Volunteers 'dig’ summer

July 12, 2005 

By Charles M. Bartholomew
Post-Tribune correspondent

From pre-Christian pottery fragments to poptop-period beer cans, the University of Notre Dame’s summer excavation at Collier Lodge, southwest of Kouts, has unearthed an impressive range of artifacts.

Almost as impressive is the diversity of the amateur diggers the project by anthropologist Mark Schurr has attracted after being opened to the public last year: an ex-teacher who has worked with archaeological digs in Africa, a middle school soccer player and a cameraman who has worked with Batman and Spider-Man, to name a few.

Schurr said a typical new excavation is worked for five years. The third summer of work ended recently at Collier Lodge, the last relic of the hunting clubs that dotted the Grand Kankakee Marsh a century ago before it was drained.

The Kankakee Valley Historical Society hopes to restore it as a museum and education center.

Kassie Haberkamp, 14, a freshman-to-be at Valparaiso High School, showed up with her grandfather last summer.

Kassie and Bill (click to enlarge)

“I grew up near there; I thought it would be interesting to see what they’d find,” said Bill Beck, 73, a retired carpenter from Porter Township.

“I knew she’d enjoy it; she’s an active, outdoor type.”

Added Haberkamp, “I just started working, and the professor asked me to try the transit and some of the paper work.”

Kassie (click to enlarge)

“She had the knack,” Schurr said.

“She did just about everything there was to do,” added Beck, who worked this spring at Schurr’s excavations of villages near Plymouth.

“We’re finding all kinds of stuff: pottery, bones, teeth, arrowheads, gun shells,” said Haberkamp, who was back this year with a notebook, recording findings and catalog numbers. “This has given me another (career) option.

I definitely could do this.”

Former Hobart School Board member and retired teacher Sophie Wojihoski, 85, is a veteran archaeology volunteer who spent several summers in Africa with Earthwatch Institute, a Boston-based, not-for-profit group that places members with research projects worldwide.

Sophie (click to enlarge)

“I was always interested in the origins of man and where we come from,” she said.

“My first dig in the late 1980s was in Swaziland.”

Wojihoski said the typical Earthwatch dig had everyone working a separate square hole, digging and sifting, unlike Schurr’s project, where several people in each hole would unearth large artifacts and dump loads of dirt onto screens for others to sift out small objects.

Roger Barski, 55, a Chicago-based underwater photographer and retired Hollywood lighting technician, donated his professional service to the project.

Roger (click to enlarge)

“I read about it in a newspaper and I decided this would be a great opportunity to see how land-based skills might be used in the water,” he said.

Roger (click to enlarge)

Barski, a member of the Underwater Archaeological Society of Chicago, lived in a house next to the site for the first two weeks of the dig. He spent a lot of time on a ladder to get the proper angles for photos that show the layout of the whole dig to supplement Haberkamp’s charts and drawings.

“I’ll also be taking some formal portraits of Schurr and the crew,” Barski said.