© 2024 KRCU Public Radio
90.9 Cape Girardeau | 88.9-HD Ste. Genevieve | 88.7 Poplar Bluff
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Southeast Students Pick Up Archaeology, Boat-Rowing Skills At Summer Field School

Five college students got their hands dirty this summer as they dug and sifted through a Mississippian culture archaeology site just south of Cape Girardeau.

We’re going to start this story at the end. On the final day of the archaeology four-week field school this summer, five students had some trouble getting to their site. The Mississippi River got in the way, according to Scott Myers, an archaeology student at Southeast who participated in the field school.

“It’s a mound site, so it’s kind of built up and the river was flooding at this time. The water just kept rising and we thought we were going to be able to go around,” Myers said. “We went around, and the water had already got that far, so we just couldn’t get to it, so we had to get a boat to get all our stuff off the last day.”

Boat rowing skills were almost certainly not on the field school job description, but archaeology professor Dr. Jennifer Bengtson says that’s the kind of thing that comes in handy for an archaeologist.

“It was a unique experience. It was an adventure,” Bengtson said. “It really just goes to show that I really mean it that you can’t replicate that experience in the classroom. As an archaeologist you have to be prepared for all sorts of different conditions.”

The field site is on private land south of Cape Girardeau. The landowner is very interested in archaeology, and has allowed Southeast archaeologists to work at the site for many years. Archaeology professors and students had been digging in this land back in the 1970’s and 80’s. This past summer, Bengtson and her students worked the site with fellow archaeologist Jim Phillips to learn more about this old village.

“It’s a natural rise on the landscape. And it turns out, even if there is a very severe flood, their village was elevated enough that they were protected from it. And so, it’s a great place to build a village,” Bengtson said.

Southeast’s archaeology lab is packed with boxes of artifacts, many from past excavations and some from this past summer. On an old table in the center of the lab, artifacts from the most recent dig sit on screens. There are little pieces of ceramics, arrowheads, animal bones, things like that. This was all excavated from what Bengtson calls “The Plow Zone.” Since this is agricultural land, the artifacts have been plowed over again and again and again, so few pieces are still intact. But these little bits hold clues that can help piece together what life was like in this village.

The Mississippian cultural traditional started in about 1,000 A.D. 

“The big bang center of it all was at Cahokia, which is near modern day St. Louis,” Bengtson said. “Then Mississippianism spread in different ways. Sometimes Mississippian people actually moved and made new settlements. They moved out of Cahokia. Sometimes it wasn’t movement of people, but movement of ideas. So the idea of Mississippianism spread.”

Spread, she says, throughout much of the southeastern United States and as far north as Wisconsin.

This will be Jennifer Bengtson’s second year teaching at Southeast. It’s a good fit for her because her specialty is Mississippian archaeology. She did her dissertation doing excavations around the Illinois River, and now she brings that knowledge to Cape Girardeau.

“We only had five students, which was good for me because it’s a manageable small field school for my first year doing this. But in the future I envision having about twelve to fourteen students for field seasons,” Bengtson said. 

Not all of the field school students study archaeology. She also had a history students, and a student from Western Kentucky University.

For Scott Myers, the archaeology student who rowed alongside Bengtson, it’s an experience worth repeating.

“I’m coming back every summer until she kicks me out,” Myers said.