Grant to help New Philadelphia excavation
A grant will bring cutting-edge technology to New Philadelphia and point the way for more excavation work next summer.
The $14,000 grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training covers the cost of an aerial survey this fall using high-resolution thermal imaging to look beneath the surface of the community founded by Free Frank McWorter.
Terry Martin, curator and chair of anthropology at the Illinois State Museum and co-director of the New Philadelphia archaeological project, said the survey’s timing will “give us some more information that we can use in planning.”
Similar thermal imaging technology used in the rainforests of Costa Rica uncovered paths more than a foot beneath the soil surface buried by hundreds of years of sediment, soil and vegetation.
“They’re reconstructing history never before known of settlements and villages that existed 1,000 years ago linked by these paths completely invisible to the eye on the surface,” said Chris Fennell, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois and featured speaker Tuesday night at the New Philadelphia Summer Lecture Series.
“That’s basically what we’re going to try in New Philadelphia.”
A camera perched on a powered parachute 500 feet in the air will shoot photos of the 42-acre site hoping to spotlight heat release from compacted areas or stone foundation walls and identify critical areas of the site that Fennell said could lead to focused geophysical surveys and excavation.
Excavation work in 2008 will be overseen by a new partnership of Fennell, Martin and Anna Agbe-Davies, an assistant professor of anthropology at DePaul University. Agbe-Davies, who worked on site and was part of the speaker series in 2005, is a leading young archaeologist focusing on African-American archaeology.
“We’ll pursue a lot of leads we started in the first three years,” Martin said. “One discovery we want to pursue is the blacksmith shop. Most of what we excavated so far is cellars and foundation remains. Looking at the blacksmith shop will give a first look at one of the trades, the light industrial aspects of the town.”
DePaul’s involvement puts three Illinois institutions at work on the project with continuing interest from Illinois College, the University of Illinois at Springfield and Hannibal-LaGrange College.
The work will continue progress made during a three-year National Science Foundation/Research Experiences for Undergraduates project grant and field school overseen by Paul Shackel, head of the Center for Heritage Resources at the University of Maryland. That grant ended last year, halting further excavation this year at the site but not additional work on New Philadelphia.
Getting material out of the ground “is just the beginning to really start interpreting it and figuring out what it means,” Martin said. “One thing we need to start to do is analyze and publish findings from the first three years.”
Martin said plans call for publishing two books — an edited volume of papers on the project and a second volume targeting the initial surface survey and documentation of field work done at the site — likely within the next two years.
