The sun rises slowly over the Tennessee River as a young woman leans down into a three foot trench cut into a small mound. She holds a blue dust pan in her hand, scraping it across the dirt floor of the trench. An odd sight. Especially when, you consider the location- the Indian mounds at Shiloh National Battlefield. With him are six young archaeologists, four undergraduates at Queens College and two graduate students.
Dustpans can be very useful.
From approximately 1,000 to 1,300 AD, an Indian settlement existed within a walled or palisaded town on the edge of what is now the national battlefield. The big mounds near the river are familiar to park visitors, but until last summer, the smaller mounds scattered throughout the woods went virtually, unnoticed, except of course by Dr. Welch and other archaeologists. But the very untouched nature of the Shiloh site is what gives Welch's project its great potential. The smaller mounds represent the remains of houses, wattle and daub structures with vertical wooden posts in the center and cane-woven roofs. Then, they plastered the roofs with clay.