Walk Behind Trowel

Looking for the past in a highway's path

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EAST ST. LOUIS — The largest archeological excavation currently under way in the United States is not, as you might suspect, in a remote desert or a virgin forest. It lies in the path of an interstate highway amid the industrial ruins of a once-thriving city.

This narrow slice of East St. Louis will soon be the roadbed for Interstate 70, which by 2014 will have its own bridge over the Mississippi River. Dozens of archeologists have been working since 2008 to beat a series of looming construction deadlines ranging from July to January.

They’re gathering evidence on Native Americans from the Mississippian culture, who from about 1050 to about 1350 lived in what some regard as America’s first city. It was an agrarian metropolis stretching from St. Louis to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, well inland on the Illinois side of the river.

“The highways of today were first blazed and laid out and used by Native Americans,” said Brad Koldehoff, an archeologist on the project. Then came the French and, eventually, the Illinois Department of Transportation.

That is one of the ironies of modern archeological research: the funding for investigations usually comes only in advance of federal highways that will forever scar the ancient landscapes. That’s thanks to a federal law passed in the 1960s, requiring that the environmental and cultural effects of federally funded projects be taken into account.

Koldehoff is the cultural resource coordinator with the Illinois State Archeological Survey. He’s an employee of the Prairie Research Institute, which is part of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In part because archeological research is so closely tied to federal highway expenditures, he’s stationed at IDOT headquarters in Springfield.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Koldehoff was driving his hybrid Toyota to the dig, motioning to houses along Collinsville Road.

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