Protecting Nature Preserving Hiatory

摘要

Runmng a new water pipe to the caretaker's cottage at The Nature Conservancy's Emiquon preserve in central Illinois should have been a straightforward project. But one morning in February 2009, when staff digging a trench for the pipe began pulling uppottery fragments, animal teeth and mussel shells, things started to get interesting. "We got the sense somebody had put that stuff there - even the shells were too far from the river," says Tharran Hobson, a Conservancy restoration manager who was doubling as a plumber that day Hobson took a handful of the detritus and drove a mile to the house of Alan Harn, an archaeologist with the nearby Dickson Mounds Museum who happened to be at home, painting his garage. One look at the sample was enough to make Harn drop his paintbrush and pick up his trowel.