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| I am currently in my third year of the doctoral program in
anthropology. Since the fall of 1997, I've been working at a sandstone
rockshelter on private property in southwestern Illinois. Diagnostic artifacts
from the landowner's initial excavations indicate that site occupation and use
ranged over at least several thousand years, up through the Mississippian
period. Perhaps most significantly, systematic coring and auguring, as well as test excavation over the past year have suggested that the remaining deposits may preserve an occupational sequence several meters deep that spans much or all of the Archaic period. Such stratified deposits are rare for the broader region, being known primarily from the Modoc Rock Shelter and Koster sites.
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| Good preservation and a unique geological setting should allow
the study of
trends in plant and animal use, as well as the evolution of the depositional
environment, for a much of the Holocene. This work has been supported by a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation and an Olin fellowship for women from Washington University.
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