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ONALASKA — Last week found 19 well-tanned students from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse digging in the dirt. Under constant sun, but moderate temperatures, the students were excavating centuries-old food and garbage depositories, trying to document segments of an ancient culture before developers plow the site asunder.
The site is one of few remaining undeveloped tracts in the Sand Lake Archaeological District, a National Registry of Historic Places site that extents roughly a mile on either direction of the current dig.
“It’s an amazing area,” said Ernie Boszhardt, regional archaeologist for MVAC. “There’s hardly any of it left.”
Time is not on their side. Although the students and employees of the Mississippi Valley Archaeological Center at UW La Crosse has been excavating the 400- to 700-year-old food storage pits along Sand Lake Road for three weeks, this week they’ll move across the small valley near Hwy. S and explore 1,000 more. All of this needs to be completed by July 2.
“We don’t have the resources,” Boszhardt said. He explained that due to the magnitude of the site and the limited number of help, a selection system is used.
High priority sites are dug, low priority sites are ignored, and medium priority sites are dug if time allows.
Sections of the site — a former farm field — were first bulldozed to remove several inches of 100-plus years of modern tillage.
That artifact-rich debris lay in a berm to the east of the 150-plot site. It is nearly meaningless to the archaeologists, and like the low-priority sites, it too will be ignored.
“They don’t have any context,” Boszhardt said of the countless arrowheads, pottery shards, scrapers and other other artifacts in the berm.
Only artifacts that can be documented, recovered, plotted and cataloged will reveal their context when evaluated at the lab on the UW-L campus.
Another smaller site to the south, revealed just such a find. The 600-year-old Oneota shell-tempered pot had likely been crushed by the bulldozer.
Boszhardt identified it as Oneota — the long ago natives who inhabited the sites — by the bits of crushed clam shell and telltale ridges.
The Oneota favored the La Crosse area for its fertile soils and abundant wildlife.
Boszhardt explained that the Oneota would summer at places such as the Sand Lake Archaeological District and spend their winters west of Rochester, Minn. hunting buffalo.
When they returned to Onalaska in the spring, they would retrieve stored grains, gourds and other items, in time to ward off spring-time hunger.
The crews already had uncovered 10 buffalo-shoulder-bone hoes during the dig, evidence of the Oneota’s migratory lifestyle.
During the past few decades, MVAC has uncovered hundreds of artifacts from the narrow two-mile tract.
Last Friday UW-La Crosse archeology students Amanda Urbancic and Nathan Everson were excavating post molds, looking for evidence of an ancient structure of some kind.
Urbancic explained that although the wood from the posts rotted away long ago, debris used to shore up the post leaves a signature in its place.
Because that debris is so small, soil from the post molds will be collected individually and brought into the lab for careful analysis.
“There’s so much I’ve learned, dealing with artifacts firsthand,” she said of the project so far. “There’s no way I could have learned so much in the classroom.”
Although archeology’s preference is to preserve in place, Boszhardt said excavating the site is the only option.
“We are destroying as we dig,” he said. “If we weren’t here, they would dig it with the bulldozer and no one would learn anything.”
MVAC was hired by developer Elmwood Partners to survey and excavate the site in advance of future development. Although permitting and zoning applications have not been filed — a process that could be completed in as few as 45 days — the city’s master plan calls for a traditional neighborhood east of Sand Lake Road and south of Hwy. S.
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