongoing excavations about 300 miles south of Winnetka centered around the town of Kampsville, Illinois in Calhoun County. Dr. Stuart Struever, the lead Anthropologist on the project probably considered his visit that morning to the Carlton Washburn Jr. High School just another in a very long stream of never ending lectures in an attempt to raise the funds he desperately needed to continue his work.
Before I discuss how Dr. Struever’s talk went off the rails that morning I want to talk a little bit about his work and his goals. There have been books written about Dr. Struever’s work as a very young man in a part of Illinois near where he grew up further North. As he studied Illinois pre-history, he was eventually drawn to the area around Calhoun County. Calhoun County Illinois is the longest and most sparsely populated County in Illinois. It starts just above St. Louis Missouri and encompasses the land between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers for about a hundred miles. Predominantly agricultural and geographically isolated by the lack of river crossings it is almost a land lost in time. Back then the only way to enter the county was just a couple of bridges that were many miles apart and a few Free Ferries run by the State of Illinois. For the most part Calhoun County was just as it had always been since man first moved into the area at the end of the last Ice Age about 13,000 years ago. Calhoun County had/has very few towns and the only real damage to the Archeological sites in the region came from occasional destruction by artifact hunters and plowing.
Calhoun County really was a pre-historic paradise for the various cultures that came and went with the passage of time. Strategically located far enough south of the intersection of the Arctic Air Masses and the Gulf Coast Air Mass it is blessed with a moderate temperature in the winter and a wide variety of seasons, each providing its own type of food resources.
Dr. Struever and his team had discovered a geological freak of nature, that had created one of the most amazing and important archeological sites ever discovered, ANYWHERE! During the end of the last ice age the glaciers had deposited a layer of very fine PH Neutral soil on top of the bluffs that were carved by the Illinois and Mississippi rivers on other side of their wide river plains. One specific little horseshoe shaped bluff happened to have a little creek that ran along side of it for almost all of history. This little area provided shelter from the winter winds and a source of water for the people who lived there. Over time rain and wind washed the fine soil (Loess) off the tops of the bluffs and allowed the area to slowly build up with the deposits. By the time the site was discovered in 1968 on farmland, then owned by Theodore and Mary Koster there were, in spots as many as 35 feet of deposits going back through all @13,000 years of pre-history. As you excavated this site from the surface downward it was like excavating through a perfectly preserved cultural layer-cake. Dr. Struever and his team had named the site after the kind farmers who were allowing him to excavate on their land. It was mainly this “Koster Site” that Dr. Struever had come to speak about that morning. But it was not the only thing on his mind.
Remember this was spring of 1971. In 1968 they dug the first test holes at Koster. They then went back for a little more digging in ’69, but it was not until ’70 that work began in earnest, however Dr. Struever had huge plans for the up and coming 1971 Field season. His plans included not only expanding his testing and excavation of the Koster Site, but also building a team of specialists from many different Universities; all living and working together in the small town of Kampsville Illinois. Dr. Struever had built or was building a Central Data Processing facility for processing all field samples as well as all the other Labs he needed so that the different types of remains could be sent off to the specialized Labs to be further analyzed by experts in their respective fields. It was pretty much a vision of an Archeological Research Utopia.
To the young minds in attendance that morning, it was a pretty spellbinding performance. After his talk was over Dr. Struever gave us a chance to ask questions. It was during this question and answer session something organic and unexpected happened. It started with a question from someone about the types of groups that come down to help him excavate. Then someone else asked if he ever had worked with kids as young as us? One has to remember Stuart Struever was there in Winnetka, in attempt to raise funds and I have no doubt that to some degree he was pandering to the audience when he boasted of having in the past worked with sons and relatives of his colleagues out in the field and who knows, perhaps one day he would even be able to bring a group of kids as young as High Schoolers or even Jr. High schoolers to work with him down in Kampsville. Next thing you know a flustered Stuart Struever was being asked: “why can’t it be a group from our school, and why can’t it be this year?” Anyway, the presentation never did get back on track, and it just sort of ended.
For all practical purposes the matter should have been dropped, forgotten and dismissed. However, there was a small and highly motivated group of students who would not let the matter drop. Also, the students of Carlton Washburn Jr. High had a secret weapon in the form of an English Teacher named Mrs. Genevieve MacDougall. “Mrs. Mac” as she was affectionately called was a firebrand of the first degree. When she set her mind on task, she was a force to be reckoned with. She made it her mission to reach out to Professor Struever and convince him to allow a group “her” students from our school to go to Kampsville that summer. It didn’t hurt that Mrs. MacDougall’s husband; the world-famous author Mr. Curtiss MacDougall and recently retired Professor of Journalism at Northwestern University (the same school where Professor Stuart Struever taught) was in her corner.
I would like to say that I was one of the motivators that pushed the movement, but that was not the case. For the next month or so I listened to the rumor mill. At some point I did reach out to Mrs. MacDougall just to let her know of my interest. However, I had no real expectations of being able to participate. It was a money thing. In those days to ease the financial burden in our household I was working part-time after school at a local bakery as well as every day I worked at the school cafeteria during lunch. Asking my parents to put money aside for a program that did not even exist yet was beyond my bravery level. As spring started to turn towards summer, with the end of the school year in sight things started to change. Somehow Mrs. MacDougall had convinced Dr. Struever to allow Mrs. MacDougall to assemble a first time ever group of 15 students who would travel to Kampsville and spend a full week immersing themselves in Archeology and working with the university field school students at the Koster Site.
A sign up list was posted, an application package (complete with costing info and a parental permission slip) was made available and interested students were required to fill out the packet and also submit an essay on why they should be allowed to participate.
The next month or so during the selection process, scrambling to earn extra money and trying to will myself on the list was stressful (for a 14-year-old). The participants were chosen, and we all met with Mrs. MacDougall a few times prior to leaving for Kampsville for requisite “training”. Sometime towards the end of June our valiant (and clueless) group headed towards Kampsville.
Upon arrival in Kampsville we were greeted by none other that Dr. Struever himself. We were shown our “Dormitory”, taken to St. Anselm’s Church for an introductory lecture and then piled into cars and the back of pickup trucks and driven the @20 miles out to the site. At the Koster Site we were given a brief safety lecture, then we were broken up into pairs and individual groupings which were than assigned to a team of University Field School students. Basically, our week on site was spent as indentured servants doing the grunt work for the college “kids”. Some of the members of our group grumbled and complained. There was a feeling that we had come there to do actual Archeology, not just fill out tags, screen dirt and move around heavy bushel baskets of samples in a dusty/hot environment.
I think that when the week was over most of the group was happy just to get the hell out of there and go home. But not all; myself and another young man lobbied to stay an extra week. After another week he too went home. Again, I stayed. In fact, I wound up staying in Kampsville until the field season came to an end a little more than 8 weeks after I had arrived, in early September. For the first time in my life I had felt I had found a place where I belonged.
Growing up my Dad had had owned a Ceramic Tile Contracting business. From the time I could walk he would take me on job sites and put me to work as his apprentice. All those years of lifting, carrying, cleaning tools and doing the grunge work had uniquely prepared me to do well at the Koster Site. There was no job I was not willing to tackle, and I was willing to work as long and as hard as anybody else on site. Somehow, this amazing group of individuals accepted me as one of their own. What I did not know until later, was just how much this first summer in Kampsville would change my life, and how the success of that 1st Junior High School would lay a foundation that paved the way for thousands of other interested individuals of all ages to have access to being able to have a real life Archaeological learning experience.
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