If you've ever driven up Illinois Route 26 toward Spring Bay, you've probably passed by a major Native American archaeological site without even realizing it.
That's not to say it exactly sticks out like a sore thumb. Even from up close, the village site looks like any other farm field to the untrained eye. It's not until you notice two raised areas that the geography begins to hint at something manmade.
T2, so-called because it's the second Native American site discovered in Tazewell County, was home to around 400 to 500 people around the year 1300, said Greg Wilson, an archaeologist with the University of California Santa Barbara who recently excavated on the site with a small team. It's believed the village was surrounded by palisade walls.
"This was a time when warfare was bad enough that no one lived outside of these fortified centers," he said. "In previous areas, you might have had a fortified town, but people still lived in farmsteads, at least within running distance of a town like this, but at this point, it just wasn't safe for anyone to live outside."
Dana Bardolph, an archaeologist at Northern Illinois University, said the village was densely packed inside. The team knows this through the gradiometry they used to pick up underground traces of the structures that once stood on this land.
"What's really remarkable about the remote sensing is that we have, I mean, rows and rows of houses," she said. "That allows us to walk right out to a specific location and just pick one to put excavation units on."
In addition to the palisade walls and houses, Bardolph said there's also signs of a large central plaza. One of the mounds has a prominent view of this plaza, and was likely the elevated spot where a chieftain's house once stood, Wilson said. Today, a modern house is built atop that mound, though its lack of a basement means there may be something preserved underneath it.
An archaeological team from Western Illinois University previously worked on the T2 site in 2001. They encountered the remains of a burned building and a deep pit filled with feasting debris, but Wilson said the new gradiometry gives a better picture of the whole site. Burned timbers and oxidized soil on the site of one building excavated by Wilson and Bardolph confirm the diagnosis of a fire at some point.
The team also found items like animal bones, broken pottery, and stone tools in the burned building. That's important dating evidence for the site, Wilson said.
"This is it's all trash is what we're finding, and that's great for us. Archaeologists are really time detectives," Wilson said. "So we're gathering little bits and pieces of evidence from the trash to that tell us about the day to day lives of the people that lived here."
Bardolph said a larger pottery sample and high precision radiocarbon dating will help them better pinpoint the chronology of the site's settlement. But it's known that the entire region was abandoned by the Mississippian civilizationdue to drought around the year 1425, all the way down to the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in far southern Illinois.
"We have all these questions about who who were the very last Native Americans living here before abandonment," said Wilson. "How were they coping with the warfare, the drought?"
There's evidence for the formation of new alliances that crossed ethnic boundaries as one survival mechanism, Wilson said. But there are still unknowns.
"We know that people would have abandoned sites like this, and then spread out across the landscape. And then they would have met new folks and kind of intermixed and intermingled with new cultural groups," said Bardolph. "And so we've seen new cultural traditions, but we don't really know exactly where folks went post-abandonment of these centers. And that's a big question."
Uncovering places like the T2 site near Ten Mile Creek and the Fandel site excavated by Wilson and Bardolph Woodford County last year are increasing the understanding of the Mississippian culture through its centuries of existence in the Illinois River Valley.
